Rich Mintz  

I’m currently wrapping up Eliza Fay’s Original Letters from India, the NYRB edition of a collection (first published in 1925) of letters written in the 1770s. Fay traveled from Dover to India (with her husband, a lawyer) at a time when the British imperial outposts were genuine outposts, beset by dangers of all kinds. When you set out for India in those days, safe arrival at which was not guaranteed, and Fay and her husband were detained and held hostage twice during their twelve-month (!) journey.

It’s hard to empathize nowadays, when anyone with $1000 can book an advance plane ticket and be safely in India next week, more or less guaranteed. Exoticism will never entirely disappear as long as people are tribalist and closed-minded (i.e., forever); but a world in which even modestly paid manual laborers have access to cheap mobile phones is very different from Fay’s world. When she dispatched her letters, she had no guarantee they would even arrive.

Just finished A History Of The World In Six Glasses, Tom Standage’s light historical narrative about six drinks (beer, wine, spirits, coffee, tea, and Coca-Cola) and the roles they played in different cultural periods.

On the “broad historical trends” front, I didn’t learn anything I didn’t know, but Standage was good with details (for instance, I hadn’t realized the guy who yelled “aux armes!” and set off the French Revolution had a name; and I hadn’t known tea came into prominence so late) and it made a compelling read. The narrative construct felt a little forced, but since I have a sort of industrial history fetish it didn’t really bother me.

My task of winnowing down my “to read” list got a little tougher as I read this review by Neal Ascherson, in the London Review of Books, of Norman Davies’ new book, Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations. Not just this book, but some of Davies’ earlier ones, including his 1981 history of Poland, are going on my list.

I’ve often thought of reading a history of Poland. I’m fascinated by the fact that (as young Jews of my generation learned) in the early 20th century, within the memory of my grandmother, Warsaw was one of the greatest Jewish cultural centers in the history of the world; and that by the time I was born, all of that was gone. My father’s family came from near Minsk, in an area of Europe’s east that has changed political hands many times in the past two hundred years. But my interest in Poland is more than personal. As Ascherson points out, Davies has done much to set Poland at the geographic center of European history; centuries of political developments have whirled about it.

Davies’ latest book delves into the passing of a dozen European states, some of which died of natural causes, some of which were murdered, and some of which were stillborn or nearly so. I’m particularly interested in his chapter on the United Kingdom, which he contends has been on its way to dissolution almost since the Act of Union.

I’m delighted to see that Kate Beaton’s cartoon collection Hark, A Vagrant has hit the top of the Times bestseller list.

I never heard of Beaton, a Canadian cartoonist whose specialty is “literary and historical scenes rendered in four panels or less,” until Abe Riesman called my attention to her a few months ago. Since then I’ve devoured every word and every panel on her blog and have been eagerly awaiting the book, which is very much as good as advertised. In fact, I think it may be my favorite graphic-novel* acquisition of the past year.

*Technically it’s not a “novel,” but this is the term of art that the publishing industry has decided to use.

Baltimore City police have arrested Barry Landau, the celebrity-chasing presidential historian, for the alleged theft of historical documents from the Maryland Historical Society. According to the NYT, the tip came from a MHS employee, who saw a colleague Jason Savedoff, who was traveling with Landau put a document into a briefcase and walk out the door, and immediately called the police. Shortly afterwards, 60 historical documents (which, it is implied, were not his property) were found in the possession of Landau’s colleague in Baltimore.

The director of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, in extended remarks to the Times, recalled that Landau and Savedoff — who visited 17 times in the past year — aroused suspicions by their behavior, and other historical societies are now checking their records and their collections. Savedoff in particular, who was introduced as Landau’s nephew, made a suspicious impression; among other things, he didn’t seem to be intellectually inclined or particularly well trained for the work.

It’s always surprising when someone in an intellectual or cultural field turns out to be a pilferer (and I note that there’s been no trial here and it’s conceivable that this is a colossal misunderstanding). Remember the Smiley map thefts? That story verged on the unbelievable, but it turned out to be true. (If you’re going to read one Smiley story, make it this one.)

But in the clubby world of historical document collections (which has its academic side and its for-profit dealing side), it’s easier to get away with theft than you might think. A culture applies of mutual respect — people are presumed honest and legitimate. Subjecting participants in that culture to excessive security restrictions would be unseemly, so it isn’t done. The sorts of people who keep public collections of historical documents — mostly stuffy and boring things, of interest only to narrow experts — are generally happy for any attention. And temptation is everywhere. Assuming the Landau charges are true, I suspect what may have happened is that he yielded once to temptation, couldn’t believe how easy it was, and fell into the habit.

So it’s been quite a week for Grand Rapids, what with a multiple murder-suicide and the passing of First Lady Betty Ford just a day apart. The locals could be forgiven for taking a few days off to recover their senses.

