137: Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb

Rhodes is a novelist, and The Making of the Atomic Bomb is, as most reviewers have noted, a readable, and at times engrossing, epic (or as Hacker calls it, an “Atomiad.”)  It traces the development of the atomic bomb from the early 1900s, when physicists were just beginning to suspect the existence of an atom (though he locates belief in the “atom” as “an invisible layer of eternal, elemental substance” in ancient Greeks Leucippus and Democritus) through Los Alamos and WWII, and on to the development and testing of the “Super” or hydrogen bomb in the 1950s.  Various reviewers put their own political slants on Rhodes’ thesis, but Broad, I think, captures it most fairly: since 1945, when the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, science has for the first time become powerful enough to challenge the state.  Critically, unlike technological determinists, Rhodes sees that though atomic technology has changed the way politics is enacted, the relationship between politics and technology is a two-way street – which means, following Bohr, that a peaceful, unified, global system is just as possible in the Nuclear Age as the current system of warring states.

135: Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory

In Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama argues that "even the landscapes that we suppose to be most free of our culture may turn out, on closer inspection, to be its product," and that this mutually constitutive relationship between nature and culture is "a cause not for guilt and sorrow but celebration."  Accordingly, while Landscape and Memory digs deep into the histories of a wide variety of landscapes, Schama's is an "archaeological" method rather than a critical one.  His goal is not to expose capitalist exploitation in the landscape but to dig deep "below our conventional sight-level to recover the veins of myth and memory that lie beneath the surface."  By situating landscape myths in their historical-cultural moments, Schama shows how socially-constructed meaning and memory become embedded in a landscape.

Schama applies his archaeological approach to a variety of landscapes: the primordial Bialowiez forest in Poland, which the Germans wanted to raze and replace with "a great, living laboratory of purely Teutonic species: eagles, elk, and wolves" (and bison) during WWII, because it was the symbolic and heart of Poland;   Gianlorenzo Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers in Rome as an embodiment and co=optation of the ancient obsession with circulation and flow; Mount Rushmore and sculptor Gutzon Borglum's obsession with dominating nature by carving human heads into stone; and "both kinds of arcadia, the idyllic as well as the wild," as escapist "landscapes of the urban imagination," responding to cities by providing pandemonium when cities are too ordered and bucolic countryside when cities are too chaotic.

Throughout, Schama relies on a narrative form to weave many disparate threads into each chapter's coherent whole.  This book is neither a call to action nor a complete history of particular places nor even a landscape study; it's more of a literary exploration into the layers of myth and memory that make up a landscape, arranged by a subjective narrator into layers of his own choosing.  While it's a lovely read, it does make me wonder whether Schama thinks the physical landscape needs to be there at all.

132: Don Mitchell's The Lie of the Land

In The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape, Don Mitchell uses labor history, critical social theory, and cultural landscape studies to reveal the "connection between the material production of landscape and the production of landscape representations, between work and the 'exercise of the imagination' that makes work and its products knowable" in the construction of California's agricultural landscape.  In doing so, he argues that the "struggles over the form that the reproduction of labor power in industrial agriculture would take" ultimately shaped the landscape.  However, landscape is ideological in that it tends to "erase the politics and actuality of work from the view" (Cosgrove) and naturalize capitalist concepts like property and land ownership.  Therefore, the critical project of The Lie of the Land, to "understand the interplay between production and representation of landscapes, while at the same time restoring an ontology of labor to the center of landscape geography and history," is a political project.

125: Kenneth Foote's Shadowed Ground

In Shadowed Ground: America's Landscapes of Violence and Tragedy, Kenneth Foote examines the treatment of spaces of violence and tragedy in the US to see how the relationship between private grief and larger national narratives is encoded and shaped by the landscape.  His (many) case studies include the Revolutionary and Civil Wars; the first slave arrival (in 1619), mass murders, political assassinations, violent labor and race riots, transportation accidents, fires, floods, and explosions; he argues that "the decision to render sites visible/ invisible reflects a deliberate choice regarding issues of meaning and identity."  Shadowed Ground thus contributes not just to the recovery of American history in the landscape, but to the exploration of the relationship between space and memory.

Foote argues that responses to tragic sites generally fit somewhere along this continuum, keeping in mind that the categories are not fixed:

118: Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life

In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau argues that far from being a passive act, consumption, whether as use of an object or space, “ways of operating,” or art/ “ways of making” (combination, selection, cut-and-inversion), is a kind of spatial production.   

