Tim's Light Reading (3-1-2012): The Information Age, ISIH, Ron Paul, Religious Freedom, And The Minds Of Children

1 (of 5). The History of the Information Age

One could do worse for primary and secondary intellectual history sources on "the information age" (depending on how defines that age) than those listed in this "FiveBooks Interview" with Nicholas Carr. Three of the books Carr recommends are, in fact, histories of some sort. Standage's The Victorian Internet is number one on Carr's list.


2. The Mind of Ron Paul

I noted in the other post that I wasn't interested in writing any more about Rick Santorum. But I didn't promise I wouldn't offer something on history and another contemporary politician. This piece on Ron Paul, for instance, is different. Authored by David Halbfinger for The New York Times, the title signals its historical bent: "Ron Paul’s Flinty Worldview Was Forged in Early Family Life." Here's an excerpt from the articles opening passages:

His father and mother worked tirelessly running a small dairy, and young Ron showed the same drive — delivering The Pittsburgh Press, mowing lawns, scooping ice cream as a soda jerk. He also embraced their politics, an instinctive conservatism that viewed Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman as villains and blamed Democrats for getting America into wars.

As a young doctor in training, dissecting cadavers or practicing surgery on dogs, he would tell all who would listen about how the country was headed down the wrong path, about the urgency of a strict gold standard and about the dangers of allowing government too much power over people’s lives.

“Once that got ingrained, that became his religion,” said his brother Jerrold, a minister and a psychotherapist. “He says he preaches the ‘gospel of freedom’ — that’s the money quote. Politics became his crusade.”

And the article's thesis: Supporters and detractors often marvel at his consistency since entering politics in 1974, citing it as evidence of either levelheadedness or lunacy. It contrasts sharply with some of the rivals he is trailing in the Republican primaries, including Mitt Romney, who is often accused of ideological flip-flopping.

As the article progresses you learn more about the books he read (e.g. Atlas Shrugged, Doctor Zhivago, The Road to Serfdom), the family roots of his ideology, and his relationship with the Birchers.


3. The ISIH Annual Meeting for 2012

Here's the CFP for the ISIH's 2012 meeting. Here's the title: "The Importance of Learning: Liberal Education and Scholarship in Historical Perspective." Very cool. And the meeting is on U.S. soil!---at Princeton University. Cool. Too bad my travel funds are uncertain for this year because I'd love to go and talk about the great books as liberal learning in a transnational perspective (i.e. jump start my next book project!). Here are the first two sentences from the CFP:

The ideal of liberal education, long a mainstay of Western ideals of higher education, is suddenly under attack the world over. In country after country, the idea that higher education should aim primarily at the cultivation of the intellect and sensibility rather than at preparation for a particular vocation is being swept vigorously aside by more exclusively utilitarian understandings.


4. The Freedoms of Individuals v. The Freedoms of Religious Institutions

Janine Giordano Drake applies historical thinking to the topic at Religion in American History. Here's the big question: Can Catholic social service agencies have it both ways? Can a private, religious organization both manage social services on behalf of the public and also be immune from the checks and balances of that public which invested them with that worldly power?

And here's a taste of her conclusion: We’ve been through all this before. A hundred years ago, Catholics were protesting the overreaching power of Protestant schools, hospitals, and insurance companies in the civic realm. Protestants maintained that this was their “public witness,” even though Catholics held that nobody had the right to a public witness which overshadowed the right of others to follow their alternate Christian conscience.

Check it out.


5. The Minds Of Children and the Role Ideology in Children's Libraries

Writing for The Millions, Alan Levinovitz dissects the issues around the late twentieth-century, and early twenty-first, censorship of certain children's books. The occasion for the article is tomorrow's film opening of Dr. Seuss' The Lorax. In the course of reading the article I learned that Tim LaHaye published an iteration of his "Left Behind" for children (of which Levinotvitz rightly observes that the book has never been the object of a censorship drive by Left-leaning parents).