This is an appropriate time to remember the everyday greatness of Betty Ford, who was hailed even in her prime for being plainspoken and reluctant to indulge GOP pieties. She said on national TV that she wouldn’t be surprised if her daughter had premarital sex; she openly called for the ERA; she supported legalized abortion at a time when that was a much more controversial position than it later became. And she became a public face for addiction and recovery, for the normalization of mental illness, for the right of ordinary people to have matter-of-fact plastic surgery — the list goes on and on and on. Per the New York Times, she hated Pat Nixon’s pretentious formal furniture, and she stuck a cigarette between the fingers of a Greek goddess in the Yellow Oval Room. She was seeing a psychiatrist in 1962, for heaven’s sake.

She was a vivacious child — her mother liked to say that Betty “popped out of a bottle of champagne.”

God love the woman.

And it’s also an appropriate time to rewatch (or to watch, if you haven’t) the great Grand Rapids community lipdub of “American Pie,” which I’ll provide here for your convenience:

So I was reading this review by Steven Shapin in the London Review of Books, of Ian Miller’s new book on the modern history of the stomach (so yes, not only does someone read those reviews, someone would even consider buying the book if it weren’t £60). And I was struck by this, from 1825, one of the earliest surviving contracts with a medical research subject setting forth his obligations and rights.

For eight years, Alexis St. Martin, who had a gunshot wound in his side that permanently opened up his stomach, was experimented on by a US Army surgeon named William Beaumont, in exchange for which he received room, board, and about $150 a year, under an agreement that read, in part:

Alexis will at all times … submit to assist and promote by all means in his power such philosophical or medical experiments as the said William shall direct or cause to be made on or in the stomach of him, the said Alexis, either through and by means of the aperture or opening thereto in the side of him, the said Alexis, or otherwise, and will obey, suffer and comply with all reasonable and proper orders of or experiments of the said William in relation thereto, and in relation to the exhibiting and showing of his said stomach and the powers and properties thereof and of the appurtenances, and powers, properties, situation and state of the contents thereof.

The most amazing part of this story: despite having a hole in his side that perforated his stomach, St. Martin lived another 40 years, married, and had six children.

Driving up the New Jersey Turnpike tonight, after the sun had gone down but before it was really dark — in other words, prime nostalgia time — I was listening to Billy Joel on Rdio. I’m not talking about “River of Dreams” Joel, about which the less said the better (although if that’s your thing, you know, good for you) — I’m talking about the early stuff, like draw a line right through the middle of “Uptown Girl” (or maybe right after it if you’re feeling generous) and consider everything before.  The two peaks of this period were, of course, The Stranger and 52nd Street.

I should confess at this point that I’m not a particularly rabid Billy Joel fan, but unlike many other wealthy and popular singer-songwriters, the man is both a genuine musician and a very gifted entertainer, and those two albums are probably two of my lifetime favorites, as listenable and interesting now as they were 30 years ago.

So, I was listening to this stuff, you know, “My Life” and “Only the Good Die Young” and “Rosalinda’s Eyes” and so forth, and a wave washed over me of nostalgia for something I never actually experienced (I’m sure the Germans have a word for that) — namely, the New York City of the 1970s and early 1980s. I mean post-Simon and Garfunkel (who essentially marked the very tail end of the falling-away of an old New York, a city of homburgs and Checker Cabs) and pre-Wall Street (which is a convenient marker of the rise of a new New York, the New York of super-rich douchebags and, as all my native New Yorker friends never tire of repeating and repeating and repeating, “mallification”).

It just happens that that period exactly coincides with my growing-up years (I entered kindergarten in 1970 and graduated from college in 1987), a period during which I had almost no experience of New York City.  (I visited for 36 hours in 1982, at age 17; found it disturbing and chaotic and unsafe and definitely unappealing; and didn’t return for years, except once or twice briefly during college.)

New York in the 1970s and 1980s is an experience I entirely missed, and I regret it. By all accounts it was a heady time, and not Masters-of-the-Universe headiness, but the headiness of “everything might change, if we want it to, and we do, don’t we? So let’s try something.”  You know, post-Watergate, post-”Drop Dead,” but pre-Helmsley. Not everyone experienced life this way, of course, but enough people did that the memory of it is still in the cultural air here.  And elsewhere, too — the post-Watergate malaise/hopefulness was national — but everything tends to be muted in Los Angeles where I grew up, people are parochial and on average tend not to give much of a shit about things that happen in the outside world.

Early Billy Joel stands for (and, in snippets, captures and reflects back) that New York City in its moment of transition, which I wasn’t mature enough to get excited about when I encountered the very tail end of it in 1982. By the time I spent significant time in New York — in 1995 and 1996 — everything was ruined.

Don’t get me wrong, the city is still a lovely, powerful, vibrant, and diverse place, of course, and in countless ways is better now than it used to be — I happen to hold the bourgeois and out-of-fashion opinion that a city in which you are not likely to be murdered or slashed or larcenized is a better place than one in which you are, even if that comes with a side of Starbucks. I’m very glad I get to have the experience of living and working here, and helping to effect the next round of accretive change. But people who lived here before about 1990 have a sense of wonder about what they lived through — oh my God, we all did this and this and *this*, I can hardly believe it now, and we all did it *together* — that people who lived here afterwards don’t really have. I missed out on that New York, and it’s never coming back.