Building on (but rejecting) Foucault, Bourdieu, Kant, and others, de Certeau conceives of the physical world as divided into two classes: those with power and capital who are in control of space and production, and those with neither, but who exercise their agency by taking advantage of opportunities and consuming creatively.  The powerful side of things is also the scientific, the rational; this side creates static places of power, characterized by rational utopian uniformity, legibility, clarity, strategy, and centralized control.  The weak consumers take advantage of cracks in the rational system of these places; dependent on time, these peripatetic storytellers (walking and narration are inseparable) combine the fixed elements of the city/story with memories and inventions triggered by circumstance and audience to subvert the rational powers and create something new.

96: Bill Stott's Documentary Expression

In Documentary Expression and Thirties America, Bill Stott looks at 1930s America through the lens of the documentary genre.  Documentary is a form of expression that purports to represent reality but in which it is difficult for viewers to separate the false from the true.  Stott argues that at its base, the 1930s documentary had a left politics, a desire to look not just at the world as it is but at the world of the poor, the downtrodden, and the ordinary, with the intention not just of rendering it vivid and lifelike but also of constructing an audience response or instigating some progressive reform.  The different ways people created and used documentaries in the 1930s indicate, to paraphrase Agee, that the world can be improved and yet must be celebrated.

Stott considers a wide range of documentary forms and uses, and shows how documentary conventions were both developed and subverted.  Radio, examined through Edward R. Murrow, soap operas, and War of the Worlds, was the "paradigmatic medium of documentary" in the 1930s because it combined the two methods of documentary, "the direct and the vicarious, the unmediated experience and the interpretative commentary" in constant juxtaposition with one another.  Photography and documentary films, as Stott shows, were also forms in which apparent reality was actually heavily mediated, particularly when they were made by the government.  By contrast, Agee and Evans' Let Us Now Praise Famous Men explodes social documentary by both critiquing the world of the tenant farmers and celebrating it in all its beauty, all well being self-conscious about the role of the narrator in the creation of a work of art that reveals the most intimate details and suffering in people's lives in order to, perhaps, instigate social reform.

While Stott's analysis is somewhat limited by his choice of documentaries - he works primarily with cultural products created by people who worked for the federal government or for private corporations - and while he could do a bit more with the conditions of production, his visual and textual analysis are strong, and his discussion of documentary as a particularly valid entry into American culture in the 1930s makes sense.  What better way to see what people might have thought about what their world was like?

93: Ruth Rosen's The World Split Open

Ruth Rosen's The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America is a conscious attempt to excavate and describe the legacy of the women's movement - primarily second wave feminism - for generations of women (and men) who didn't live through it, so that a kind of living, breathing social history can keep the struggle for gender equality alive.  In particular, Rosen charts the change in women's consciousness from the 1950s to the 1990s through a vast compendium of the many issues, events, people, ideas, books, successes, and failures of the women’s movement in the United States, with some connections to women’s movements outside the US.

This book is written for a popular audience in response to her discovery that her undergraduate students in the 1980s had no idea what the women's movement had redefined.  Accordingly, it hits all the highlights: Betty Freidan, SNCC and other civil rights groups, the coming together of the Old and New Left in what she calls the “female generation gap,” Kennedy’s commission on women and the tension between liberal and radical feminism, NOW, Gloria Steinem, the Vietnam War, abortion, the naming of hidden injuries, sexuality, the body, intersections between feminism and race and class, protests and happenings, consciousness-raising groups, sex, pornography,  ideological factionalism, trashing, paranoia, the FBI, commodification, the superwoman, and Ronald Reagan and the spread of global feminism.  Throughout, she attempts to characterize the depth and breadth of the women’s movement as much as she can while also showing just how interconnected this historical period was.  She also tries to account for the successes and failures of the women's movement and the legacy of the movement as a whole.

Rosen's faith in the power of narrative to continue the perpetual gender revolution is clear, and I think her point that we will lose the gains we have made if we are not vigilant is a good one - just look at the attacks on affirmative action.  However, I would very much like to read a history of this iteration of the women's movement written by someone who was not there, to get a sense of the larger social and political context and a more thoroughgoing critique (instead of a celebration) of the movement itself.

37: Bernard Bailyn's Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (round 2)

Bernard Bailyn's The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution argues that the ideology of the American Revolution was based on the usual combination of Enlightenment thought, religion, English common law, classical literature, but also on the "peculiar strain of anti-authoritarianism bred in the upheaval of the English Civil War."  Bailyn's critical intervention was that the Revolutionary generation were not a cabal of philosophical intelligentsia using Enlightenment principles to construct the ideal society; they were a bunch of real-world people operating within an ideology that had both British and American roots, and they overthrew British rule because this ideology led them to suspect a British conspiracy against liberty.

