[March 14, 2023, 1pm. I may continue to tinker with these before tonight’s public hearing]
Update, March 15, 2023.
Here are my remarks as delivered, just within the 2 minute limit:
And here are the comments I submitted to the online form:
For the 160th anniversary of First Bull Run, I offer a not wholly facetious counterfactual, explaining how two Pennsylvania Militia officers, perhaps mere lieutenants, could have shortened the Civil War by nearly four years.
Continue readingI suppose every human culture depends on elders who are willing not only to teach the young, but to listen to them. Back in graduate school, I was writing about freeway revolts with a methodology that consisted of figuring out which Ray Mohl article was most relevant to a given section. Yet when I met Ray in person, he treated me not as a receptacle of his wisdom and knowledge, but as someone from whom he himself could learn.
That may have been true at the edges; one of the pleasures of urban history is that each city has its particulars, so another detailed case study is always welcomed. But more than that, Ray was a fundamentally patient, gentle, and curious man. His was a face I always delighted to see at a conference, and I mourn that I won’t see it again. Ray, I miss you.
For more on Ray’s work, see In Memoriam: Raymond Mohl
The colleges of the country are sinking in tone, lower & lower, in accordance with the opinion & manners of the people—I mean of what is considered even the best educated portion of the people. Practical ability, physical science, knowledge that may promote success in the great & absorbing ambition of all—making money—are now immensely prized & preferred to literature, philosophy, & art. Parents wish to see their sons successful men of business, not scholars & gentlemen, & to gratify this desire the colleges are reducing their standard of excellence & admitting the natural sciences to the foremost place among the studies prescribed.
Sidney George Fisher, 18 December 1869
A Philadelphia Perspective: The Diary of Sidney George Fisher, edited by Nicholas B. Wainwright (Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1967), 556.
XKCD takes on U.S. history. Generally accurate, I think, but it refers to James Monroe as wearing “pants instead of breeches.” Linda Thrift of the National Portrait Gallery notes that Monroe “wore small-clothes until his death. Monroe’s wife enforced dress etiquette at presidential receptions, refusing admission to anyone not in breeches and silk hose.”
