Kenneth M. Stampp, Civil War Historian

Kenneth Stampp in 1993.


Kenneth M. Stampp, a leading Civil War historian who redirected the scholarly view of slavery in the antebellum South from that of a benign relationship between white plantation owners and compliant slaves to one of harsh servitude perpetuated to support the South’s agrarian economy, died Friday in Oakland, Calif. He was 96.

Mr. Stampp, who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1946 to 1983, wrote several influential books about the Civil War period, from the decade leading up to the war to Reconstruction.

His reputation was founded on two books that turned accepted wisdom inside out and engendered seismic shifts in the scholarship of the period. They became staples of university classrooms.

Amazingly, in all the years I've studied the Civil War, and all the meetings I attended at the Round Table, I never heard of him.

The first, in 1956, was “The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South,” which juxtaposed the views of slaves themselves with the more conventionally researched perceptions of slave owners, yielding a far different picture of the institution than historians had previously created.

Rather than portraying slaves as docile, simple-minded creatures who were complicit in their own subjugation, Mr. Stampp showed how by working slowly, breaking tools and stealing from their owners, the slaves were in constant rebellion. And rather than portraying the owners as beneficent upholders of a genteel culture determined to maintain racial harmony, Mr. Stampp revealed the slave-keeping impulse to be an economically motivated choice.

Not "yes, massa, I's happy wid you." Or the benevolent white father.


“We now viewed slavery not only through the eyes of the masters but through the eyes of the slaves themselves,” said Leon Litwack, a long-time colleague and former student of Mr. Stampp’s at Berkeley, and the author of “Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980. “He was clearly one of the influential historians of the 20th century. All you have to do is open history textbooks and compare what you find in them to what you found before 1960.”

Perhaps the Texas Board of Education should take a look.

The second seminal book, “The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877,” published in 1965, demythologized another favorite trope of previous historians: that the decade after the Civil War was disastrous for the South, a time of vengefulness visited upon it by the North, of rampant corruption and of vindictive political maneuvering.

Yet there are people who do blame Sherman and all Yankees that followed him for wreaking havoc upon the South.

“He was really a pioneer, demolishing the magnolia and mint juleps view of slavery,” said Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia. “And the Reconstruction book was in the same revisionist mode, sweeping away myths. Among serious history scholars, nobody is going to go back before Stampp.”

Impressive.

In Tough Times, Humanities Must Justify Worth

One idea that elite universities like Yale, sprawling public systems like Wisconsin and smaller private colleges like Lewis and Clark have shared for generations is that a traditional liberal arts education is, by definition, not intended to prepare students for a specific vocation. Rather, the critical thinking, civic and historical knowledge and ethical reasoning that the humanities develop have a different purpose: They are prerequisites for personal growth and participation in a free democracy, regardless of career choice.

But in this new era of lengthening unemployment lines and shrinking university endowments, questions about the importance of the humanities in a complex and technologically demanding world have taken on new urgency.

Already scholars point to troubling signs. A December survey of 200 higher education institutions by The Chronicle of Higher Education and Moody’s Investors Services found that 5 percent have imposed a total hiring freeze, and an additional 43 percent have imposed a partial freeze.

Considering the economic times, a freeze or near-freeze is not that bad. Other organizations are firing employees.

With additional painful cuts across the board a near certainty even as millions of federal stimulus dollars may be funneled to education, the humanities are under greater pressure than ever to justify their existence to administrators, policy makers, students and parents. Technology executives, researchers and business leaders argue that producing enough trained engineers and scientists is essential to America’s economic vitality, national defense and health care. Some of the staunchest humanities advocates, however, admit that they have failed to make their case effectively.

What is the case to be made? Well, critical thinking, for one. Business and computer students do not have the capacity to reason critically well developed, generally; they know their discipline and not much more.

Richard M. Freeland, the Massachusetts commissioner of higher education, is part of what he calls a revolutionary movement to close the “chasm in higher education between the liberal arts and sciences and professional programs.” The Association of American Colleges and Universities recently issued a report arguing the humanities should abandon the “old Ivory Tower view of liberal education” and instead emphasize its practical and economic value.

Exactly.

To Mr. Delbanco of Columbia, the person who has done the best job of articulating the benefits is President Obama. “He does something academic humanists have not been doing well in recent years,” he said of a president who invokes Shakespeare and Faulkner, Lincoln and W. E. B. Du Bois. “He makes people feel there is some kind of a common enterprise, that history, with its tragedies and travesties, belongs to all of us, that we have something in common as Americans.”

How bad is it?

This is one measure of the depth of the current recession: The Bank of England cuts its key rate by a half percentage point to 1.5%, the lowest level in the bank's 315-year history, marking the latest in global policy makers' efforts to fend off the threat of deep recession.

315 years is a very long time. 1929 was eighty years ago. 315 years ago it was 1694. England and Scotland unified 13 years later - and BOE's interest rate was higher than it is now.

Bank of England records show that from April 1719 until May 1822 -- a period that included the U.S. Revolutionary War and the Napoleonic wars -- rates held steady at 5%. As Britain joined World War War I in early August 1914, on the other hand, U.K. rates fell sharply, from 10% to 5% in a week.

