Washington Slept Here...or There

Sorry for the hiatus; turns out work sometimes is work. In any event, there was once a historic home located in Kingston, NJ which laid claim to one of the oldest tourist traps in America, that "Washington Slept Here." Then, the fates took a turn and the house was bought but needed for some reason or other to be moved. Moving houses, especially 200+ year old houses, is an impressive job but it can be done and some contractor successfully did it. The wife and I noticed, however, that when the house was moved, it brought with it the sign claiming "Washington Slept Here". Now, if we are generous and believe that Washington had indeed slumbered away in the place, it brings to question the accuracy of the claim. After all, Washington may indeed have slept in the house, but not there. It's a technicality, but one which can be important to some.

Similarly, Provincetown, MA is waging a campaign to be recognized as the real first landing place of the Pilgrims in New England. While just about all Americans know about Plymouth ("Plimouth Plantation") and its Rock, the question -- crucial for the tourist boards in both Provincetown and Plymouth -- is whether that Rock was really the first place a bunch of sea-sick refugee religious fanatics first set foot in the New World. The truth is....that Provincetown is right. The Pilgrims hit Cape Cod first and tried to create a settlement at Provincetown first, giving up and moving on to Plymouth shortly thereafter. So score one for Cape Cod. However, before they start popping champagne in Provincetown, they might want to read the Pilgrims' accounts of Cape Cod: "A hideous and desolate wilderness full of wild beasts and men." (A Voyage Long and Strange, by Tony Horwitz, 2008; Pg. 1) In other words, the Pilgrims abandoned their Provincetown settlement in 1620 because they hated the place. They may not want to emphasize that fact on the Provincetown tourist posters. Having visited Cape Cod I can assure you it is a pleasant enough place but my point is that accuracy is important in some respects, but may not be suitable for our current *uses* of history. But hey, if it's any consolation to the folks in Provincetown, none of the original Mayflower passengers' journals mention anything about Plymouth Rock either....

And anyway, whether Provincetown or Plymouth, we all know that Jamestown beat both, having been settled in 1607.....

How Historical Change Flows Through Us

When I was about 18 or so, I had a job in a small town, and lived in the next small town about 5 miles down the road. I couldn't afford a car at the time, so each day I walked the 10 miles back and forth. No, this isn't one of those "I walked in 6 foot snow, uphill both ways, with wolves nipping at my heels" stories; I'm not an embittered old man yet. Yet. However, I did walk those 10 miles, and honestly, I didn't mind it; it kept me in shape, gave me time to ponder things -- I always liked to think -- and in any event, on occasion, some kind soul with a car would take pity on the poor slob that was me and pick me up along the way. On one such occasion, on a sunny spring day, just such a blessed soul, some young guy about my age, picked me up with his 1969 dusty-beige Dodge Charger. Since both towns were centered on the same highway, it was obvious where I was going, so we did not exchange any words at all. He simply pulled over, I got in, and off we went. Now, this was a time when someone driving a car from the 1960s was not unusual, and indeed this Charger had not been "restored", though it was kind of different for such a young guy to have such a sporty car like that at his age. In any event, one of the reasons we didn't talk was that we couldn't hear each other; he had installed an awesome sound system in this beast which already had a powerful 318 cubic inch V-8 engine, so as he stepped on the gas the G-forces pushed us back in our seats and the engine roared us down the road. Pardon me for a moment while I wipe the drool off my chin, and the tear from my eye as I look outside at the Corolla sitting in my driveway today. Anyway, it was a nice, warm spring day, the windows were open, the sky was blue, the wind was whipping through our hair; we both had long hair. Man, I had hair then! Sorry, I keep digressing; anyway, so there we went down the road with the wind whipping through our -- whimper -- hair. It was awesome. The song bellowing -- no, booming out of his sub-woofers was Heart's Barracuda, and I'd swear the road itself was vibrating and thudding with the bass line. As the song nears its triumphant crescendo with the words...

You're gonna burn, burn, burn, burn, burn it to the wick Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh, Barra, Barracuda!

...the bass line picks up in a thunderous, testosterone-infused blow-out of a hard rock ending. Suh-weet. When we got to town, I thanked the guy for a great ride -- I still remember that ride today, decades later -- and I don't think my feet touched the ground at all that day at work.

So today's topic is music. The experience of music has changed quite a bit over the past century or so, and that has changed the music itself. I got to thinking about this because I heard Don McLean, the guy who wrote "American Pie" ("...and them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye, singing this'll be the day that I die."), on the local radio as he was complaining about how the new technology of music -- downloading songs, in particular -- was in his opinion destroying music by taking artistic control of the album away from the artist; fans can just cherry-pick whatever songs they like, usually the ones to make the charts or achieve radio play, without listening to the rest. This got me thinking a bit...

