Saturday, August 04, 2007

This Wood Doc Ain't Got a Woody for Teddy

Well, if both MFT and I are going to express our admiration for Teddy, I suppose we've got to expect a bit of FreeCounterPoint.
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9 comments:

Pepe le Pew said...

am i getting this right? the premise here is that liberal historians have an (inherently) slanted view of their field, so by extension, we switch to the more objective of conservative, aka "good american" historians ? You gotta be pulling my fucking leg.

8/05/2007 1:23 AM
My Frontier Thesis said...

Wood makes the mistake of deciding that there are only TWO kinds of historians: "the Liberal," and "the Conservative." Both are crazy. It's his sort of absolutism that is frightening.

Read a little Richard Hofstadter if you want some interesting interpretations of American History.

8/05/2007 3:54 AM
My Frontier Thesis said...

AA, first click on this link. It will take you to U of C, Santa Barbara's budding Ph.D candidates and the titles of their respective, and forthcoming dissertations. The following dissertation (they are in alphabetic order according to the graduate student) caught my eye:

Simoes De Carvalho, Paul
"Amazon Days: The Life and Works of the Portuguese Historian, Joao Lucio de Azevedo (1835-1933)"
Advisor: Francis Dutra

Although one consonant is varied, I wondered if there was still any distant relation to that particular Portuguese historian?

8/05/2007 1:04 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...

One more quick note: I sometimes wonder if Teddy would today be diagnosed as bipolar.

8/05/2007 1:51 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...

Now, now, MFT, I can think of all sorts of absolutisms which are much more frightening than those of Doc Wood and his apparent "Bowling for Columbia" efforts.
As for his use of "liberal" and "conservative", it seemed to me that he was not referring to classes of doing History. It seemed to me he was referring to the broad political divisions within this country, and noting that in academia success is highly dependent on belonging to a certain one of those divisions. That is just brutal objective fact. Zinn is gloriously IN. VDH is scornfully OUT. And so it goes, with only the odd counterexample at the far end of the large deviation, across the board.
Hofstadter is one I read in my misspent youth. Perhaps I should give him a second chance?
As for Teddy, he's one of my favorites. That won't stop me from reading or pondering a serious argument as to why he should not be one of my favorites. However, without reading Wood, the article doesn't tell me if he has a serious argument or not. [Young Teddy getting all zippy on his first Bufallo kill doesn't come across as a serious argument. If you can't be zippy when your a young'un, when can you?]

8/05/2007 1:57 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...

MFT asked:

"Although one consonant is varied, I wondered if there was still any distant relation to that particular Portuguese historian? "

No, mft. Azevedo is a fairly common name in both Spain and Portugal. "Azev" like "Al-meid", "Azer", "Al-bufer", "Al-cantar", "Abed" and other names of people and places derive from the Islamic invasions of Iberia in the 7th Century. The heart of that invading force was a corp of generally Persian and Central Asian convertees to Islam, thus heralding from what today are Iran, Iraq, Azerbaijan, etc.... As the Islamic armies swept through Egypt and moved acoss the old Roman territories in the lower Mediterannean, they constantly melded in local forces who opted to join rather than be obliterated--but these were minions, and the new names which were given to the conquered lands, and which had a greater number of progeny, were disproportionately from "Persia" and that first great triumph of IM.
Doc Azevedo is no more related to me than what the usual "six degrees of separation" might probabilistically allow

8/05/2007 2:09 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...

AA, check out the latest Hofstadter biography by David S. Brown, put out by U of Chicago Press within the last year or so.

8/06/2007 9:59 AM
My Frontier Thesis said...

AA said: Wood was referring to the broad political divisions within this country, and noting that in academia success is highly dependent on belonging to a certain one of those divisions.... Hofstadter is one I read in my misspent youth. Perhaps I should give him a second chance?


Too bad academics aren't judged by interesting research and outstanding instructor ability. It's about (and likely always will be about) parroting the Appropriate political line.

Also note: Hofstadter devoured everything Mencken during his undergraduate days in Buffalo, New York.

When one particular girl was defending at Columbia (Hofstadter her advisor), somehow it was brought up that she would now be following in Hofstadter's footsteps. Hofstadter told her that if she was to ever honor him, it would best be done by charting out one her own, and constructing her own interpretation of history.

Hofstadter too was rightly accosted of relying heavily on secondary source material. He should've spent more time in the archives. His "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" ain't a bad read, though.

Hofstadter was disturbed by the Red Scare that rippled through academia. And like Orwell he was equally disturbed by the willingness that a Marxist would (and HAD to) accept marching orders from Moscow. If those marching orders were questioned (even using Marx himself!), they would be labeled a troublemaker, or ousted from the party, or called a Troskyite, or, well, they might just disappear too. Again like Orwell, Hofstadter just couldn't get behind that, to put it mildly.

Also, Hofstadter was one of the first to finally put the Frederick Jackson Turner Camp on its head (after 4-5 decades of supremacy), although Turner and Hofstadter would likely have gotten along just fine.

8/06/2007 3:36 PM
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