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Colin Kidd: The Dark Side of American Liberalism, 25 September 2003

Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History 
by James Morone.
Yale, 575 pp., £25, April 2003, 0 300 09484 1
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... from the American Dream of the white, periwigged, slaveholding intelligentsia of Enlightenment Virginia. Nevertheless, greater democratisation came in the 1830s during the age of Jackson; a tragic and bloody Civil War had to be fought in the 1860s to end the peculiar institution of Southern race slavery; democracy was extended to women voters in 1920; and ...

Tsk, Ukh, Hmmm

Michael Newton: Forgetting to remember to forget, 23 February 2006

Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language 
by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Zone, 287 pp., £18.95, May 2005, 1 890951 49 8
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... Kierkegaard wrote, ‘we suggest that it is simultaneously forgotten yet preserved.’ Samuel Johnson said that ‘forgetfulness is necessary to remembrance,’ and Johnny Cash sang, ‘I forgot to remember to forget.’ That forgetting is a way of remembrance is the idea which recurs throughout Heller-Roazen’s book, appearing again and again in ever ...

I just get my pistol and shoot him right down

Eric Foner: Slave-Dealing, 22 March 2018

The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History 
by Anne C. Bailey.
Cambridge, 197 pp., £19.99, November 2017, 978 1 316 64348 8
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... in the decades before the Civil War, a large number of whom were sent from older states such as Virginia to the burgeoning Cotton Kingdom of the Lower South. Every Southern newspaper carried advertisements for the sale of slaves and every major town had slave dealers who drew attention to their business with signs proclaiming ‘Negro Sales’ or ‘Negroes ...

Diary

Sean Wilsey: Going Slow, 17 July 2008

... he’s still bulletproof in Texas). The Gunter – another cattle king hotel – is where Robert Johnson made his first recordings, in 1936, and rock and roll was born. Eisenhower had an office in town, and he was in it on the morning he heard about Pearl Harbor. I don’t even think he was a general then. The San Antonio gangster Freddie Carrasco, while in ...

Dancing Senator

Pat Rogers, 7 November 1985

Memoirs of King George II: Vols I, II and III 
by Horace Walpole, edited by John Brooke.
Yale, 248 pp., £65, June 1985, 0 300 03197 1
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... Fundamentally he sees life, in terms of his famous definition to Lady Ossory, as a comedy: like Johnson, he disliked a feeler. Throughout, Newcastle is described in terms of farce and buffoonery. The ‘burlesque Duke of Newcastle’ of the letters is fleshed out into a coherent and intelligible character: ‘He loved business immoderately, yet was only ...

Flattery and Whining

William Gass: Prologomania, 5 October 2000

The Book of Prefaces 
edited by Alasdair Gray.
Bloomsbury, 639 pp., £35, May 2000, 0 7475 4443 3
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... by Theodore Dreiser while a cheap ‘just for study’ copy will be hawked by a professor from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute. My treasured copy of Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy has a preface by F.D. & P.J.-S. and an introduction whose Part I is by P.J.-S. and whose Part II, briefer, is by F.D., which suggests these initials know the ...

Are you still living?

Kasia Boddy: Counting Americans, 19 October 2023

Democracy’s Data: The Hidden Stories in the US Census 
by Dan Bouk.
Picador, 362 pp., $20, August, 978 1 250 87217 3
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... to get people to believe that their personal details won’t be handed on to the authorities. When Johnson Jones Hooper wrote about his experience of ‘Taking the Census in Alabama’, he signed it ‘by a “Chicken-Man” of 1840’ – a reference to the common belief that his job was to identify (for tax purposes) every chicken, cow and loom. A hundred ...

A Piece of Pizza and a Beer

Deborah Friedell: Who was Jane Roe?, 23 June 2022

The Family Roe: An American Story 
by Joshua Prager.
Norton, 655 pp., £25, September 2021, 978 0 393 24771 8
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... in the cause. An article Prager read in the New Yorker referred to the plaintiffs in Loving v. Virginia, which overturned bans on interracial marriage, as the beau idéal. The Lovings had said all the right things, then stayed out of the limelight – and stayed married. They even had the perfect name. The few sentences on the more ...