Just finished reading The Oxford History of Mexico, spurred by a week’s vacation near Playa del Carmen earlier this year. I had a pretty good grasp of 20th-century Mexican history, but it occurred to me that I didn’t know nearly enough about what came before, so I decided to find a source, and this was the one that I put my hands on first.

It’s been a long book, produced by a team of authors as so many sweeping histories are, and I learned a lot of little things and some large things. (Example: Mexico’s political development over the past 150 years is arguably the most successful social revolution in the history of the world.) Now that I’m done, I also have some clear macro responses to it and to the story it tells of military conquest and reconquest, cultural development, and daily life.

First and foremost, I’ve been struck by the degree to which chance — taking the form of specific actions taken by specific people, based on short-term opportunities, for their own decidedly local reasons — was an important factor in the way this story played out.

In particular, the fact that Texas became American at all was the result of the confluence of three things: the relative weakness and distraction of the Mexican central government at a critical time, the distance of Texas from the Mexican center of power, and the absolute determination of a bunch of the “heroes of Texas history” not to have their right to make a buck (via slaveholding and the aggregation of land) interfered with, honesty and straight dealing be damned. If (for example) Stephen Austin had been incrementally less determined or just a bit more scrupulous, things might well have gone differently.

Or, to take another example, so much of the economic history of Mexico in the 20th century was bound up with the need of great powers (on both sides) to have access to raw materials for their wartime production. So people (in government, and in industry, and in private society) made decisions based on that. (J.G. Farrell’s The Singapore Grip, which I read earlier this year, was as much about rubber profiteering as it was about the war.)

This is, of course, always true — “people doing their own things for their own reasons” is, at the end of the day, the only definition of history there is — but in retrospect, everything always seems orderly and foretold. In the moment, it isn’t at all.

Secondly, and equally significant, is the extent to which the history of Mexico and the history of the United States have been bound up together to a degree that most Americans don’t think about. U.S. ties to Mexico stemming from the large number of people of Mexican ancestry living in the U.S. are the least of it. For most of our collective history, the border was even more porous than it is now, with people moving back and forth (in both directions) for personal and economic reasons. For people on both sides, the border region is seen as “remote” and local interests trump the national interest. And in many ways, the three large North American nations have been an economic collaborative all along, NAFTA or no NAFTA. U.S. colonialism has had a diversionary effect on economic activity, but Mexico is huge — its population is a full third of that of the U.S., and it has a strong and diversified economy — and the country is economically significant. It has economic momentum in its own right.

And, on top of everything else, until the first or second quarter of the 19th century, it was far from clear that the U.S. would permanently out-compete Mexico in economic terms. Mexico, in fact, had some considerable advantages going into the game (not least a long cultural and economic history well adapted to the geography of its central lowlands, and tighter ties to the Spanish aristocracy and central government than the American colonies had).

I’m watching a “Rockford Files” episode in which Nazis are about to figure (so it seems) in the plot, and something occurs to me: in 1977 when this episode was made, the Nazi era was precisely as recent as the Jimmy Carter/Ronald Reagan era is now.

To me, Nazis are part of “history,” but I remember Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan perfectly well, not as history but as lived experience from my childhood. In fact, in 1980, I was practically old enough to vote for (er, against) Ronald Reagan, so it doesn’t feel so long ago. But Jim Rockford (and, for that matter, James Garner) in 1977 would remember Nazis not just as childhood experience, but from their (earlier) adulthood.

As a child, I often wondered why so much of our popular culture (TV, movies, etc.) was “about” World War II, and Nazis in particular. Some sliver of this presumably had to do with the fact that the crimes of the Nazis were so extreme, and some part of it presumably had to do with the overrepresentation of Jews in Hollywood. But I realize now that most of it was simply due to the fact that World War II was a big disruptive thing that had recently happened to all the grownups in the world. Even my parents, young as they were, were old enough to have been affected by it — my father was even stationed at Great Lakes Naval Station in Waukegan, Illinois for a time, although the war ended before there was time to deploy him.

Similarly, I wonder whether the young political people I work with are curious about why Ronald Reagan looms so large in the popular consciousness. Part of it is no doubt due to the fact that he was larger than life even in life, and part of it due to his charisma, and part of it due to his ideas; but part of it is simply due to the fact that Ronald Reagan was a big disruptive thing that happened to all of the grownups in the world. Everyone my age and older — that is, basically, everyone old enough to have kids in middle school now, or older — has personal memories of that era.

And if you really want to blow your mind, consider this: when my grandmother was born (and she is still alive and well), the Civil War was as recent an occurrence as the Vietnam War is now, give or take a year or two. And I remember the Vietnam War, or at least the end of it; and I’m not that old. So my grandmother must have interacted with people in her childhood for whom the Civil War was part of their adult lived experience. And the oldest of those people, in their childhoods, would almost certainly have interacted with people who remembered the Revolutionary War from their adult experience. That’s a pretty remarkable formulation of the short duration of American history to date.