Battle of Thermopylae

103 Across: victor at Thermopylae: Xerxes. Thermopylae was the site of a battle fought in August 480 BC, between an alliance of Greek city-states and the invading Persian Empire of Xerxes I, at the pass of Thermopylae in central Greece.

Jews and Blacks Join in This 'Yizkor'

Nat Hentoff writes an interesting piece in today's WS Journal.

There is now a recording, "Yizkor: Music of Memory" by David Chevan and the Afro-Semitic Experience (www.chevan.addr.com) – original, resonantly melodic jazz settings of Jewish prayers and psalms – that Mingus and I, if he were still here, could rise and share.

Hazzan Mizrahi's style, not often heard today, except in traditional synagogues, is Hazzanut, which startled me with its "cry" of the life force – and its vulnerability – when I was a child. Mr. Chevan calls it "a mixture of out-of-time recitative, some improvisation, and distinctive tunes." By "out-of-time," he means that "when the cantor moves from singing a tune to focus on individual words, those amazing improvised . . . highly ornamental melismas emerge. In some ways this is similar to what a gospel singer does; it is just that gospel more often stays in time."

Fascinating.

The stunning impact of the Hazzanut way of singing is also shown by Ben Ratliff in his new book, "The Jazz Ear: Conversations Over Music" (Times Books). Ornette Coleman, the beyond-modern-jazz icon, told of the first time he was given a 1916 recording by Cantor Josef Rosenblatt (whose 78 rpm discs I began collecting when I was 13).

"I started crying like a baby," Coleman said. "The record was crying, singing, and praying, all in the same breath. And none of it was crossing each other. I said, 'Wait a minute. You can't find those "notes." They don't exist.'"

That is amazing: Ornette Coleman listening to a cantor? and digging him?

Long ago, when I recorded deep blues singer and pianist Otis Spann for the Candid label, I asked him what the listeners at the black blues clubs in Chicago came to hear. "They wanted," he said, "to hear stories about their own lives, and hopes."

In that context, Mr. Chevan says: "One of the most important Afro-Semitic Experience concerts we have ever given was at a Saturday night concert at St. Philips Moravian Church in Old Salem, N.C. This was a former slave church and many of its worshipers were buried beneath the floor of the church in order to avoid their graves being desecrated. It was a standing-room-only audience that was on its feet almost the entire night as we played for the ancestors beneath our feet."

Israel to Display the Dead Sea Scrolls on the Internet

Another technological triumph.

What Would Ataturk Do?

Turkey is literally the bridge between Asia and Europe. It is also a figurative crossroads between Islam and Christianity. Its historical place is a mixed one: home of the Caliphate, the old Ottoman Empire, it was made a secular state by its modern founder, Ataturk.

Warnings of the demise of Ataturk's legacy have been around almost since he died 70 years ago. A relentless modernizer, hearty drinker and fan of the fox trot, the founder of the Turkish Republic – his name means "father of the Turks" – had issues with Islam. He shut down Islamic schools, banned Islamic garb and opened a German brewery in his new capital, Ankara. His was hardly the path of least resistance in a land that is 99% Muslim, once ruled Mecca and was for centuries home to the Caliph, Islam's supreme leader. Yet Ataturk's way prevailed for decades.

He is venerated the way Washington, Martí and Bolívar are: founders, beacons, idols.

One thing is clear: Ataturk worship, the world's most enduring personality cult, still holds this increasingly prosperous nation of more than 70 million people in its thrall. Ataturk shows scant sign of going the way of his contemporaries. Vladimir Lenin lies in Red Square but is barely mentioned in Russia now, except as a butt of jokes. Even Mao Zedong, embalmed in Tiananmen Square, has slipped from his pedestal: The Chinese Communist Party's official view of him is 70% good, 30% bad.

GW is highly respected, but he is a distant figure. Lincoln is less diatant, yet his veneration is also a somewhat distant one.

Ataturk, revered for defeating invading British, French and Greek forces, is untouchable. His mausoleum in Ankara drew more than 12 million visitors last year, up by four million from 2006. The constitution bans all deviation from the "reforms and principles" of "the immortal leader and the unrivalled hero." It is illegal in Turkey to publicly curse him. Virtually nobody, including members of the AK Party, disses him, at least not in public. One young, headscarf-wearing woman recently said on TV, "I do not like him." She is being investigated by prosecutors.

Defeated British, French and Greek forces?

Secularism a la Ataturk is not a simple formula. Unlike America's founding fathers, who separated church and state, Ataturk did not so much split Islam from the state as subordinate it to the state. He abolished the post of Caliph and placed all mosques and Muslim clerics under a government department. At the same time, he purged religion from other state agencies.

One way to do it is this way.

Ataturk, a very stylish dresser himself, clearly didn't like traditional Islamic garb, viewing it as an emblem of backwardness. His best-known comments on the dress question came in 1925 when he declared "international" – that is, Western – dress as "very important and appropriate for our nation. We shall wear it."

He even decreed what Turks would wear; that's control.

