Wednesday, November 1, 2017

CW Books to Make you Less Stupid

Five Books to Make You Less Stupid About the Civil War

29th Regiment Connecticut Volunteers, U.S. Colored Troops in formation near Beaufort, South Carolina, 1864Library of Congress
On Monday, the retired four-star general and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly asserted that “the lack of an ability to compromise lead to the Civil War.” This was an incredibly stupid thing to say. Worse, it built on a long tradition of endorsing stupidity in hopes of making Americans stupid about their own history. Stupid enjoys an unfortunate place in the highest ranks of American government these days. And while one cannot immediately affect this fact, one can choose to not hear stupid things and quietly nod along.
For the past 50 years, some of this country’s most celebrated historians have taken up the task of making Americans less stupid about the Civil War. These historians have been more effective than generally realized. It’s worth remembering that General Kelly’s remarks, which were greeted with mass howls of protests, reflected the way much of this country’s stupid-ass intellectual class once understood the Civil War. I do not contend that this improved history has solved everything. But it is a ray of light cutting through the gloom of stupid. You should run to that light. Embrace it. Bathe in it. Become it.
Okay, maybe that’s too far. Let’s start with just being less stupid.
One quick note: In making this list I’ve tried to think very hard about readability, and to offer books you might actually complete. There are a number of books that I dearly love and have found indispensable that are not on this list. (Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America immediately comes to mind.) I mean no slight to any of those volumes. But this is about being less stupid. We’ll get to those other ones when we talk about how to be smart.
1) Battle Cry Of Freedom: Arguably among the greatest single-volume histories in all of American historiography, James McPherson’s synthesis of the Civil War is a stunning achievement. Brisk in pace. A big-ass book that reads like a much slimmer one. The first few hundred pages offer a catalogue of evidence, making it clear not just that the white South went to war for the right to own people, but that it warred for the right to expand the right to own people. Read this book. You will immediately be less stupid than some of the most powerful people in the West Wing.
2) Grant: Another classic in the Ron Chernow oeuvre. Again, eminently readable but thick with import. It does not shy away from Grant’s personal flaws, but shows him to be a man constantly struggling to live up to his own standard of personal and moral courage. It corrects nearly a half-century of stupidity inflicted upon America by the Dunning school of historians, which preferred a portrait of Grant as a bumbling, corrupt butcher of men. Finally, it reframes the Civil War away from the overrated Virginia campaigns and shows us that when the West was won, so was the war. Grant hits like a Mack truck of knowledge. Stupid doesn’t stand a chance.
3) Reading the Man: A Portrait of Robert E. Lee: Elizabeth Pryor’s biography of Lee, through Lee’s own words, helps part with a lot of stupid out there about Lee—chiefly that he was, somehow, “anti-slavery.” It dispenses with the boatload of stupid out there which hails the military genius of Lee while ignoring the world that all of that genius was actually trying to build.
4.) Out of the House of Bondage: A slim volume that dispenses with the notion that there was a such thing as “good,” “domestic,” or “matronly” slavery. The historian Thavolia Glymph focuses on the relationships between black enslaved women and the white women who took them as property. She picks apart the stupid idea that white mistresses were somehow less violent and less exploitative than their male peers. Glymph has no need of Scarlett O’Haras. “Used the rod” is the quote that still sticks with me. An important point here—stupid ideas about ladyhood and the soft feminine hand meant nothing when measured against the fact of a slave society. Slavery was the monster that made monsters of its masters. Compromising with it was morally bankrupt—and stupid.
5.) The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass: The final of three autobiographies written by the famed abolitionist, and my personal favorite. Epic and sweeping in scope. The chapter depicting the bounty of food on which the enslavers feasted while the enslaved nearly starved is just devastating.
So that should get you to unstupid—but don’t stop there. Read Du Bois. Read Grant’s own memoirs. Read Harriet Jacobs. Read Eric Foner. Read Bruce Levine. It’s not that hard, you know. You’ve got nothing to lose, save your own stupid.
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Appeasement Not Compromise