Reviewer Wanted

[Update: This book was claimed at 11:39 a.m. - TL]

Colleagues,

I am seeking a reviewer for Sara Schwebel's Child-Sized History: Fictions of the Past in U.S. Classrooms (Vanderbilt University Press). The press blurb is immediately below. If interested write me at timothy.n.lacy-at-gmail.com.

- TL
-------------------------------------------------------

For more than three decades, the same children's historical novels have been taught across the United States. Honored for their literary quality and appreciated for their alignment with social studies curricula, the books have flourished as schools moved from whole-language to phonics and from student-centered learning to standardized testing.

Books like Johnny Tremain, The Witch of Blackbird Pond, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry stimulate children's imagination, transporting them into the American past and projecting them into an American future. As works of historical interpretation, however, many are startlingly out of step with current historiography and social sensibilities, especially with regard to race. Unlike textbooks, which are replaced on regular cycles and subjected to public tugs-of-war between the left and right, historical novels have simply--and quietly--endured. Taken individually, many present troubling interpretations of the American past. But embraced collectively, this classroom canon provides a rare pedagogical opportunity: it captures a range of interpretive voices across time and place, a kind of "people's history" far removed from today's state-sanctioned textbooks.

Teachers who employ historical novels in the classroom can help students recognize and interpret historical narrative as the product of research, analytical perspective, and the politics of the time. In doing so, they sensitize students to the ways in which the past is put to moral and ideological uses in the present.

Featuring separate chapters on American Indians, war, and slavery, Child-Sized History tracks the changes in how young readers are taught to conceptualize history and the American nation.

Children’s Literature as Intellectual History

Because of my research interests in education, I would guess I am more familiar with the scholarship on children’s literature than many intellectual historians. Most of the work on children’s literature seems to come from American Studiers or from researchers housed in colleges of education, or, increasingly, from the new and growing interdisciplinary field of “childhood studies,” spearheaded by the program at Rutgers University-Camden. I am currently reading a book from the Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies: Michelle Ann Abate, Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature and American Political Conservatism.

One thing about the historiography on children’s literature that leaves me unsatisfied is that there are few compelling notions about why children’s literature is important. That children’s literature is, in fact, important, is inarguable, I suppose, to the degree that it is not argued. Perhaps intellectual historians are better situated to offer answers?

Take Abate’s book, about children’s literature produced by conservatives since the 1990s. She argues that right-wing children’s literature—William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues, Terri Birkett’s Truax (an anti-environmentalist parody of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax), Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series for children, Lynne Cheney’s picture books, The O’Reilly Factor for Kids, etc.—needs to be considered as part and parcel of the larger Christian Right counterculture. She writes: “Although children’s literature has often espoused didactic lessons, offered conservative morals, and even contained political themes, the new crop of books for young readers that began appearing in the early 1990s did so in a new and far more overt way” (4). She contends that these recent conservative children’s books contain “the broad spectrum of subjects that comprise the U.S. culture wars…” (4)

Although Abate adds an important component to the rapidly growing historiography on recent American conservatism, she does little to explain the importance of children’s literature, other than to show that adults consider it important. But again, this is common. Even the best addition to this historiography, Julia Mickenberg’s Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, does little, from my vantage point, to explain why scholars should pay attention to children’s literature. Mickenberg is quite right to say that children’s literature is potentially influential given its vast audience—a “ready market provided by school libraries.” And she provides tons of fun material from leftist children’s book authors, such as by M. Boland, whose “ABC for Martin” (1931) began with the following clever refrain: “A stands for Armaments—war-mongerers’ pride; B is for Bolshie, the thorn in their side.” (Now that’s poetry!) But still…

Like in the history of education, it seems clear that the history of children’s literature pivots from Robert Hine’s oft-repeated quote: “What society wants its children to know reveals what that society wants itself to be.” But this sentiment is about adults. What does reading literature do to children? What do children make of literature? Personally, I think growing up reading literature made me a much more empathetic person, someone much more likely to root for the underdog. Perhaps this was due to the literature put into my hands by my mother, a high school English teacher with decidedly liberal sympathies. Or perhaps this was due to the very genre of literature, the very act of reading literature.

