It has been a minute, hasn’t it. I should have known that the semester would completely overwhelm my capacity for much of anything productive, let alone organizing my thoughts into something resembling coherence. If I had to summarize my feelings from the fall, it would be like when you are on a long road trip and see nothing but low, dark, ominous storm clouds up ahead. Sure, you may only see a few drops on your windshield, but you know what’s coming. Kind of tough to be good at editing, reading, writing, and teaching under these circumstances—at least it was (and is) for me. Anyway, here are a few thoughts on things I did manage to read and think about in the fall. As always, bonus recipe (chaat potato wedges) there at the end.
Anyway, here are some of the most compelling things I got to read in the fall.
Hans L. Trefousse, Carl Schurz: A Biography (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998).
I read this in grad school and remembered it fondly. Nice to revisit what is now a classic, though this time around I dwelled heavily on the chapters about Schurz’ involvement in the Civil War, Reconstruction, civil service reform, and anti-imperialism.
James Duane*, You Have the Right to Remain Innocent: What Police Officers Tell their Children about the Fifth Amendment (New York: Little A., 2016).
*Not that James Duane.
Next month I’ll post new syllabuses, but suffice it to say I was scrambling to figure out my new undergrad legal history course readings. This didn’t quite make the cut, but it is a nice distillation of the hundreds of reasons why people arrested or detained or what not should explicitly invoke their right to an attorney and then be quiet. For those teaching undergrad criminal procedure courses, I imagine this very readable and short book would be a great fit.
Holly Brewer’s Critique of Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning
Holly Brewer, “Race and Enlightenment: The Story of a Slander,” Reason 2, no. 1 (October, 2021), https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/race-and-enlightenment-the-story-of-a-slander/
My point here is not to belabor the realities of racism in early America: on that I think we are all agreed. But I do want to challenge an assumption about its pervasiveness, and where it came from, and especially the idea that it was “stamped” from the beginning. From my study of these sources (and many others) I would argue instead that it was contested from the beginning, and that it changed over time and varied by place.
*Holly Brewer makes a great point in this piece about the “more complex, and more interesting, debate over principles of privilege and power, over racism and inclusion” in the English Enlightenment thought. Moreover, her critique of Kendi—both for the specific misreading of Locke’s “Essay Concerning Human Understanding” and the overdetermined category of “racist” thinkers—is noteworthy. But Brewer’s broader point seems to use similar logic: “it [racism] was contested from the beginning”; “Did Locke do enough to reverse slavery? No. But did he make arguments that indicated that he thought Africans were fully human with rights, and part of the same species? Absolutely.” So what, then, does ‘contested from the beginning’ look like as an intellectual history, given that Locke’s efforts were hardly sufficient to “reverse” slavery or dent its rising tide? Of the Enlightenment “tradition of antiracism,” Brewer writes, “Even within the limitations of their time and their discourse, these disputations helped to create the foundation for many of the principles of human rights and democracy.” That racist institutions and discourses were part of the same story, and continue to be today, suggests to me that the “tradition of antiracism” is, sadly, far less determinate than its most ardent defenders might wish.
Lindsay Chervinsky, “Person or Presidency? And What Does George Washington’s Farewell Address Have to Do with it?”
*Chervinsky’s post raises an important and often overlooked issue in political and legal history: the savior complex. The inflated sense of self-importance that compels so many to believe that, to paraphrase the philosopher king Donald Trump, ‘only they can do it.’ As Chervinsky writes: “So many political leaders (and Supreme Court justices too) think that only they can wield the power and keep the institution afloat.” To be clear, we aren’t talking about the particularly craven class of politicians who want power for its own sake. Nor the venal ones who substitute sass for substance in order to line their campaign coffers. Rather, the perhaps well-intentioned ones who believe they are indispensable to the mission. Of course these are almost exclusively white dudes so there’s also that element of privilege and consistently failing upwards.
Nakia Parker, “Texas’ Long Celebration of Juneteenth,” Black Perspectives, October 18, 2021.