Diary

Alan Bennett: What I did in 2014, 8 January 2015

... I never quite understand why they are happy to sit on a panel with the likes of Farage, Boris Johnson, Jeremy Clarkson et al. Their reasoning would, I imagine, be that this gives them the opportunity to have fun at the expense of Farage and Co. And so they do. But the impression an audience comes away with is that actually nothing much matters and that ...

Later, Not Now

Christopher L. Brown: Histories of Emancipation, 15 July 2021

Murder on the Middle Passage: The Trial of Captain Kimber 
by Nicholas Rogers.
Boydell, 267 pp., £16.99, April 2020, 978 1 78327 482 6
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The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery 
by Michael Taylor.
Bodley Head, 382 pp., £20, November 2020, 978 1 84792 571 8
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... The scale of what the abolitionists were up against is only now becoming clear. To paraphrase Virginia Woolf, opposition to anti-slavery may turn out to be more interesting than anti-slavery itself.The voyage of the Recovery provides Nicholas Rogers with his subject in Murder on the Middle Passage. The torture and murder of the unnamed girl off the coast ...

What is there to celebrate?

Eric Foner: C. Vann Woodward, 20 October 2022

C. Vann Woodward: America’s Historian 
by James Cobb.
North Carolina Press, 504 pp., £39.50, October, 978 1 4696 7021 8
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... or lodge in the same hotel. The 1949 meeting was held at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. Woodward arranged for John Hope Franklin, a Black historian who had just published From Slavery to Freedom, a pioneering survey of African American history, to deliver a paper. But where would Franklin sleep and eat? Woodward facetiously suggested that ...

Living on Apple Crumble

August Kleinzahler: James Schuyler, 17 November 2005

Just the Thing: Selected Letters of James Schuyler 1951-91 
edited by William Corbett.
Turtle Point, 470 pp., £13.99, May 2005, 1 885586 30 2
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... John Hohnsbeen, an art-dealer friend, was having an affair with the architect Philip Johnson, and the ‘unprivate walls’ are those of Johnson’s famous Glass House. Schuyler was 28 and this was his first serious mental breakdown. He had only recently arrived in New York after an extended stay in ...

Daddy, ain’t you heard?

Mark Ford: Langston Hughes’s Journeys, 16 November 2023

Let America Be America Again: Conversations with Langston Hughes 
edited by Christopher C. De Santis.
Oxford, 339 pp., £32, August 2022, 978 0 19 285504 6
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... was an abolitionist too; he insisted they name their son after Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 Virginia slave revolt. His younger brother, John Langston, became one of the most prominent advocates for Black rights in the Reconstruction era, and was elected to Congress in 1890. By 1901, however, when Hughes was born, the spread of Jim Crow laws had eroded ...

The Little Man’s Big Friends

Eric Foner: Freedom’s Dominion, 1 June 2023

Freedom’s Dominion: A Saga of White Resistance to Federal Power 
by Jefferson Cowie.
Basic, 497 pp., £25, December 2022, 978 1 5416 7280 2
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... to inspire the movement for American independence. The Earl of Dunmore, the governor of colonial Virginia, later notorious for arming slaves to fight on the British side during the War of Independence, complained that Americans ‘do not conceive that government has any right to forbid their taking possession’ of Indian land. Even the bellicose Jackson ...

Diary

Linda Kinstler: At the 6 January trials, 26 September 2024

... individuals who just happened to be ‘walking through the building’, as the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, put it. Trump recently referred to the riot and the prosecution against him as the ‘6 January Hoax’ and to the arrested rioters as ‘hostages’. His vice-presidential running mate, JD Vance, has described the defendants as ‘political ...

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