Bailyn comes to this conclusion by closely reading the pre-1776 pamphlets produced in the colonies regarding the "Anglo-American struggle" - political theory, history, polemics, sermons, correspondence, and poems - for the "assumptions, beliefs, and ideas - the articulated world view - that lay behind the manifest events at the time."  Rather than focus on "Enlightenment platitudes," he looks for what the leaders of the Revolution were "actually saying," and where their words and ideas had come from.  He calls his method "deeply contextualist," but it feels more like the myth and symbol approach of Henry Nash Smith or Leo Marx, where a popular text is read as though it contains clues to what the people were really thinking at the time.  And he comes up with a picture of pre-1776 ideology that mixes British and American ideas with American real-world experience: a growing consciousness that Americans could and should be free, a suspicion that the corrupt and despotic British Empire (especially the church of England) was plotting to take liberty away from all English-speaking people, and a Revolution designed to save America from corruption and tyranny and preserve the rights of liberty.

This worldview, and the Revolution and Constitution that came out of it, came out of English thought and developed in reaction to British policies, so the Revolution was not a radical break.  It was, however, the beginning of a country that was fundamentally different from England: English government had developed out of the accretions of history; America's would develop out of ideology, an amalgam of real-world experiences, ideas, philosophy, politics that both drew on its English heritage and was unique unto itself.

You can check out round 1 here.

29: Joy Kasson's Buffalo Bill's Wild West

Buffalo Bill's Wild West is one of those cool pop culture books that simultaneously teaches you a ton about a cultural product and about the culture that produced it.  In this case, the product is the ever-evolving, politically-topical, travelling western variety show hosted by "Buffalo Bill" Cody around the turn of the last century; the culture that produced it is turn-of-the-century America, a world as uneasy about the conflict and exploitation in its past as it was about the growth of industrial capitalism in its midst.  Arguing that Buffalo Bill himself was among the first modern American celebrities, Kasson shows how his Wild West shows knit together celebrity, American history, and cultural memory into a new narrative of American national identity.

Kasson uses a lot of interdisciplinary hoopla to achieve her goal, but basically, her argument goes like this.  Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show was enormously popular starting in the 1890s, and its producers constantly tweaked it to incorporate both audience feedback and topical stories, so we can safely consider it embedded enough in turn-of-the-century American culture to have both affected and reflected the mood of the times.  Further, the show presented itself as both authentic history and spectacle, and Buffalo Bill himself was both a real person and a widely-publicized invented celebrity.  By walking a very hazy line between fact and fiction, the show started an enduring link between American history and popular culture, where history becomes a spectacle created by the people for their own edutainment.  Conflicts, wars, even struggles with Native Americans get whitewashed; in the name of pleasure, even the bloodiest battle scenes end with Indians - yes, real Indians! - and Anglos reconciled to the applause of the audience at the end of the show.

And finally, from history as edutainment, it's but a few short steps to national identity as edutainment: to paraphrase my friend Jessica, we like the lies we tell ourselves; if we tell them enough, eventually we come to believe them.

I like this book because it is readable, but also because it still rings true today.  Have you been to Disneyland?  Seen Lincoln?

7: James Miller's Democracy is in the Streets

What with the dance lessons on Saturdays and working on Sundays, it's kinda hard to get a lot of reading done on the weekends.  I did manage to get through a book on Saturday and another today, though!

I had high hopes for Democracy is in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago, and thankfully it didn't disappoint, but it was not at all what I expected.  Most of the stuff I've read about social movements so far has been heavy on the Marxism, or staunchly materialist, or at least incredibly modest about the roles individual people play in creating social change.  Clay Carson's In Struggle, for instance, is a critical history of SNCC that slowly and carefully maps out every person, event, and location Carson could get his hands on.  Reading through Carson's slow accumulation of thousands of tiny pieces of evidence, you get a sense of both the magnitude of the Civil Rights movement and the incredible ordinariness of the people who were coordinating it through SNCC.  And really, that's what I want in a history of a social movement: the creation of a big picture through close attention to details, so that I can see exactly how social change happened and how, precisely, the movement grew, acted, and fell apart.

James Miller is not Clay Carson.  And this book is definitely not that book.