Reviewing Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth, Parker writes:
Gordon-Reed advocates for a more expansive understanding of early Black life in Texas and North America, and for more nuanced interpretations of Blackness broadly. In our current era, when subjects like the teaching of critical race theory and slavery in classrooms is being challenged across the United States, and celebrations like Juneteenth are sometimes attacked as “divisive,” Gordon-Reed’s encouragement is a welcome call.
Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt (New York: Reaktion Books, 2021).
If you don’t like Hannah Arendt or do not find worth in her intellectual project, do not read this book. You won’t like it. Because Samantha Rose Hill deeply admires Arendt, and that admiration comes through in virtually every page of this lovely, brief biography of Arendt. I have incredibly mixed feelings about Arendt. I find her story, and her intellectual insights about the nature and function of law to be so powerful that they inform almost any scholarly project that I undertake. I find her analysis of Adolf Eichmann to be so dangerously powerful that they terrify me. Eichmann in Jerusalem is probably my favorite piece of literature—fiction or non. But having read through her letters and papers, as well as all of her published works, and just about anything ever written about her in English, I really don’t like her stubborn unwillingness to take seriously any intellectual current outside of the Western ‘great books.’ I once wrote a paper about her use of totally awful sources like Bertrand de Jouvenel. She was also terrible when it came to questions about race, gender, and ethnicity. This isn’t just about her really troublesome understanding of the Civil Rights Movement as discussed so ably by Kathryn Gines, Hannah Arendt and the Negro Question (Indiana University Press, 2014). It is also about the foundational and wildly inaccurate historical development of racism that she offers in The Origins of Totalitarianism. (And spare me, please, the ‘judging her by the standards of her time’ bit.)
Anyway, Hill does admire Arendt but she doesn’t whitewash the discussion of race. Instead, she gives the reader a summary of what was controversial, why it was controversial, and what the scholarly discussion has been about thereafter (see, e.g., “Reflections on Little Rock” discussion 149-152). The beauty of the book lies in Hill’s ability to contextualize Arendt’s intellectual work within the story of her life without losing nuance in only 200 or so pages. The book will be at the top of my syllabus for my course, “Hannah Arendt, Citizenship, and Ethics”—an interdisciplinary seminar for undergraduates that I am teaching this semester and for the next few years. (It is going great, btw.) Hill is a wonderful writer, too. She makes accessible even Arendt’s most dense writings, such as The Human Condition. If I have one criticism of the book, it is that Arendt’s later life—post Eichmann, really—gets too brief a treatment, especially in comparison to more substantial early chapters. But that’s about it. A wonderful little book.
The entire June 2021 American Historical Review, pretty much, but especially:
Sylvia Sellers-Garcia, “Walking While Indian, Walking While Black: Policing in a Colonial City,” American Historical Review 126, no. 2 (June, 2021), 455-81.
Policing and paperwork have a long history in the construction of racial categories. Where racial profiling occurs through these mechanisms, the practice serves a larger political purpose. Designating specific races of people as chronic perpetrators of criminal violence serves to locate and theoretically delimit a broader social ill….establishing in writing that men with this profile were dangerous to the public and the state. It is important to acknowledge how daily, routinized state actions accumialte to achieve this political purpose. Delineating and simultaneously criminalizing racial identity is a grandiose project, but it manifests through the mundane. (478)
Nicholas Barreyre and Claire Lemercier, “The Unexceptional State: Rethinking the State in the Nineteenth Century (France, United States),” American Historical Review 126, no. 2 (June, 2021), 481-503.
“The history of the state is alive and well.” (481)
“All in all, nowhere could the United States pass as a ‘stateless’ society….These findings cast in a new light the turn toward more bureaucratic forms of governance a the dawn of the twentieth century. Yet they still need to find a wider audience, both scholarly and lay.” (482)
“Putting in dialogue historiographies that strangely ignore each other helps us understand state building in the US early republic and in postrevolutionary France in a very different light. (484)
“…the state as specific ways of enmeshing public and private forms. (485)
“The direct engagement of citizens with the state, and the local modalities of state practices, suggests that we move beyond a simple vision of statist versus antistatist political cultures.” (490)
“If we understand household government, charters, and amateur volunteers as common configurations, a shared repertoire used in both countries (and certainly elsewhere), then it becomes important for historians to map out more precisely in which domains they were adopted and for what specific reasons.” (501)
“Such a history is particularly relevant in the context of contemporary neoliberalism.” (502)
Karlos K. Hill, “Community-Engaged History: A Reflection on the 100th Anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre,” American Historical Review 126, no. 2 (June, 2021), 670-84.