In the 18th century, there were a couple levels of music. There was a formal level performed by professional musicians who travelled around to venues -- you know, the Mozarts of the world. Given that the 18th century was, for most people, all work and very little play, these concerts were very popular for all classes of society. You might think Mozart, Bach or Beethoven are stuffy music for old folks, but they were the high entertainment of their day, the cable TV of 18th century Saturday nights. Everyone swarmed to these concerts, and the music was social music; it was written and performed for a live audience sitting just a few feet away. The musical themes were taken from popular cultural themes and images, something that everyone in the audience would relate to and understand. There was another kind of music as well, the, well, let's call it "low brow" music, which was working people sitting outside in the evenings looking to blow off some steam and have some cheap fun. In Europe and America this usually involved a guitar or fiddle, maybe a few percussion instruments, a singer, and people would laugh, sing and dance with the music. Here again, the themes of these songs were generic and aimed at their audience, in this case, lower-level classes in society, with themes taken from the hard working lives they knew.

Although styles changed over time or across regions, this basic culture of music remained the same for centuries. Until, that is, a bunch of guys in the 19th century invented a way to record sound. For a while there was some fumbling over formats, with for instance Thomas Edison perfecting a clay cylinder, but eventually in the early 20th century flat plastic (and shellacked) disks won the day, and the record album was born. This was a revolution; now, an average person could bring a concert played by the professional musicians into their home and listen to it anytime they wanted. At first, recording companies rushed to record all the great professional music that had been, until then, a special event thing, but soon recorders were recording any type of music they could get their hands on. At about this same time (or maybe I should say, right on time) some popular forms of music were raging across the U.S. -- the blues, jazz, marching music -- and very quickly recording studios began recoding and selling the stuff. It redefined "popular" because now anyone could listen to any music no matter where they lived. The thing about a record was that it had limited playing time, but soon artists adapted to that playing time and began producing music suited to records. Artists understood their audience had changed, had widened now and was no longer just the local yokels out on a Saturday night; it was everybody. Jazz, blues, and their strange sibling rock and roll all grew up around this record technology, and as technology improved allowing records to play both longer and better quality sound, artists adjusted their music along the way.

Another thing about records though was that they had to be flipped over mid-way through the performance, and with more sensitive players could skip easily if someone jumped or bumped into some furniture in the room. You also couldn't leave them in direct sunlight or let them get damp; they would warp like a tortilla chip. In the 1970s, someone came up with the idea of the cassette (after an embarrassing experiment with 8-tracks), which negated some of the more sensitive issues that record LPs ("long-playing") had. This was another revolution, because cassettes were smaller and easier to carry or store, and cassette players could be put in cars, which meant you didn't have to listen to the radio anymore -- you could bring your own music along. (My adventurous car ride described at the beginning involved a cassette player in the guy's awesome car.) Now music wasn't just for home, you could take your music almost anywhere. Sony got rid of the "almost" part in the early 1980s when they invented the Walkman, which now allowed you to take your music anywhere a person could go. Soon, to the consternation of the music companies, recordable cassettes were born and for the first time, listeners and fans could cherry-pick their favorite songs from multiple artists and put together their own mix cassettes, which I assure you we all quickly did.

With each step in this technological trail, music became a little more personal, a little more focused on the individual rather than the audience-crowd. Artists understood that they were writing (and performing) not for a hall full of bored locals, not for a bedroom full of teenagers, but now for a single person walking along a beach or on a street, listening to their music. If you listen to the popular music of the 1980s, 90s and our own decade, you see that music becomes more personal, almost like a private dialogue between the artist and listener.

The birth of the 'concept album' is usually credited to the Who's 1969 album Tommy, but if you listen to any Johnny Cash, Merl Haggard, Woody Guthrie, Ray Charles, Miles Davis or etc. album, it'll become obvious that the concept album was pretty much born with the record. The concept album is seen by many as the epitome of the album, of the fullest artistic realization of what modern popular music can bring you: Pink Floyd's The Wall, Genesis' The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Janis Joplin's Pearl; great music that tells a story, a story for us all. I'm not complaining or bemoaning the changes technology has made, just observing. OK, I am complaining a little bit. The old Roman saying, Omnia mutantur, nihil interit -- "Everything changes, but nothing is lost" -- applies here, I suppose.