In a recent review of Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Robin Blackburn takes issue with Moyn’s argument that human rights were invented in the 1970s. Moyn contends that using the framework of human rights to explain political or intellectual history prior to the 1970s is at best anachronistic, at worst a teleological cover for imperialistic impulses of humanitarian interventionists. Blackburn finds a good deal to like about this contention, but maintains that not everyone who fought for rights since the Age of Revolution did so in the name of state power and, as such, often did so in the cause of individual, even "human" rights. Blackburn disagrees with Moyn because he explicitly has in mind abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, who never tied his disdain for slavery to state power. Quite to the contrary, he disavowed the Constitution as a guarantor of slavery. (This seems to come directly from Blackburn’s new book, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights.)

How does this detour into human rights history relate to children’s literature? Blackburn writes:

We can agree that fictitious lineages help no one. Nevertheless, if the first law of history is that the past is always another country, the second is that it is never beyond the reach of the present. Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights (2007) sees the appeal to subjective ‘rights’ as a product of the new print culture of the 18th century, arguing that the wider identifications encouraged by the novel endowed readers with a new sensibility and sensitivity to suffering. She traces the emergence of a concern with ‘human rights’ as much to the psychology of the novel reader as to the arguments of the philosophers—with Rousseau, as philosopher-novelist scoring on both counts. While the political pamphlet appealed to the reasoning faculty, the novel or poem encourages the reader to imagine herself or himself in the situation of another. It directly aroused sympathy and de-familiarized oppression... The reader could be invited to identify with those unlike themselves.

Does something akin to this explain the recent importance of children’s literature?

Scholars tend to argue that, for most of its history, children’s literature was inherently conservative in its didactic approach to instilling proper behavior. Only recently has children’s literature more openly explored issues that arouse empathy, or the relativistic side of morality. Thus, Abate argues recent right-wing children’s literature is anti-modern in harkening back to a bygone era and that, as such, it fails to arouse empathy.

But if this is true—that conservative children’s literature fails to invite readers to identify with those unlike themselves—then what explains its popularity? What explains the millions of copies sold? I suppose there is one of three answers to this perplexing question. 1) Empathy is an overrated component of recent children’s literature, which does not, after all, act like the 18th century novel. 2) Conservative literature does, in fact, arouse empathy, just not for liberal academics like Abate. 3) American conservatives are decidedly un-empathetic and don’t want their children to evince sympathy for those who suffer.

My guess is some complex combination of all three is at play here. But this leads me back around to my original question: Why is children’s literature important? Is it merely a synecdoche for adult concerns?

Children’s Literature as Intellectual History

Because of my research interests in education, I would guess I am more familiar with the scholarship on children’s literature than many intellectual historians. Most of the work on children’s literature seems to come from American Studiers or from researchers housed in colleges of education, or, increasingly, from the new and growing interdisciplinary field of “childhood studies,” spearheaded by the program at Rutgers University-Camden. I am currently reading a book from the Rutgers Series in Childhood Studies: Michelle Ann Abate, Raising Your Kids Right: Children’s Literature and American Political Conservatism.

One thing about the historiography on children’s literature that leaves me unsatisfied is that there are few compelling notions about why children’s literature is important. That children’s literature is, in fact, important, is inarguable, I suppose, to the degree that it is not argued. Perhaps intellectual historians are better situated to offer answers?

