Thank you guys for reading "How real was it?" today. Seven pageviews on a new post in under 12 hours is a lot for Publocc. I spent so much time at my desk writing that thing on Friday I hurt my damn back! Took so many Advil Saturday I couldn't write anything. Finished it up with a couple of hours Sunday morning. Didn't proof it, too sore and tired.
I wrote "How real was it?" with no other sources than Holmes' 1884 and 1899 addresses. There is support in the literature for everything I wrote, however. I had the damnedest time finding the 1899 speech, it was in a book called The Fundamental Holmes. While looking for that speech I stumbled onto another book on Holmes with the word "Valueless" in the title. I used "value-free" in the post.
After after I posted "How real was it?" I lay down to ease my back and read and the book I picked off the shelf was Gordon Wood's The Idea of America. I didn't like that book when I read it a couple of years ago, I thought Professor Wood was a punkin' eater and I wrote a post back then on that. The American Revolution seemed to mystify him: The American colonists were free and happy and had good reasons to be happy, he wrote. So, why did they revolt? The rest of the book (To be accurate, the rest of it I read, because I got exasperated and didn't finish.) was an unconvincing attempt, so it seemed to me, to paint a little lipstick on the pig. You know how you sometimes get the feeling from the introduction that the author hadn't quite figured out what he wanted to say--it's overlong, it meanders? Well, that was the impression I got again from reading Professor Wood's introduction, so to stave off re-exasperation a little longer I skipped the rest of the introduction and just opened the book to a random chapter. The first sentence was this:
"Were the American Revolutionaries mentally disturbed?"
I had read that chapter before! I had marked it with a post-it note and underlined that sentence--but I had no memory of reading either sentence or chapter. I don't think I got that idea from the book, I think I got that idea from actually reading the Declaration of Independence! I think that idea was probably why I bought The Idea of America and in re-reading that chapter, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century," (Even the length of Professor Wood's chapter headings exasperate me.) I reacquainted myself with Professor Wood's tortured, desperate attempts to answer that question, "No." So I didn't finish it again.
So, as I was saying...There is support within the serious literature for all the thoughts I spewed forth in "How real was it?," for all the thoughts I've spewed forth in the last couple of weeks on the Civil War, including the proposition that Andrew Atkinson Humphreys was mentally ill, for my more general, more flamboyant assertion that "America was born a lunatic with a forged birth certificate"--I say, there is support for it all, but I didn't know it.
I wrote "How real was it?" with no other sources than Holmes' 1884 and 1899 addresses. There is support in the literature for everything I wrote, however. I had the damnedest time finding the 1899 speech, it was in a book called The Fundamental Holmes. While looking for that speech I stumbled onto another book on Holmes with the word "Valueless" in the title. I used "value-free" in the post.
After after I posted "How real was it?" I lay down to ease my back and read and the book I picked off the shelf was Gordon Wood's The Idea of America. I didn't like that book when I read it a couple of years ago, I thought Professor Wood was a punkin' eater and I wrote a post back then on that. The American Revolution seemed to mystify him: The American colonists were free and happy and had good reasons to be happy, he wrote. So, why did they revolt? The rest of the book (To be accurate, the rest of it I read, because I got exasperated and didn't finish.) was an unconvincing attempt, so it seemed to me, to paint a little lipstick on the pig. You know how you sometimes get the feeling from the introduction that the author hadn't quite figured out what he wanted to say--it's overlong, it meanders? Well, that was the impression I got again from reading Professor Wood's introduction, so to stave off re-exasperation a little longer I skipped the rest of the introduction and just opened the book to a random chapter. The first sentence was this:
"Were the American Revolutionaries mentally disturbed?"
I had read that chapter before! I had marked it with a post-it note and underlined that sentence--but I had no memory of reading either sentence or chapter. I don't think I got that idea from the book, I think I got that idea from actually reading the Declaration of Independence! I think that idea was probably why I bought The Idea of America and in re-reading that chapter, "Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century," (Even the length of Professor Wood's chapter headings exasperate me.) I reacquainted myself with Professor Wood's tortured, desperate attempts to answer that question, "No." So I didn't finish it again.
So, as I was saying...There is support within the serious literature for all the thoughts I spewed forth in "How real was it?," for all the thoughts I've spewed forth in the last couple of weeks on the Civil War, including the proposition that Andrew Atkinson Humphreys was mentally ill, for my more general, more flamboyant assertion that "America was born a lunatic with a forged birth certificate"--I say, there is support for it all, but I didn't know it.