“I know that most communities are unaware of their own history of anti-Black violence, and those that are aware rarely choose to draw attention to it in the way that Tulsa has done.” (670)
“Tulsa’s Greenwood District is a special community, one that was built on hope, destroyed by white mob violence and vengeance, and then raised again from the ashes through the strength of Black resilience and faith. Buoyed by its powerful past, Greenwood lives on, and with the activities surrounding the approach of the centennial of the massacre, working toward healing history has taken center stage.” (666-7)
“I must confess that this essay almost did not happen. I am tired. I am burned out because of the realities of being a Black man in American and being a Black scholar in academia in Oklahoma. I am burned out because the American history I study is violent and difficult even though it is so important. In the past four years, I have spent dozens of hours planning and implementing a vision for how I can amplify the history of the massacre during the upcoming centennial. As a result, I have written a book, established a book series, put together a library exhibit, created a new course, co-developed and co-led a professional development series for teachers, and consulted on state lesson plans and curricula. Alongside other community leaders, I have fought to bear witness to the utter horror of the massacre while looking toward a future in which healing might be possible. The amount of work we have done in advance of the centennial commemorations—and the amount we have left to do—feels overwhelming. And yet here I am. I persist in doing work as a historian that I think is essential for healing and change.” (679)
The October 2021 William and Mary Quarterly was also brilliant, headlined for me by:
John W. Nelson, “Sigenauk’s War of Independence: Anishinaabe Resurgance and the Making of Indigenous Authority in the Borderlands of Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Oct., 2021), 653-686.
Nathaniel Millett, “Law, Lineage, Gender, and the Lives of Enslaved Indigenous People on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean,” William and Mary Quarterly 78, no. 4 (Oct., 2021), 687-719.
From the Winter 2021 Journal of the Early Republic:
Sean P. Harvey, “Tools of Foreign Influence: Albert Gallatin, Geneva, and Federalist Nativism before the Alien and Sedition Acts,” Journal of the Early Republic 41, no. 3 (winter, 2021), 523-51.
centering the intersection of Gallatin’s opposition to Federalist policies and Federalist knowledge of Geneva’s experiences throws into especially stark relief how foreign and domestic concerns converged in a single person and the place of his birth to fuel Federalist nativism for several years before the Alien and Sedition Acts. (527-8)
Ann Marsh Daly, “Every Dollar Brought from the Earth: Money, Slavery, and Southern Gold Mining,” Journal of the Early Republic 41, no. 3 (winter, 2021), 553-85.
“Recent scholarship has identified money, banking, and credit as forming a crucial nexus between early republic capitalism and slavery. Slave owners commodified enslaved people to collateralize loans, banks raised capital by issuing bonds against enslaved people and their future labor, and financial institutions provided credit to slave traders and the plantation complex. To be sure, these practices placed slavery and enslaved people at the heart of American economic expansion. However, the focus on credit can give the impression the links between slavery, money, and finance ran primarily through abstract financial instruments and practices. Yet, as the Burwell gold’s journey suggests, money and finance were not always abstract. Slavery and money also intersected outside of banknotes and credit and in the material world of specie and physical labor of miners in the Appalachian foothills.” (556)
Annabel Brett, Megan Donaldson, an Martti Koskenniemi, ed., History, Politics, Law: Thinking through the International (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
*As a general rule of thumb, legal historians should pick up anything with Martti Koskenniemi’s name on it. I’ve also long admired the work of Annabel Brett, albeit from afar. [Brett’s 2012 book, Changes of State: Nature and the Limits of the City in Early Modern Natural Law (Princeton, 2012) is a visually beautiful book—this is the first thing that struck me about it—and one that takes seriously the geographical nuances and challenges posed to governance in the interstitial realms of medieval Europe. Hobbes looms large over the book’s study of the push and pull between the state’s demand to differentiate itself from nature and its simultaneous and frequent realization of its moorings within nature. People-in-movement develop the central problem in the book, as states struggled to cope with movement. This was how I discovered this book, as I was beginning to think seriously of turning my grad school work on governance of runaway and fugitive slaves into what has become my second book project. Brett’s book is great in reveling in the in-between, or “half-spaces” to borrow Jurgen Klopp’s term for it— ‘spaces within and without’ she calls them at some point, to paraphrase. I didn’t mean to ramble on about Brett’s book but it has been a lovely visit to memory lane nonetheless.] I know least about Megan Donaldson because she is the most junior of the editors. Her 2019 article on SSRN “The League of Nations, Ethiopia and the Making of States” (and apologies that I have not seen the published version) was a memorable jeremiad about the instability of the concept of statehood in the era of the League of Nations—a struggle between admittedly inadequate ideas of what statehood was and the League’s practice of using those ideas as formal criteria. In any case, seeing these three scholars team up on an edited volume certainly grabbed my interest!
