I haven't written a book review until now, and did not take extensive notes while reading. The following post is an attempt by me to paraphrase the historiography of a book I read for my future reference.

Daniel Walker Howe's What Hath God Wrought is part of the Oxford History of the United States. The Oxford History remains incomplete some 50 years on, but the books that are in it are well-written and well-acclaimed. I read James M. McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom a year or two ago and enjoyed it, but that was the only familiarity I had to the series before reading What Hath God Wrought. While the two I chose cover adjacent periods of US history, they are written with an interceding 20 years of historiography.

The ever-present figure through What Hath God Wrought is John Quincy Adams, with a dedication to his memory in the first few pages and a narration of his death in the last. He colors the rest of the book, and not unfairly so. Howe presides over transformations in the US, but instead of reveling in their growing pains and sicknesses, he grasps and affirms their threads of continuity with an early pre-industrial US. Not that one must pick one or the other, but Howe makes his apologia for Whiggery known. This was occasionally odd, since I didn't know the accusation being apologized for. I assumed it was the charge that Whigs represented a kind of American aristocracy that had expression in both the North and South (e.g. many Southern slaveholders were Whigs), and the Democrats, for all their faults, expressed a more "populist" bent.

Howe's "Whiggishness" allows him to capably navigate the layreader (i.e. myself) through a history of the early 19th century with a deftness in capturing and condensing the dimensions of American transformation. This history is elegant, but I couldn't help but feel a fraughtness in it.

The book's time period appears punctuated by wars—the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War—but the years in between span the internationally-significant development of industrial production in the US. Historiography can portray this transformation as either continuous with the US's bourgeois civil-social traditions coming out of the Revolutionary War (or, as is often erroneously depicted, its "proto-capitalism") or as a painful rupture from yeomanry. Howe's ability to create continuity could appear, to me, as minimizing the unsolved ruptures in industrialization. Howe's history appears as a mounting case for contemporary progressivism, built against adversity but raising questions that continue to be raised today. Largely omitted from the history of the two party system, which Howe deeply connects to industrialization and therefore extends into the past and future, are the Workingmen's parties. Like some anti-slavery factions, these were not wholly courted by either Whigs nor Democrats. Unlike those anti-slavery factions, their historical chapter was not closed with the (incomplete) post-war reconstruction process.

Maybe it is apt to prematurely bring up Reconstruction for a book that ends in 1848. Howe has a writing flair that instrumentalizes the transformations he sees towards the Civil War. Howe's writing about this period cannot escape its shadow. Howe mentions certain figures with a poetic flourish with the expectation that we will be charmed by their introduction. Ulysses S. Grant, for example, is introduced as such:

"A young U.S. second lieutenant arriving at Port Isabel on May 2 heard his first hostile gunfire, the distant booming of the Mexican cannon starting to bombard the fort. Ulysses Grant never forgot his reaction: He 'felt sorry' he had joined the Army."

The shadow of the Civil War makes sense when we think about our present moment. We often reach for historical illiberalism or anti-democratic sentiment (mistakenly often conflated into the same thing), albeit in a necessarily distorted way, to understand the apparent illiberalism of our time. Identification and counter-identification with the American Revolution and Civil War run rampant in progressive liberal circles as well as the self-identified Left. We think about 1776 as a continuation of 1619, we think of Lincoln and John Brown and Robert E. Lee and attempt to flatten the past to service our neuroses.

Howe's work, as an authoritative history of an inter-revolutionary period that attempts to condense and prefigure the past, may service this distortion. What Hath God Wrought appears to offer some amelioration in affirming a downtrodden, underdog progressivism emerging from American industrialization, convincing progressives that their struggle is not over in the civil sphere even if the political sphere appears unwelcoming. Perhaps this is also what the Left wants to hear. But at the same time, if the Left can only identify with these progressive causes, and not identify the questions that are not taken up in the civil sphere, then it is to their own detriment.

The conservatism of this approach can be well-expressed by the opening line of the finale—"of the many revolutions in 1848, the most momentous for future humanity was plotted by five women at Jane Hunt's tea table in Waterloo, New York, on the eleventh of July." This is in reference to the organization of the Seneca Falls convention a few days later. This is all good, if 1848 appears only as a shock in the adolescence of modernity. It may be just that. But if it is not, if 1848 signifies a much deeper political horizon referencing a now-lost struggle, then perhaps Howe's approach prematurely closes off more threads than it connects.

This is my self-hosted blog. I don't know if self-hosting is trendy, because there are a lot of subcultures creating a lot of trends, but it feels trendy considering the people I'm around. Nostalgia for the turn of the millennium invokes a kind of world in which a "Pirate Part" could make sense. One of my friends in grad school referenced the old Anarchist point that, with the attempts by the US government to capture stolen revenue that results from illegal downloading of media, many things seem to fall under Smithian rentierdom. Twenty years after that point, we hear about techno-feudalism. Now, our techno-serfs desire to be techno-peasants, thinking that it constitutes a return to the "old web." But I don't know if there is any going back.

There is a lot of imagination surrounding the "old web," which really feels like an amalgamation of gaudy Y2K fantasies coming out of resentment against sites like Twitter/X, Tumblr, etc, which are constantly boycotted but never abandoned. There's a romantic revival of '90s cyberutopianism, where the internet is a place where you can express an identity removed from your body. Maybe this was authentic in the '90s, but now even the revival of that conceit seems cycnical and more geared towards "cultivating a brand" in a post-social-media landscape where everything is your brand. Neocities sites tend to already look antiquated, like the sites are designed for a viewer to marvel at their performative authenticity before the site gets crawled by the Wayback Machine, prematurely archived instead of actually used.

I use Tumblr to maintain a niche blog but I haven't used Twitter/X since the 2020 George Floyd/BLM protests. Most of my online time is spent in Discord/Matrix clients. I make a blog now to keep my thoughts organized and to avoid forgetting things I once thought about. Hopefully as I do creative things, those can also go here. To run a blog requires misplaced confidence that someone will read what you write.