Technology has marched on, with the inception of digital music, which again revolutionized music. Digital music can be carried in even smaller portable devices that make the old Walkmans look like bricks we wore on our hips, and it can be distributed on the internet. This has opened up the music catalog because it costs almost nothing to store and make digital music available online, which means that even the oldest and most obscure recordings can be made available. It used to be that for albums by bands not yet in the popular musical mainstream, you had to either go to record shops in places like New York or Chicago which carried obscure stuff, or you could order through your local record store and, if they had your album in their catalog, they'd ship it to the store in 2 to 6 weeks. I am still waiting for an album I ordered at a store in New York state back in 1988. (Hint, hint: this refers to the unreliability of the process.) Digital music has also taken a lot of the hot air out of the music industry's sails as anyone can sell their music online and market it fairly cheaply, a fact that the industry tried to ignore for a while in the late 1990s and early 2000s by suing anybody who suggested that it still wasn't 1982. Eventually they caved in and adapted, but the album as a format for music -- through the LP record, cassette and CD -- is dying, as sagging sales show. This is what Don McLean was complaining about, and I understand his pain. Folks like me who remember albums still think in that format, and we're the dying breed of fogies who still buy albums. Nowadays, digital music has undermined not only the album but the song format as well; digital music allows 13 year old kids to cut up and combine different parts of recorded songs through "mashup" software, and distribute it online, so that one file may combine Beethoven, Dr. Dre, a clip from a speech by Bush, Metallica and some Bonnie Raitt. I have to admit that some of that stuff isn't too bad, a throwback to some of the better techno stuff of the 1990s that also combined known songs and wove them around original music.

I don't have a moral here, other than to say that my story at the beginning was a point in time, a specific way in which people at that time listened to and enjoyed music. It was unique to its time, and while people still go to concerts and listen to music in their cars -- with quite frankly far better quality sound systems -- the experience of music has changed. I agree with Don McLean that I will miss the album as a sort canvass on which artists painted their music -- I think Fiona Apples's Tidal, or Cyrus Chestnut's Soul Food, or Neil Young's Prairie Wind are great albums from which I'd never want to cherry-pick individual songs -- but I am also grateful for having access to odd and obscure musical recordings I probably would never have learned about were it not for the net and digital technology. In the 1980s as a rabid Led Zeppelin fan, I read eagerly about legendary concerts of their golden age in the early-to-mid-1970s, but now I can actually listen to bootlegs of those concerts. Amazing. Perhaps ironically, the digital age has also made all of Don McLean's recordings available to me, something which would not have been possible in the age when the record store was king. So, given all this, it will be interesting to see how the newer generations listen to and incorporate music into their lives. I, for one, am going to pop in Heart's Little Queen CD right now. Thumpa, thumpa, thumpa, oh yeah.....

The Past as the Present

This is going to hurt but it's for your own good:

Memories
light the corners of my mind
Misty water-colored memories
of the way we were
Scattered pictures
of the smiles we left behind
Smiles we gave to one another
For the way we were
Can it be that it was all so simple then?
Or has time re-written every line?
If we had the chance to do it all over again,
Tell me, would we? Could we?

That's right, I've resorted to quoting Barbra Streisand. Actually, back in the 1960s she was pretty hot, but my hormones aside, today's historical meditation is on historical memory, or how -- and why -- we remember history. Today's thoughts were inspired by this being the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacres in Beijing, and the fact that the average school student in China today has absolutely no idea that those events ever took place. The early Soviet historian Mikhail Pokrovsky once said that History is just politics viewed backwards, and to a certain extent he's right -- we view the past through the lens of how we live today. Of course, Pokrovsky was a hack as a historian and the more menacing meaning behind his statement was that governments or political extremists should generate and propagate very selectively-screened "histories" to justify their goals and means of achieving them. He apparently hit on a good idea because the 20th and 21st centuries have been filled with all sorts of ideologically-charged propaganda masquerading as History, but still, does what really happened matter? Does it somehow cut through all the political noise and still impact our lives? It does for Chinese citizens today, who, whether they understand the reasons behind it or not, have been deprived of access to several popular social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and yes even Blogger as a nervous Chinese dictatorship tries to quash any memorials to the events of twenty years ago. But still, we all, the 6.8 billion of us, do live in a world where the Tiananmen Square massacre did happen, and it has impacted our lives even if only in subtle ways we are less aware of. We each carry around a unique perspective on those events, even if we don't actively think about them. History, like language, is a living thing that changes with us, and shapes us as much as we constantly re-shape it with our changing worldview. I'll be returning to this theme in future posts but for now, I want to focus on some very brave people who deserve to be remembered:

Show me the money!