A Proposal to Change the Words We Use When Talking About the Civil War

Historian Michael Landis writes that vocabulary like “compromise” or “Union” shape how we view our past

image: https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/O7on3UDSc6ZybvOkNNjZaCZ5fcw=/800x600/filters:no_upscale()/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/02/74/0274bbe9-a064-43e7-a505-d434ae9f5ab9/whiteboard-compromise1850.png
Compromise of 1850
A suggestion to change our vocabulary when we talk about American History (iStock / dalton00)
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A new generation of scholarship – not to mention high-profile films like 12 Years a Slave and Lincoln­ -- has changed the way that the public understands American history, particularly slavery, capitalism, and the Civil War. Our language should change as well. The old labels and terms handed down to us from the conservative scholars of the early to mid-20th century no longer reflect the best evidence and arguments. Terms like “compromise” or “plantation” served either to reassure worried Americans in a Cold War world, or uphold a white supremacist, sexist interpretation of the past.
But the Cold War is over, and historians, and in turn the general public, must consider rejecting faulty frameworks and phrases. We no longer call the Civil War “The War Between the States,” nor do we refer to women’s rights activists as “suffragettes,” nor do we call African-Americans “Negroes.” Language has changed before, and I propose that it should change again.
Legal historian Paul Finkelman has made a compelling case against the label “compromise” to describe the legislative packages that avoided disunion in the antebellum era.1 In particular, Finkelman has dissected and analyzed the deals struck in 1850. Instead of the “Compromise of 1850,” which implies that both North and South gave and received equally in the bargains over slavery, the legislation should be called the “Appeasement of 1850.” Appeasement more accurately describes the uneven nature of the agreement.
In 1849 and 1850, white Southerners in Congress made demands and issued threats concerning the spread and protection of slavery, and, as in 1820 and 1833, Northerners acquiesced: the slave states obtained almost everything they demanded, including an obnoxious Fugitive Slave Law, enlarged Texas border, payment of Texas debts, potential spread of slavery into new western territories, the protection of the slave trade in Washington, D.C., and the renunciation of congressional authority over slavery. The free states, in turn, received almost nothing (California was permitted to enter as a free state, but residents had already voted against slavery). Hardly a compromise!
Likewise, scholar Edward Baptist has provided new terms with which to speak about slavery. In his 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books), he rejects “plantations” (a term pregnant with false memory and romantic myths) in favor of “labor camps”; instead of “slave-owners” (which seems to legitimate and rationalize the ownership of human beings), he uses “enslavers.” Small changes with big implications.
These far more accurate and appropriate terms serve his argument well, as he re-examines the role of unfree labor in the rise of the United States as an economic powerhouse and its place in the global economy. In order to tear down old myths, he eschews the old language.
Similar changes and constructions should be made surrounding the language we use for the Civil War.  I suggest that we drop the word “Union” when describing the United States side of the conflagration, as in “Union troops” versus “Confederate troops.” Instead of “Union,” we should say “United States.” The employment of “Union” instead of “United States,” implicitly supports the Confederate view of secession wherein the nation of the United States collapsed, having been built on a “sandy foundation,” as Alexander Stephens, the Vice President of the Confederacy, put it in his “Cornerstone Speech.”
In reality, however, the United States never ceased to exist. The Constitution continued to operate normally; elections were held; Congress, the presidency, and the courts functioned; diplomacy was conducted; taxes were collected; crimes were punished. Yes, there was a massive, murderous rebellion in at least a dozen states, but that did not mean that the United States disappeared. The dichotomy of “Union v. Confederacy” lends credibility to the Confederate experiment and undermines the legitimacy of the United States as a political entity. The United States of America fought a brutal war against a highly organized and fiercely determined rebellion – it did not stop functioning or morph into something different. We can continue to debate the nature and existence of Confederate “nationalism,” but that discussion should not affect how we label the United States during the war.
Compromise, plantation, slave-owners, Union v. Confederacy, etc.: these phrases and many others obscure rather than illuminate; they serve the interests of traditionalists; they do not accurately reflect our current understanding of phenomena, thus they should be abandoned and replaced. Let us be careful and deliberate with our wording; though we study the past, let us not be chained to it.
This article was first published on the History News Network.
Michael Todd Landis, an assistant professor of history at Tarleton State University, is the author of Northern Men with Southern Loyalties: The Democratic Party and the Sectional Crisis

