Archive by Tag
American history
short take
First Reviews of Gordon Wood’s Empire of Liberty
The first significant reviews of Gordon Wood’s entry in Oxford’s multi-volume History of the United States are trickling in. Jay Winik, in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review, calls Empire of Liberty “the culmination of a lifetime of brilliant thinking and writing” and “as elegant a synopsis of the period as any I know,” [...]
Rodney McMillian
Published in Artforum, January 2009. “The challenge of the next half century,” said Lyndon B. Johnson at the University of Michigan in 1964, “is whether we have the wisdom to use [our] wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.” Los Angeles–based artist Rodney McMillian, who [...]
Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought, H-SHEAR
Yesterday morning I completed what is perhaps the longest book I’ve ever read: Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford University Press). The transformation that Howe studies involves the “revolutions” of both communications and transportation during the period. This is in marked contrast to earlier interpretations of the era, [...]
Rules for Harvard Freshmen, 1741
The blog Boston 1775 has posted Harvard’s rules for incoming class of 1741. In the 1700s, ordinary schooling for Boston boys ran from about age seven to age thirteen or fourteen, if they lasted through the whole course. Therefore, the few boys who went on to college were still truly boys, only in their early [...]