And with good reason, it turns out. While the title is, well, a bit bland, the contributions are not. The introduction does not shy away between the methodological tensions between practitioners and historians, viz:
“While lawyers may sometimes have dif fi culty in understanding the subtleties that distinguish the interpretations that historians produce from their materials, historians may often fi nd alien the normative urge frequently driving the writings of international lawyers.” (2)
Annabel Brett, “Between History, Politics and Law: History of Political Thought and History of International Law”:
“The question, therefore is…whether history of political thought and history of international law have a kind of presentism built in that other kinds of history do not have—perhaps even to the extent that they elide the space for the distinctive duality of history and therefore, in fact, not history at all.” (21)
Political thought “writes the borderline between past and present, as all history must, involves, involves a second borderline, between history and philosophy.” (21)
The discussion of Skinner pp. 24—25 is excellent and very helpful in context of Skinner’s intellectual history of the state.
“As a solution to a real problem, the state is both a timebound and a local, or in other words a historical, phenomenon. In this way, political realism co-opts history to politics, and here is where it appeals to a contextual history of political thought as an approach to political discourse.” (32) “Politics is the field of action, and power is pulled into agency, be it of individuals or political institutions or other bodies such as corporations” (32-3).
“To think about the history of the political in this way means…shifting the emphasis from the political speaker or actor towards the other historiographical pole of language.” (38)
Marti Koskenniemi, “The Past According to International Law: A Practice of History and Histories of a Practice”:
“Now that history has become an expanding and widely appreciated part of academic international law the danger exists that it loses its critical edge by limiting its focus to the field’s internal divisions and transformations without the ambition to expose law’s complicity in the world’s injustices.” (54-5)
“The curriculum of the law school has never been stable and the content of the university courses operates in dialectical relationship with the perceived needs of legal practice.” (65)
Jennifer Pitts, “Law of Nations, World of Empires: The Politics of Law’s Conceptual Frames”:
“Liberal political theory has been prey to a similar aspiration to serve as a neutral arbiter between competing systems of value or conceptions of the good, and has been likewise slow to reckon with the imperial nature of modern liberal states and the often intense involvement by liberal thinkers in the practice and justi fi cation of imperial domination.” (192)
“How did it come to be, I want to ask, that even as the major European states were becoming global empires, leading theorists of international law and politics were conceiving of the international realm as a community of free and equal nations, and of Europe in particular as a political society distinctively free of the outdated and atavistic politics of imperial domination? And what were the implications of this disjuncture for their ability to theorize and evaluate global political relations and events?” (194)
“Vattel thus left a mixed legacy to twentieth-century international thought: the critical purchase of his normative account of sovereign equality was lost in the nineteenth-century rejection of his universalism, while his model lived on as a misleading descriptive schema.” (202)
“As in Vattel’ thought, aspirational models continue to obscure abuses by the powerful, Rawls’ Law of Peoples being an influential recent example.” (205)
Caroline Shaw, Britannia’s Embrace: Modern Humanitarianism and the Imperial Origins of Refugee Relief (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Admittedly, I only began flipping through this book because I knew there was a brief discussion of fugitive slaves that I thought would be useful for the book project on said topic. But this was one of those great finds—where I was reading backward from the discussion of fugitive slaves, page after page, until I decide to go back to the beginning and read it in the proper order. Shaw’s big insight here is to dust off the origins of the legal idea of “refuge” and to situate it in the political debates about empire and rule. It is really well done, and I particularly like Shaw’s steadfast refusal to do high legal doctrine or bottom up constitutionalism—it is always both and everything in between. Doing so means she recasts origins stories as processes in which popular movements’ norms “encode” as laws, and in which the state makes new subjects (etc.) ‘legible,’ to borrow James Scott’s term.