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The Dossier

Opinion |  OP-ED COLUMNIST

The Dossier Freakout

David Leonhardt 
Michael Reynolds/European Pressphoto Agency 
This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up hereto receive more briefings and a guide to the section daily in your inbox.
First, if you read only one thing about John Kelly’s embrace of white nationalism and the Civil War myth, I recommend a string of tweets by Ta-Nehisi Coates yesterday.
It’s “shocking that someone charged with defending their country, in some profound way, does not comprehend the country they claim to defend,” Coates wrote. He also walked through some of the copious historical evidence that the Civil War was indeed about slavery and that Robert E. Lee was a slavery true-believer and a torturer.
(To read the full string, go to Coates’s Twitter page, scroll down to the tweet that starts with “Regarding John Kelly’s creationist theorizing...” and read upward.)
On the same subject, and from the political right, Noah Rothman writes in Commentary magazine about Kelly’s “disastrous interview.” In The Times, Kashana Cauley explains how “compromise” — which Kelly said could have prevented the Civil War — allowed slavery to thrive.
The dossier that won’t die. “Check the DEMS!” President Trump tweeted yesterday. “We now have evidence that Democrats literally paid money for Russian intelligence,” Fox News’s Tucker Carlson claimed on his show. “The Democrat-Fusion-Russia story requires as full an investigation as the question of Trump-Russia collusion,” The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote.
Several readers have emailed me asking for help in making sense of this story, which is often known as the dossier story. Here goes:
Last year, a big law firm called Perkins Coie, which was working for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee, hired a research firm named Fusion GPS to do opposition research on Trump.
Opposition research is standard practice in politics, and it’s not pretty. It involves looking for dirt on an opponent and then publicizing that dirt. When you read an exposé in a major media organization about a political candidate, it sometimes started with old-fashioned investigative reporting — but other times it started with a handout from the opposition-research arm of a competing campaign.
Fusion is known for doing opposition research. During the Republican primaries, a conservative website funded, in large part, by Paul Singer, a Republican billionaire who didn’t want Trump to win the nomination, hired Fusion to look into Trump. After he did win the nomination, the Clinton campaign and the D.N.C. hired Fusion and, through the law firm, paid for the research.
Fusion worked with a well-regarded former British spy named Christopher Steele to produce a dossier that accused the Trump campaign of colluding with Russia. The dossier also included salacious — and unproven, if not false — stories about Trump’s personal behavior.
Trump and his media allies have tried to downplay his campaign’s Russia dealings by saying the Clinton campaign’s financing of the dossier was even worse. It’s classic whataboutism, and it’s part of Trump’s effort to sow confusion about the allegations against him.
It’s also a silly comparison. Clinton’s campaign was engaging in the usual, if tough, practice of trying to uncover information that makes an opponent look bad. Trump’s campaign, by contrast, was potentially colluding with a foreign government hostile to the United States to disseminate stolen material — with Trump then lying about it and trying to prevent a federal investigation of it.
“Trump’s entire defense amounts to elementary school taunt: ‘I know you are, but what am I?’” writes Max Boot, summarizing a piece he’s written for Foreign Policy.
The dossier intrigue is part of a “frantic effort to distract attention from what we do know, which is … that Russia tried to meddle in the election,” Ruth Marcus has said on CBS. “Not for the first time,” The Los Angeles Times’s editorial board notes, “the president and his allies are seizing on a sideshow to distract attention from the main event.”
In The Times. Regular readers know that I consider the lack of economic diversity at the nation’s top public and private colleges to be inexcusable. In an op-ed, Paul Glastris of The Washington Monthly offers another good idea for improving the situation: these colleges should admit more adults — people who have spent years working before enrolling in (or returning to) college. Also, for the latest news on the New York terror attack, follow The Times’s news coverage.
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Is Big Data Ruining Baseball? by Neal Gabler

