The Americans: The Colonial Experience

"But the traditionalism of Virginia in the Golden Age was lived out with a quiet and pervasive intensity. Their very strength as transplanters came their willingness to transform as they transplanted, to flavor the distant past with the local present.

Their localism has been given far too little attention and too little credit. In these days, when States' rights are out of fashion, we are too often told that a man's preoccupation with the habits of the place where he lives can only drag on the national progress. We are fortunate that 18th-century Virginia thought differently...

The Federal Constitution was a national road on which there was no return. The leadership of Virginians in Federal life continued only so long as the national government was an aristocratic comradery like that of Virginia. When the United States ceased to be a greater Virginia, Virginians ceased to govern the United States. The virtues of 18th-century Virginia, when writ large, would seem to be vices. Localism would become sectionalism; the special interest of where a man lived would come to seem petty and disruptive."

Of course the biggest vice was slavery which would in time lead to the Civil War.

The Americans

"An air conditioning system feasible for general use would be a by product of efforts to solve certain specific problems of industry. Textile manufacturers had found that to keep their fibers soft and stretchable, to prevent the broken ends that required costly stoppage of their machines, they had to control the moisture content of the yarns. A fiber with just the right percentage of moisture was strong and pliable, and to damper the fiber properly was called 'yarn conditioning.' In 1906, when an American textile engineer invented a system for accomplishing this by controlling the humidity in the air, he called it 'air conditioning,' and the name stuck.

For air conditioning, unlike many other inventions in indoor living, the theoretical as well as the practical advances were made in the United States. The man who developed the theory, who devised the machinery, and then envisioned the human possibilities of air conditioning, was William H. Carrier." Daniel Boorstin The Americans: The Democratic Experience

Knew who invented air conditioning but not the backstory.

The Americans: The Democratic Experience

"When Joyee's Stephen Dedalus said, 'History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,' he summed up Irish history. And the United States was to be the place of awakening. Irish history in Ireland and Irish history in America were a set of beautifully symmetrical antitheses. While America was a land of immigration, Ireland was a land of invasions." The Americans: The Democratic Experience by Daniel Boorstin

Boorstin later wrote, "In a word, the Puritans had been colonists, the Irish were emigrants." How true! 

The Americans: The Democratic Experience

"Function had come to displace perfection. When Americans judged a machine, a gun, a lock or a clock by its ability to do its job, all those fluted columns, ornamental arches, entablatures, curlicues and encrusted scrolls which adorned the best English made machine were wasted effort...

...products just good enough for their purpose. The aesthetic that-was-not-functionable, the ornamental that was merely traditional, had no place in the American scheme. For Americans, a high quality machine was not one that was polished and ornamental, but one that worked." - Daniel Boorstin The Americans: The Democratic Experience

Make sure it worked and then improve, improve, improve has long been the American way.

The Americans: The Democratic Experience

"From the raw material of this census of 1850, Hinton R. Helper, a North Carolinian shaped his Impending Crisis of the South (1857), probably the most influential antislavery work of nonfiction. Helper aimed to prove with statistics that the South as a whole, and especially the free white laborer, was being impoverished by slavery. He therefore attacked slaveholders as the enemies of Southern prosperity. Because Helper was a Southerner his book created a stir even greater than that of Uncle Tom's Cabin five years before. And the Republican Party ordered one hundred thousand copies to support Lincoln in the campaign of 1860." The Americans: The Democratic Experience by Daniel Boorstin

Knew about the effect Uncle Tom's Cabin had on the war but this history was new to me.

The Americans: The Democratic Experience

"The century after the Civil War was to be an Age of Revolution - of countless, little-noticed revolutions, which occurred not in the halls of legislatures or on battlefields or on the barricades but in homes and farms and factories and schools and stores, across the landscape and in the air - so little noticed because they came so swiftly, because they touched Americans everywhere and every day. Not merely the continent but human experience itself, the very meaning of community, of time and space, of present and future, was being revised again and again, a new democratic world was being invented and being discovered by Americans wherever they lived." - Daniel Boorstin

Flotsam and Jetsam

Miscellaneous thoughts and observations.

Is it bad that when I heard of the passing of Ed Koch my first thought was that Abe Vigoda had outlived another one... The Geico commercial with the pretty girl interested in going parking with the baby pig is perhaps the most disturbing thing on TV. But as a silver lining at least she wasn't parking with the Geico caveman... Wow - NYC Mayor Ed Koch put Daniel Pearl's last words on his gravestone... Loved the premiere episode of The Americans but I kept confusing Matthew Rhys with James McAvoy who played Charles Xavier in X-Men: First Class... This was one of the funniest moments from 30 Rock... The Red Sox picking Ryan Kalish over Josh Reddick isn't exactly like picking Tim Naehring over Jeff Bagwell but it isn't good either... Stop it evolution - you're embarrassing yourself...