Like In Struggle, Democracy is in the Streets is a history of "the Movement" from the perspective of a single organization, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS).  Also like In Struggle, it stretches the political and cultural ferment of the 1960s back to the late 1950s and forward to the early 1970s, so that we can see the truly original origins on one end and make sure it's really dead on the other.  But where Carson is carefully constructing a large body of evidence to support his critical interpretation of SNCC, Miller is telling a story, capturing a moment, making the Sixties come alive.  His history thus reads like a novel, with main characters - Tom Hayden, Sharon Jeffrey, Dick Flacks, Al Haber, and the rest of the early members of SDS - psychological analysis, anecdotes, and plenty of drama and foreshadowing throughout.  Seriously: he spends the first 20 pages or so talking about how Tom Hayden was destined for greatness even as a freshman newspaper editor at the University of Michigan.  And the book follows a classic narrative arc, from the first time Al Haber laid eyes on Tom Hayden, to the Port Huron summit where the Port Huron Statement was drafted, to SDS' rise to power, and finally to the (anti)climactic Chicago 1968 riots, when Hayden, shouting into the megaphone in front of thousands of people in Grant Park, suddenly realized that the Movement's philosophical underpinnings had been lost, and this mass protest could never become the "participatory democracy" SDS had envisioned at Port Huron.  And he disappeared, silenced.

Miller is writing as someone who was there - he was a member of SDS in the late 1960s, and he was at Chicago in 1968 and at the last SDS meeting in 1969 - and he is writing for a reader who was there, too.  But even though I obviously wasn't there (my parents hadn't even met yet), Miller's excitement is infectious, and while his novelistic strategy may not lead to the most factual telling of events, his characters do come alive, as do the issues that animate them.

In particular, one of Miller's central questions concerns the legacy of the Sixties.  As Tom Hayden put it in 1977, "We ended a war, toppled two Presidents, desegregated the South, broke other barriers of discrimination.  How could we accomplish so much and have so little in the end?"  In other words, for all the short-term success of the Movement, why are we not living out long-term social change?  

Miller's answer to this question is complex, so I'm probably missing a few pieces, but it goes something like this.  In 1961, the SDS students gathered in Port Huron and drafted the Port Huron Statement, a theoretically-informed document that itself informed the Movement, at least before 1965, with its universal respect for human freedom and its call for "participatory democracy" (rather than the closed institutional system we call democracy in the United States.)  But after 1965, the escalation in Vietnam swelled protest participation and turned the earlier theoretically-informed movement into a mass movement.  This could have been awesome, but while all of these people were united in their protest of the war and in their critique of the American political system, they were not necessarily united on what true democracy might look like.  And frankly, SDS had no idea either.  And so the movement (was) fragmented, and the 70s became the decade of increasingly individualized pursuits of pleasurable consumption.

The analysis applied to the Movement in this book feels very similar to the analysis applied to more recent movements, like Occupy: having a complaint is great,  but you need to have a plan for change if you want the change to actually happen; and furthermore, refusing or being unable to unite behind a single program makes it easy for powerful opposing forces to divide and conquer the individual people in the protest.

Really, though, is there only one effective way to protest power, even still - by putting an ideologically unified mass of bodies in the streets?

George Mariscal - Brown Eyed Children of the Sun

George Mariscal’s Brown-Eyed Children of the Sun responds to critiques of the Chicano Movement (the Movimiento) as a failed, regressively nationalist social movement by reconstructing it in terms of postmodern discourse.  Using Raymond Williams’ claim that ideology and material practice/ discourse are mutually constitutive, and Foucault’s claim that “overlapping ideologies and discourses produce figures, practices, and languages functioning under a generalized rubric,” Mariscal analyzes a variety of texts, including images, poetry, speeches, student essays, newspaper articles and writings by both English- and Spanish-speaking activists to “map the complex ideological field that was the Chicano Movement of the Viet Nam war era” in terms that he hopes will help 21^st century Chicano/a activists form their own context-dependent identities and social movements.  (23, 21)  Because he is interested in the relationship between discourse and ideology in the Movimiento and in constructing a Foucauldian “archaeology” rather than a chronological historical narrative, Mariscal refuses to develop a linear narrative or to reify the Chicano Movement around a single ideology, group, or even defining feature.   Instead, he analyzes primarily written and visual texts by both participants and contemporary observers  to complicate key movement concepts and symbols (or people) such as nationalism, race, Che Guevara, Cesar Chavez, Aztlan, and UCSD.  The end result of this discourse analysis is a conception of the Movimiento as a fragmented ideological fabric whose participants are themselves fragmented, multiple, and heterogeneous.