Anyone who follows baseball, whose World Series ends this week, knows that the national pastime has changed more in the last five years than in the previous 50. It hardly seems the same game. Starting pitchers go five innings or less; they throw more curves and sliders; there are defensive shifts on almost every batter, and those batters are usually swinging for the fences, and succeeding more than ever before, or striking out when they don’t succeed; the stolen base is practically obsolete, as are, increasingly, the sacrifice bunt and the hit and run. Eventually, the ground ball may be too. This is a revolution, but it hasn’t been organic, arising from changes in the athletes. It has been imposed … by data.
What happened to baseball is one small example of something that has been happening for years across America. We are all now inundated by data, all of us living a data-driven life at the expense of what one might call a more human-driven one. In ways both obvious and subliminal, statistics are changing our institutions, including our politics — and they are changing us. It isn’t too much to say that they are becoming determinative.
Let’s start with baseball. When I was growing up and first became a fan many, many years ago, the game was something of an art. It was full of guesswork, intuition, tradition, idiosyncrasy and, of course, talent. Grizzled managers didn’t consult iPads, fielders didn’t pull cards out of their pockets for each batter to get defensive positioning, and batters didn’t watch a video of their last at-bat in the dugout — all things that managers and players routinely do now. The game was much looser than that, much more instinctive. It was all gut and nerve and hunch — a bunch of guys feeling the game. To quote the immortal Yogi Berra: “You can’t think and hit at the same time.”
That’s mostly gone now, so much so that when Houston Astros’ manager, AJ Hinch, sent his pitcher, Charlie Morton, out to the mound for the sixth inning Saturday night, going against the “book,” the announcers kept marveling that Hinch was “trusting what he sees,” “trusted his eyes,” rather than referring to the statistical tables that would have told him to remove the pitcher — the idea being that just about nobody trusts his eyes anymore. You trust the data.
This big revolution in baseball, maybe the biggest, which has spread to every other professional sport, is called “sabermetrics,” and it began back in the 1950s and then caught fire in the 1970s, when a few baseball diehards and stat nerds, most notably a former factory security guard and amateur statistician named Bill James, who has become something of a baseball deity, discovered that data was really a treasure trove if you knew how to interpret it and, more, use it. 
John M. Ward of the New York Giants’ baseball card portrait.
Card set: Allen & Ginter World’s Champions (N28), 1887. (Image couresty of the Library of Congress)
James and his confreres didn’t believe in trusting their eyes. They felt that the statistics baseball generated often told a different story from the one you saw, and, more, that the traditional stats didn’t really tell you what you needed to know. Better stats could tell you who was really adding to the team’s victory total and who was detracting from it, who hit which pitcher best and which pitcher had a batter’s number, which batters were better at night and which during the day, and a thousand other things that would radically alter the practice of the game. 
And they were so good at it, so right, that baseball team after baseball team began relying on new and sophisticated stats to determine just about everything they did. You didn’t play hunches anymore. You played the odds. Michael Lewis’ best-seller, Moneyball, and the movie based on it, told the story of how Oakland Athletics’ GM Billy Beane rebuffed the old-timers and swore by data instead of eyes for his decision-making. It’s a film in which sabermetrics is the real hero and tradition the real villain, whether we want to think of it that way or not. Nowadays, in order to be a general manager or even a manager you have to be a data freak.
No one, least of all me, is going to argue against statistics and scientific data. (Well, I suppose Republicans would argue against them.) The more we know, the better, and the more explanatory our data, the better. But there is nevertheless something to the quote Mark Twain attributed to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli that there are three kinds of lies: “lies, damned lies and statistics.” It is not so much that statistics lie, or even that, as my late father, an accountant, used to say, “Figures don’t lie, but liars do figure.” And it isn’t even that statistics, taken at face value, are missing something essential, though I think they are — a human element that breathes life into them. If we didn’t have that human touch, AJ Hinch would have pulled Charlie Morton because the data shows that a pitcher is less effective the third time through the order, and Dodger manager Dave Roberts certainly wouldn’t have let Joc Pederson, a struggling hitter, bat in the ninth inning … when he hit a three-run homer.