Mischa Suter, “Theoretical Interlude: The Anthropology of Debt,” in Bankruptcy and Debt Collection in Liberal Capitalism: Switzerland, 1800-1900 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2021), 71-82.
Gautham why in the world were you reading about 19th century Swiss debt collection practices? Well, a better question my dear reader, is why you aren’t reading about 19th century Swiss debt collection practices. Because as Mischa Suter will explain, there was a whole lot of stuff going down. Actually, I entirely blame my wonderful student Jonah Estess for me going down he rabbit hole that ended up with me picking up this (admittedly very interesting) book. Last spring, Jonah and I had a long conversation on the American U quad about the Confederacy’s debt collection practices and this led me to think about comparative examples. Turns out our thesis—about the CSA political economists having no freakin idea what they were doing—was correct, or so it would seem from the view from Zurich. The pages I’ve flagged here are noteworthy because Suter raises a broad theoretical discussion of how to understand debt, in part through Marx and Mauss but especially through Tonnies.
FOOD
Tim Marchman, “What to Eat When It’s Too Hot to Eat?” Popping Tins, September 12, 2021.
For oysters, I was really liking Ekone’s plain smoked oysters, which lack spectacular promotional copy but are absolutely fantastic atop a Triscuit with a splash of hot sauce and go really great on some crusty bread with tomato slices. As opposed to the dubious mass-market oysters this newsletter has previously covered and expressed satisfaction over with reservations, these are big, meaty boys—they go fantastic atop a Triscuit because they are the size of a Triscuit—that have a great texture to them, and, if not all the fresh liveliness of a living oyster, a lot of the essence of the living sea. The problem with them, if there is one, is salt. They have a lot of salt—49% of your daily needs, per the Ekone site. That’s of course a lot of why they’re so good and it’s not something you can’t fit into things if you’re inclined. I definitely managed to do so.
*I followed Tim’s advice and ate this and you should do the same.
Tim Marchman, “What do I do with the Oil in a Tin of Seafood,” Popping Tins, October 18, 2021.
I like to make soup with it.
To do this, put a pot—I use a deep two-quart sauté pan, the second-most useful of all pots, but whatever is fine—over medium heat, then dice about a little under a half pound of vegetables. The last time I made this I used two stalks of celery, a small red onion, and two seeded jalapeños, but you could use bell peppers, or hotter peppers, or leeks, or thinly-sliced carrots, or whatever you have around.
Vivek Menezes, “Goa’s Daily Bread: Soul Pao,” Vittles, October 4, 2021.
The passage of time has ensured the same thing happened to bread, because every Goan of every background now whacks it back in great quantities. Many visitors also take pains to purchase bagsful to take back to their pao-deprived home cities and states. This is only as it should be. As the Goaphilic cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote pithily puts it in his polemical masterpiece, Confluences: Forgotten Histories from East and West (its co-author is the Bulgarian-German writer Ilija Trojanow), “no culture has ever been pure, no tradition self-enclosed, no identity monolithic.” It’s true everywhere, but perhaps especially here, because Goa was hoisted on the globalisation bandwagon spectacularly early, with indelible results that keep on evolving. It’s why my daily unddo is sometimes accompanied by the talismanic kalchi kodi, but more often with the brilliant camembert that’s made in the North Goa village of Siolim by the Swiss cheesemaker Barbara Schwarzfisher or Chistopher Fernandes’s outstanding bacon.
*Warning: you will be drooling even while lamenting the calamitous costs of globalization.
Abbas Asaria, “Gallinejas and Entresijos: The Melancholy Mesentery of Madrid,” Vittles, September 13, 2021.