Take Abate’s book, about children’s literature produced by conservatives since the 1990s. She argues that right-wing children’s literature—William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues, Terri Birkett’s Truax (an anti-environmentalist parody of Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax), Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series for children, Lynne Cheney’s picture books, The O’Reilly Factor for Kids, etc.—needs to be considered as part and parcel of the larger Christian Right counterculture. She writes: “Although children’s literature has often espoused didactic lessons, offered conservative morals, and even contained political themes, the new crop of books for young readers that began appearing in the early 1990s did so in a new and far more overt way” (4). She contends that these recent conservative children’s books contain “the broad spectrum of subjects that comprise the U.S. culture wars…” (4)

Although Abate adds an important component to the rapidly growing historiography on recent American conservatism, she does little to explain the importance of children’s literature, other than to show that adults consider it important. But again, this is common. Even the best addition to this historiography, Julia Mickenberg’s Learning from the Left: Children's Literature, the Cold War, and Radical Politics in the United States, does little, from my vantage point, to explain why scholars should pay attention to children’s literature. Mickenberg is quite right to say that children’s literature is potentially influential given its vast audience—a “ready market provided by school libraries.” And she provides tons of fun material from leftist children’s book authors, such as by M. Boland, whose “ABC for Martin” (1931) began with the following clever refrain: “A stands for Armaments—war-mongerers’ pride; B is for Bolshie, the thorn in their side.” (Now that’s poetry!) But still…

Like in the history of education, it seems clear that the history of children’s literature pivots from Robert Hine’s oft-repeated quote: “What society wants its children to know reveals what that society wants itself to be.” But this sentiment is about adults. What does reading literature do to children? What do children make of literature? Personally, I think growing up reading literature made me a much more empathetic person, someone much more likely to root for the underdog. Perhaps this was due to the literature put into my hands by my mother, a high school English teacher with decidedly liberal sympathies. Or perhaps this was due to the very genre of literature, the very act of reading literature.

In a recent review of Samuel Moyn’s The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, Robin Blackburn takes issue with Moyn’s argument that human rights were invented in the 1970s. Moyn contends that using the framework of human rights to explain political or intellectual history prior to the 1970s is at best anachronistic, at worst a teleological cover for imperialistic impulses of humanitarian interventionists. Blackburn finds a good deal to like about this contention, but maintains that not everyone who fought for rights since the Age of Revolution did so in the name of state power and, as such, often did so in the cause of individual, even "human" rights. Blackburn disagrees with Moyn because he explicitly has in mind abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, who never tied his disdain for slavery to state power. Quite to the contrary, he disavowed the Constitution as a guarantor of slavery. (This seems to come directly from Blackburn’s new book, The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights.)

How does this detour into human rights history relate to children’s literature? Blackburn writes:

We can agree that fictitious lineages help no one. Nevertheless, if the first law of history is that the past is always another country, the second is that it is never beyond the reach of the present. Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights (2007) sees the appeal to subjective ‘rights’ as a product of the new print culture of the 18th century, arguing that the wider identifications encouraged by the novel endowed readers with a new sensibility and sensitivity to suffering. She traces the emergence of a concern with ‘human rights’ as much to the psychology of the novel reader as to the arguments of the philosophers—with Rousseau, as philosopher-novelist scoring on both counts. While the political pamphlet appealed to the reasoning faculty, the novel or poem encourages the reader to imagine herself or himself in the situation of another. It directly aroused sympathy and de-familiarized oppression... The reader could be invited to identify with those unlike themselves.

Does something akin to this explain the recent importance of children’s literature?

Scholars tend to argue that, for most of its history, children’s literature was inherently conservative in its didactic approach to instilling proper behavior. Only recently has children’s literature more openly explored issues that arouse empathy, or the relativistic side of morality. Thus, Abate argues recent right-wing children’s literature is anti-modern in harkening back to a bygone era and that, as such, it fails to arouse empathy.

But if this is true—that conservative children’s literature fails to invite readers to identify with those unlike themselves—then what explains its popularity? What explains the millions of copies sold? I suppose there is one of three answers to this perplexing question. 1) Empathy is an overrated component of recent children’s literature, which does not, after all, act like the 18th century novel. 2) Conservative literature does, in fact, arouse empathy, just not for liberal academics like Abate. 3) American conservatives are decidedly un-empathetic and don’t want their children to evince sympathy for those who suffer.

My guess is some complex combination of all three is at play here. But this leads me back around to my original question: Why is children’s literature important? Is it merely a synecdoche for adult concerns?