There is something to the quote Mark Twain attributed to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli that there are three kinds of lies: ‘lies, damned lies and statistics.’
The deeper danger, I think, is that statistics, as they are deployed so often now, aren’t just explanatory; they are dictatorial, meaning they impose themselves on whatever is being analyzed and tryrranize it. In baseball, for instance, the old stats — home runs, ERAs, RBIs, batting average, slugging percentage — were extrapolated from the game to give us some sense of value. We thought a player with a high batting average was a good player. Sabermetricians tell us otherwise. They use their stats not just to measure value, but to bend the game to conform to the statistics. Or put another way, they are less interested in what had happened than it what it portends.
Take “launch angle,” which is the hot baseball stat these days. The idea is that there is an optimum angle at which the bat strikes the ball in order to get a hit, or better yet, hit a home run. (And, yes, there is a comprehensive data set on the launch angles of just about every batted ball.) As a means of explanation, I suppose, there is some interest in knowing which players have the “best” launch angles. But that’s not what has happened when the data is mined. Instead, just about every player — and organization — has become obsessed with launch angles as a way of making sure that batters get that ball up over the wall, and they adjust accordingly. What used to be a very human endeavor — learning how to hit a ball — has become a mechanical one. It is as if data analysts were to tell a visual artist which colors to use or a writer which words work best.
Failure is a part of being human. It is a way we grow, develop, learn and ultimately gird ourselves for the inevitable defeats we will encounter. Failure isn’t necessarily to be avoided; it is to be understood. A life without failure is a life not fully lived.
And to what end? The end is to minimize failure, a pursuit which certainly has its place in many areas of our lives, but not in all of them. Not to get too philosophical about it, but failure is a part of being human. It is a way we grow, develop, learn and ultimately gird ourselves for the inevitable defeats we will encounter. Failure isn’t necessarily to be avoided; it is to be understood. A life without failure is a life not fully lived. A game in which failure is measured by the inability to adjust one’s launch angle is a game diminished.
We see this data-drive most clearly in sports, which are full of stats, but everywhere numbers crunchers are striving to find the formulas for what works and what doesn’t — which typically means, what gets us to do what someone wants us to do. This is the primary function of algorithms — formulas designed to let merchants know what we will want. Google operates on algorithms expressly designed to give us the information and the ads it has surmised we want. Facebook operates on algorithms to send us the news (and the ads) it has surmised we want. Amazon operates on algorithms to advertise books to us it has surmised we want. Netflix operates on algorithms to give us the TV programs and movies it has surmised we want. And increasingly, political organizations are searching for algorithms that will allow those organizations to give us the political positions it has surmised we want.
And so it goes.
There is a certain circularity to this: You take our data and then provide us with something customized to that data. But just as baseball statistics rob the game of some of its beautiful mess, algorithms rob us of the opportunity to be exposed to things we haven’t already endorsed. They place us within a prison of our own predetermined desires. We only get what we have wanted previously and nothing else. This is a limiting way to live. And like so much else in our culture, eg., social media, which I discussed last week, it tends to push us further within ourselves and away from others. Algorithms, like sports statistics, promise predictive success — in this case, the predictive success of being satisfied with what has always satisfied us in the past.
The cultural implications of living within our very own feedback loop are large. So are the political implications. Already, Americans barely extend themselves beyond their own political predispositions. We wall ourselves off from anything we don’t like. Once politicians find the political equivalent of launch angles or get the hang of creating algorithms that can push our buttons, we may lose the humanity of our political discourse too. We are clearly on that path now.
Maybe this is progress. Maybe this is just the direction of the world. Still, baseball, I think, used to be a better game before it got all computerized with analytics. But that’s just a game. A politics that figures out precisely how to incite us or pacify us or distract us is something else. And I am not so certain that something else is an advance.
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