For my first installment in this blog, I'll take a look briefly at how we consume History, or History as a product. I'm sure a bunch of you just flinched now and maybe spilled your coffee, and that is a perfectly healthy reaction, but nonetheless the reality is that somebody somewhere has to pay for historical research to get done, and the answer to "Who pays for this stuff?" impacts the end product.

I like to compare History in this sense to art. Think for a minute about art history; if you've ever taken an art history class, you've no doubt spent time looking at the cave art from Lascaux, some Byzantine icons and murals, maybe, for some of the more culturally inclusive classes you spent time looking at Buddhist and Islamic art styles, then of course you hit the Renaissance -- Michelangelo, Bellini, van Eyck, Duerer, etc. -- and then you rapidly moved into modern art. All amazing stuff, with architecture, sculpture, mosaics, etc. all thrown in for good measure. The big hanging question for all these starving artists was, "Who is going to pay me to do this stuff?" A big (and oft-ignored) part of the story behind the changes in art styles and focus has been who commissioned and bought the stuff. I'm not quite sure who "paid" the artists at Lascaux, but medieval European art was primarily financed by churches and wealthy families, while Renaissance art saw growth in the latter category at the expense of the former. As centralized governments -- cities, provinces, national -- became stronger and wealthier, they too began to commission art and hire artists. In our modern age, art is primarily fed by an open market with individuals, governments and a new phenomenon, the art museum, all competing to generate and display art. Is it any wonder then that (Western) art has moved from its medieval, communal and religious-themed origins (when churches were the primary consumers) to a more secular and often narcissistically individualistic theme in our own times, given who is funding the stuff nowadays?

So too goes History. History as a discipline was really born somewhere in the 17th and 18th centuries in Europe -- yeah, I know about Herodotus and Procopius, and you can argue about the value of oral histories like Beowulf, but History as an objective, disciplined study of human civilizations is a relatively modern thing -- and it was primarily driven by the Renaissance-era universities. Ah, the universities, where if one could achieve a tenured position, life was relatively safe and comfortable, and one could focus on research, publish the findings when complete, give the occasional public lecture. Life was sweet. Well, no more of that nonsense. Europe's early universities were funded by wealthy aristocratic sponsors, while in the 19th and 20th centuries, governments increasingly took over. In the 21st century, however, certainly in America but increasingly so in Europe and elsewhere as well, universities are becoming businesses who are funded in part by government grants still, true, but as well by wealthy donors (individuals and businesses) and their ability to attract funding is tied directly to their ability to attract top-rate students who in turn prove to be top-rate performers in their chosen academic fields. In this environment, universities have put immense pressure on all their academic arms, History departments included, to turn as much ground-breaking, Earth-shattering (and headline-grabbing) research as possible. Publish! Publish! Publish! professors are told, and they are also pressed into speaking circuits so that every opportunity for them to show their face and show off their expertise is seen as a marketing opportunity for the university.

Now, it may seem like I'm complaining about the current state of affairs but I'm not; I'm merely describing them. They are what they are, but their importance for us here today is that they influence and impact what historical research gets done. In today's market-savvy environment, aside from strictly academic journals and conferences, History is focused towards the lowest common denominator, namely, its ability to compete and sell (almost as a form of entertainment) in an open marketplace. If you visit bookstores in different countries, you'll be struck by what subjects crowd the shelves of popular bookstores. Each country tends to have their own favorites, their own biases. Now, there is historical research done on just about every possible subject, and one could argue that the market has made room for the less popular subjects by provided them an outlet in the form of the internet, where you can find and buy just about anything, but when it comes to your local bookstore, the stuff on the shelf is treated as any selling inventory: what moves the fastest? This is why there will always be more books on military history -- because more men read history than women, and nothing's as testosterone-infused and exciting as warfare -- than books on, say, the 18th and 19th century Shaker communities, or how different grains have shaped civilizations. In a certain sense this is fine because, well, at least some historical research is getting done somewhere and someone's reading it, but it does have the dangerous effect of skewing the popular understanding of History, that our ancestors did nothing but heroically storm enemy beaches and triumphantly plant the flag on mountain tops. We're in danger of developing a historical myopia which, for some, may be a minor issue, but in a world where some nutcases drugged up on a very self-serving vision of History decided to fly passenger airliners into skyscrapers, I would suggest that History really does play a part in how our present world unfolds, our understanding of our past -- however flawed -- often does impact our world.

