Will B. Mackintosh

He preferred to bankroll Henry Clay rather than take a shot at the big chair himself. Let’s hope Trump is as successful as Clay was. (courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York)

I have been fascinated by the debates raging about Donald Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns, and the related debates about the size of his fortune and the source of his wealth.  The consensus seems to be that he is refusing to release financial information because it will show that he isn’t nearly as rich as he says he is.  While it’s absolutely entertaining to watch Trump writhe as the gossamer threads of his “success” are blown away by gale-force media scrutiny, I was particularly struck by John Cassidy’s reporting on the specific sources of Trump’s wealth in The New Yorker.   It turns out that (unlike Romney in 2012) much to Trump’s wealth is derived from old-fashioned, boring, concrete real estate, rather than modern, sexy, ephemeral market capitalizations.  As Cassidy points out, “Trump certainly owns some very valuable properties, most of which are in New York City.”  It struck me that Trump’s fortune comes from what is perhaps the second-oldest form of American fortune-building: owning a piece of Manhattan Island.  While it’s not quite as old and venerable of an American wealth-building tradition as owning enslaved people and forcing them to grow tobacco for export, it’s pretty close.  It places Trump’s fortune in a long and “illustrious” tradition of great American fortunes, along with the Beekmans, the Schermerhorns, the Astors, and many others.  Those previous owners of bits and pieces of Manhattan Island inspired Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence; too bad this one seems to be operating as The Destroyer of American Political Innocence.

“Look! It’s moving. It’s alive. It’s alive … It’s alive, it’s moving, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, it’s alive, IT’S ALIVE!”

I have always distrusted TED Talks.  They masquerade as scholarship for the masses, when they are in fact pretty much the exact opposite of scholarship.  They radically simplify rather than embrace complexity.  They rush towards answers without stopping to consider questions.  They reflect, or even celebrate, the conventional wisdom of their day, rather than questioning or even contextualizing it.  They may be the lyceums or chautauquas of the 21st century, but at least in the 19th century, sometimes you got to go swimming or sailing in between doses of packaged platitudes. Read more

This is the March Madness that historians should be obsessing over.

Let me start by stipulating that I really like The Junto, which is “a group blog on Early American history.”  I think it makes a great contribution to the online life of early Americanists … more collaborative than solo outlets like mine or The Way of Improvement Leads Home, and less formal than Common-place.  But every year around this time I have to take a break from reading it because they give so much play to their annual “March Madness” feature.  As they described it this year, “each year we engage in a spirited tournament of voting in some category related to early American history.”  They accept nominations in the category (this year it’s journal articles) and “[t]hen, by the power of The Junto’s bracketologists, [they] put together tournament brackets, announce the brackets, and open it up for your votes.”  I think this exercise is highly problematic for two reasons, one of which is broad and general, and the other of which is narrower and more specific. Read more

It’s hard to live in a Citty upon a Hill.

Like much of academia I have been riveted over the past 24 hours by the saga unfolding at Mount St. Mary’s in Maryland. (Imagine me, late last night, trying to peer around the paywall at the Frederick News-Post while feeding a baby.)  Briefly, from what I can gather from news reports like this, this, this, and this, the story begins with the hiring in 2014 of Simon Newman, “an executive with a strong background in private equity, strategy consulting, and operations,” as president of the well-regarded Catholic liberal arts college.  Although he had no experience in higher education, Newman was hired because  the search committee was looking for “a new leader with fundraising, strategic planning and fiscal leadership skills.”  Readers who are immersed in the culture of academia can probably already tell exactly where this is headed. Read more

Luckily, it’s pretty much been uphill since then. (Harper’s Weekly, Jan. 3, 1863)

My last post on the tension between preservation, development, and economic inequality in Fredericksburg attracted quite a bit of attention around town, which was gratifying.  By far the most interesting and engaging reaction came from Michael Spencer, Associate Professor and Director of the Center for Historic Preservation in the Department of Historic Preservation at Mary Washington, in the form of a private email.  His email sparked what I found to be a challenging exchange about preservation, economic development, and the specific proposals that are currently on the table for downtown Fredericksburg.  I was extremely gratified to get the feedback of a professional preservationist, since my training has prepared me to work with documents and words, not brick and slate.  I think our debate reflects our disciplinary differences in a productive and illuminating fashion, so I have (with his permission, of course) shared it here in its entirety.

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A mortal man who is, ahem, burdened by his past.

The oddest intellectual disjuncture of parenting so far has come during my quiet hours of feeding the baby her bottle.  I’ve been listening to books on tape audiobooks* while she drinks, because bottle feeding requires two hands, considerable attention, and a healthy dose of patience.  I’ve been mostly consuming nineteenth century novels, because it can’t hurt to bone up on some of the century’s doorstop classics, which are mostly too long to work into my regular rotation of professional reading.  I tend to gravitate to books that I know, but not particularly well, and which don’t directly bear on my research but which are important in the overall sweep of cultural and intellectual history of the nineteenth-century U.S.  It also doesn’t hurt that you can download public-domain books on tape audiobook (generally pre-1923) from Librivox for free, and I’m too cheap to pay for Audible.   Most recently, I’ve been wading through Moby-Dick, at the rate of two or three chapters  per 7 ounces of milk.  (Melville’s chapters are short, and the baby likes to take her sweet time.)  I am quickly coming to the conclusion that Moby-Dick was a deeply weird choice for the particular context of baby feeding.   Read more