Stonehenge Used as Cemetery From the Beginning

Ken Geiger/AFP-Getty Images

New discoveries shed light on the original purpose of the Stonehenge monument.

A reference question - Billy Joel-Fire

Yesterday two young ladies came in with a question: where can we find this book? It was a reference book on American history. They had no idea how to find a book, reference or otherwise. One of them was actually interested in the Dewey Decimal System, so I gave them a brief lesson on call numbers.

Their assignment was to research names and events mentioned in the Billy Joel song "We didn't start the Fire". I just now found a link to a site that does exactly that.

One of the students had this stanza:

U2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, "Psycho", Belgians in the Congo

They thought that U2 was the singing group; when I told them it was a spy plane, they were amazed that it had the same name as the group. A, kids.

I told them Rhee was a South Korean president, that Congo was a Belgian colony. And I helped them find reference material.

Stonehenge

It seemed a magical place when we were there in 2000. Now there are excavations going on.

BBC's story:

Enduring mystery

Excavation at Stonehenge aims to solve its riddles

El País has a story: El cuándo y el porqué de Stonehenge

El cuándo y el porqué de Stonehenge

Se inician las primeras excavaciones en 40 años para determinar la fecha precisa de creación del monumento

• Ver fotogalería

Dominican Republic: Jewish Refugee haven

One of the joys of being a librarian is working with patrons who are intellectually curious and vibrant, interested and interesting, and who bring me news ideas and concepts.

This is such a case: a woman came in this Saturday, around 10.30, and told me about an exhibit she had recently seen at the Jewish Heritage Museum. It was about Sosúa: A Refuge for Jews in the Dominican Republic - Sosúa: Un Refugio de Judíos en la República Dominicana.

I have never heard of this piece of history. I learned something. After telling me of this, and elucidating on the exhibit, the meaning of it, the historical details of Jews escaping Nazism and being given a haven (one they did not find in the US), we discussed the issue. I told her of the book I'm reading, Burnt bread and chutney: growing up between cultures -- a memoir of an Indian Jewish girl. She told me about her own family being in the jewelry business and doing business with Indians.

As we talked I noticed she was an attractive woman. Her face was made up, her lipstick perfectly drawn. her hair a weird shade of orange. In her sixties, surely. Her neck and hands said so. Yet clearly when younger she must have been quite pretty, even beautiful.

I see people all day long, many seniors, some teens, and all ages in between. Many people look sloppy in their dress, almost dirty. Some are dirty, and some reach the point of being disgusting. People cough and sneeze without covering their face -- and some that do then put those hands on the computer keyboard or the newspapers they are reading and that we in the staff will have to handle.

The Place to Be

A name I remember. Roger Mudd was part of the CBS News that I grew up with: in my teens I became fixated on politics and world affairs, and it was CBS that I watched. Edward R. Murrow I think I saw in his program (perhaps Face-to-Face); it's a dim memory. But the News team of Cronkite, Mudd, Schorr, Rather, yes, I know I watched them.

This picture is fascinating, for its low tech (notice the Ys and Ns in the middle column veer right as the move down), and,most, for the names on it. Difficult as it is to see, the names Church, Gore and Fulbright have Ns next to them; just as surprisingly, Dirksen has a Y. The first three were Democrats, the last one a Republican - and this was a vote on "a key Senate vote on the Civil Rights Act" on June 10, 1964.


Roger Mudd, a correspondent for CBS News, reports
from Washington on June 10, 1964. The board tracks
a key Senate vote on the Civil Rights Act.

To think of Gore as voting against a Civil Rights Act component, while the Republican Minority Leader Dirksen voted for it, is to realize how strange politics can be, and how wrong stereotypes can be.

Philip Jones Griffiths, War Photojournalist, Dies at 72

A fascinating person whom I learned about by reading BBC News. His obit from the NY Times is here. Some great pictures, such as this one of "a group of men gathered outside Pentonville prison in North London where a friend of the group had been executed that morning."

Austria remembers Nazi annexation

"80,000 candles will be lit outside parliament, where Austrians cheered Hitler's arrival 70 years ago." Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer told parliament that no pay-off could undo what had been done. "I can only humbly beg survivors and their relatives to accept this gesture for what it is: a trifling acknowledgement of the injustice that was done to you," he said.

"On Tuesday, Vienna's Jewish community formally re-opened the Hakoah sports club complex which had been confiscated by the Nazis in 1938."

More than France has done, surely; Austria is publicly agonizing over its role in the Holocaust. France hasn't even acknowledged its role. It revels in the myth of its resistance, and ignores its Vichyism.

"Mr Gusenbauer also announced that the government would build a Simon Wiesenthal Centre in honour of the Nazi hunter who died in 2005."

"The anniversary of the Anschluss has revived debate among Austrians about whether they were victims or supporters of the Third Reich.

Otto von Habsburg, 95, the son of Austria's last emperor, told a commemorative meeting that no state in Europe had "a greater right than Austria to call itself a victim".

But the president of the lower house of parliament, Barbara Prammer, told Wednesday's session that Austrians were complicit in Nazi crimes.

She said any suggestion that they had been forced to commit atrocities was a "fiction of history"."