So what can we do? There are all sorts of arguments to be had about the state of academia today and what should be done about it, but I think the real answer is a more democratic one; namely, that the responsibility for making an effort to truly understand our past lies with each one of us. It means viewing History less as mere entertainment -- all those exciting World War II programs on the History Channel -- and more as a part of who we are today. It means maybe reaching for that book on the Shakers or visiting a local museum or reenactors community instead of watching troops storm Omaha Beach again. There's nothing wrong with military history, of course, and there certainly is a proper time for remembering the heroes who took Normandy in 1944, but when you look at some 10,000 years of human history, World War II is important but only a small part of our larger picture. Making the effort to learn about other aspects of our past, such as how great-grandma in the 19th century dealt with feminine hygiene issues, or how the spread of Scottish textile manufacturing to New England in the 19th century transformed life there and also led to, among other things, child labor laws and the invention of the computer -- these are as much a part of who we are today as what happened at Gettysburg in July, 1863.

Welcome to History as Perspective!

When I was a very young lad, my mother used to occasionally take me to these parks with lots of stones and flowers, with very manicured lawns and high iron fences. The dress code was formal, which precluded me from doing what a three or four year old boy wanted to do, which was run around, kick things and roll in the mud. These were extremely boring visits, usually shoehorned into a day of errands, and as I was too young to ask for the car keys, I had no choice but to go and try to be on my best behavior. Luckily, these visits only happened a few times a year, but when your entire life so far amounts to about 36 months, a few times a year seems like overkill. Anyway, I don't remember how old I was, but somehow my mother was able to impress upon me one day while on one of these visits just what it was we were visiting, and I can remember the revelation as it struck me like a one ton delivery truck: there were people buried beneath those stones, real people! I remember walking along a row of stones, noticing somehow for the first time the names and dates on each stone, realizing that each one represented a lifetime, a whole collection of memories. I thought of all the stories I'd heard about our family, about my grandparents and their parents, a huge treasure-trove of anecdotes about jobs they'd had, pranks they'd pulled -- you definitely don't ever want to turn your back on anyone from my family -- fish they'd caught, horses and cars they'd owned, all these stories that made these ancestors of mine legendary, and I knew that all these people buried beneath these stones must have had similar stories to tell.

Thus began my life-long love affair with History. It's that human element behind the cultural masks we like to hide behind, the huge array of ingenious ways we've invented over the past 10,000 years to fulfill the core basic human needs that intrigues me. I'm not nostalgic; while I'd give anything to get into a time machine and visit the 19th -- or the 9th -- century, I will also want to come back. I'm pretty happy with the 21st century, thank you. It's just that I enjoy trying to understand how those who came before us lived and saw their world -- our world -- and how their lives unfolded. It's also not about glorification or ancestor-worship; the past has had its share of jerks, idiots and bullies as well. Well, de mortuis nil nisi bonum, as they say.

Most folks nowadays experience history primarily through school, which they remember as being boring for having to memorize endless lists of battles, kings, treaties and inventions, or through the wonder of modern cable television, which is more exciting but would give an outsider the impression that the vast majority of human history has been people stabbing or shooting one another. History is more than just lists and pictures of people in funny clothes, however; history is our understanding of the past, of how what they were eventually came to be what we are today. This means that History -- uppercase "H" there -- while not a "hard" science like botany or geology, is still a pretty serious scholarly discipline that, aside from its own research methods, also relies on everything from archaeology to linguistics to modern cultural anthropology to, well, everything. Really. History involves everything from lawn mowers to your pets to bagels to hairstyles to underwear to the Hubble Telescope; everything. The problem is that since we are looking at the past, well, we drag ourselves into the mix a bit. When we look at History, we can't help but look at it from our modern perspective, from our own conceptions of what life is about. We can try to be objective, but quite frankly we're a bit limited in that department. What this all adds up to is that History isn't just a description of the past, it's an exploration of our relationship to the past as well, and that means our relationship to the present to boot. Exploring something about Grandma's life is a de facto exploration of our own lives. Man, aren't we a bunch of narcissistic egotists?

That's what this blog is going to be about, my meditations on History, the past, and how we look at both. I am an amateur historian who is (hopefully) about to be published for the first time, but while I've always loved reading and experiencing History through multiple sources -- and I'll occasionally share some of those insights here as well -- I've also spent a lot of time reading and thinking about the theory behind History, behind how we look at the past and how we apply it today; it is some of those findings and ideas I'll be kicking around here. So please join in to the discussion and share some of your own observations, and feel free to pick a part mine -- although, with my paper-thin skin and fragile egg-shell ego (backed up by a ferocious, man-eating wife), I'll have to insist that all discussion be respectful.