Yet despite their place in Madrid’s culture, and their importance among certain groups of Atlético fans, the culture and consumption of gallinejas and entresijos has drastically changed over the last few decades. In the 1960s there were over seventy businesses dedicated to them, a significant number of which served only gallinejas, entresijos and other fried offal. Now there are fewer than ten. Out of those, I count three that primarily focus on those ingredients (Casa Enriqueta being one), but none remain purely dedicated to them. [….]
Yet I struggle with leaving the Calderón for another reason. The last few years have felt like a period of change, where we’ve had to question our identity and who the club is actually for. The same summer of our move saw our owners change our badge to make us more marketable, while earlier this year they took part in the failed European Super League. I couldn't help but see the relocation as the physical manifestation of all of this: a move away from what we cherish about Atleti, and what we want it to represent.
*A lovely and poignant meditation on the food culture that surrounds Atleti and its history. Simeone’s football might be ugly but Asaria paints a beautiful portrait.
Football:
Michael Cox, The Mixer: The Story of Premier League Tactics, from Route One to False Nines (New York: HarperCollins, 2018).
-I have very mixed feelings about this book. On the one hand, it was really great just to read about the history of the EPL—the comings and goings, the personalities, etc. It really also helped to just skip all the pages about United triumphs (though the discussions of Ferguson’s approach to personnel is great). On the other hand, while some of the tactical discussion is great, some is also very…what I might best describe as “Match of the Day” style analysis. This is particularly true as you get toward the end of the book as the politics of personality, especially with managers like Mourinho, dictates how he discusses actual tactics. But still a fun read that had my rapt attention!
Adam Smith’s @andcouldheplay7 twitter feed: “A blog about all things LFC” and companion website, andcouldheplay.com
-I discovered Adam Smith’s commentary while listening to The Anfield Wrap, which—along with Anfield Index—is my go-to source for LFC stuff. He hosts one of the regular shows and is a guest on others. Smith and I share a dark sense of humor, though his general disdain for superstition makes him very much the shithouse type he abhors. “The shithouse and not the political economist,” Smith might say. A little inside joke there. But anyway, Smith’s great because he manages to avoid the many, many pitfalls of LFC twitter. A reasonable voice with some timely and necessary interventions. Still a shithouse of course.
RECIPE: Potato wedge chaat
Very tasty. Very filling. Not unhealthy. Make it vegan by omitting the labneh. In short, you have no reason not to make this.
Ingredients:
4 medium potatoes, cut into wedges approximately 1/2 inch wide, 1 inch long
1 cup labneh
1 shallot, diced and soaked in lemon juice
1 cup mint, chiffonade
1 cup cilantro, chopped
1 cup chopped tomato (cherry, roma, whatever)
chopped green chilies (come on, at least 5 or I won’t respect you)
Olive oil
t tbsp Chaat masala (Spicewalla’s is great)
1 cup curry leaves, torn
1/2 cup tadka (tempered dried red chili, curry leaves, mustard seed, cumin seed, urad dal, hing: add all ingredients in a small pan with ghee or oil, heat until seeds begin to pop, remove from heat. Curry leaves should be beginning to crisp)
salt and pepper
1/2 tsp turmeric
Method:
preheat oven to 400F
Bring a pot of really, really salted water to boil, then add potato wedges, remove from heat, cover and soak for 12 minutes.
Gently drain potatoes and dry thoroughly. Really can’t be much moisture on them before they go in the oven.
On sheet pan, toss potatoes with salt, pepper, tablespoon chaat masala, tadka. Potatoes should be well covered with oil/ghee, so if not, add more.
Bake 25 minutes at 400F, then flip wedges and rotate pan and bake for 20 more (I’d check every few minutes to see where you are; my oven runs very hot so I usually end up taking them out a bit earlier than expected).
Plate wedges in a tight row. Top with: labneh, onions, tomatoes (if using), cilantro, mint, green chilies, more chaat powder, sprinkled turmeric
If you are ambitious (and I’ll admit that once the prospect of eating these arises, patience wears thin…) you might go for a tamarind or mint chutney to dip. Lots of easy recipes out there, just avoid the Food Network one that adds dates, otherwise I’ll mock you relentlessly.