Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century

The first book by ToM's own Alex Cummings, Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright recently dropped from Oxford University Press.  Based on his dissertation at Columbia, the book traces the winding history of technology, property rights, and music since the invention of sound recording in the 1870s.  From sheet music  to piano rolls, and from reel-to-reel tape to CD-burners, new technologies have constantly raised the question of how sound and music ought to be regulated.  Composers didn't want their songs to be used to make player piano rolls or wax cylinder recordings in the early twentieth century--unless, of course, they were getting paid for the …

David Greenberg Doesn’t Hate Howard Zinn Because He Was a Bad Scholar, but Because He Was a Radical

Rutgers historian David Greenberg has written a hit piece on Howard Zinn that would be hilarious if it weren’t so cringe-inducing.  Actually, it is hilarious.  Greenberg has taken to the pages of The New Republic to remind the world that the late, great Zinn was a puffed-up piece of nothing, whose work ranks at about the level of a coloring book in scholarly terms.  Why?  Because Greenberg is far more sophisticated than all that. Dumping on Zinn is, unfortunately, a bit of a cottage industry, and the celebrated Boston University historian and activist makes an easy target.  His books are widely read, yet he has a good deal more street cred than the airport-reader-and-civil-war-buff …

A Mediating Mess: How American Post-WWII Media Undermined Democracy

Editors notes: This review originally appeared in The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics, and Culture (5.2, pages 254 - 257).  Unfortunately, in its original publication, the review  misidentified Professor Morgan as Edmund rather than Edward. These errors  have been corrected here. Apologies to Prof. Edward P. Morgan for the mishap. When the Swift Boat controversy engulfed the 2004 election campaign, America’s obsession with the Vietnam War once again reared its ugly head.  Democratic candidate and decorated Vietnam Veteran John Kerry’s staunch opposition to the war upon his return from deployment drew harsh critiques from conservatives in the early 1970s and in 2004.  The …

Tropics of Meta’s Best of 2012

It has been a big year for us at ToM, as we rebooted and redesigned the site back in March and welcomed many new contributors.  (Hi, Jude, Lauren, Maryann, Nick, Adam, John, Jonathyne, & co.)  We were also lucky to see several of our pieces circulated more broadly in the online world, such as Alex’s look at the politics of Atlanta’s Beltline, Ryan’s analysis of sexuality in the films of Wes Anderson, and our roundtable discussion of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.  Meanwhile, the manic, occasionally psychotic antics of the US election cycle prompted both mild laceration from our friend Clement, who covered the presidential conventions and debates, as well as the periodic spike in …

The Modern Paul Gilroy: Modernity, Transnationalism, and the Impact of The Black Atlantic on History

Events in Egypt over the past year—its apparent revolution that upended strongman Hosni Mubarak—have been hailed as a victory for democracy.  However, in recent weeks, critics decried the actions of democratically elected president Mohamed Morsi, who adopted dictatorial tactics in pushing through constitutional reforms that would ultimately strengthen his power.  Though he relented, many accused Egypt’s President of betraying the revolution by his apparent return to the heavy-handed nature of his authoritarian predecessor.  While today no one would debate the accuracy of such sentiments in regard to revolution’s meaning, as philosopher Hannah Arendt illustrated in her 1963 work On …

Californication: Race, Ethnicity, and Unity in Twentieth Century California

In the weeks following the 2012 presidential election, the media greeted Barack Obama’s victory with a slew of articles focusing on the apparent coalition that formed around the President’s reelection campaign.  While Mitt Romney garnered a majority of white males, Obama secured clear victories among women and Asian, African, and Latino Americans.  Notably, Latino and Asian Americans threw their collective support behind the president at rates above 70% and were the only two groups whose margins for Obama increased.   Admittedly, Latino immigration has declined significantly.  As a recent Economist leader pointed out, “Fewer Mexicans now move to the United States than come back …

Crayons, Fraternities, and Military Historians: The Perception and State of American Military History

During his luncheon talk at the 1997 meeting of the Society for Military History, John Lynn revealed that a colleague of his at the University of Illinois had inquired if military historians write in crayon. Eleven years later, John Shy, professor emeritus of history at the University of Michigan, reported at the 2008 meeting of the American Historical Association that the head of an American history department proclaimed military history “as of interest only to hormone-driven fraternity boys.”   In the world of academia, a common belief among military historians is that non-military historians tend to equate military history with popular narratives focused narrowly on guns, battles, …

Dog Days Classics: The Wages of Whiteness and the White People Who Love Them

July, 1956. It had been over a decade since the Carnegie Foundation solicited Gunnar Myrdal’s opinion on American race relations. A Nobel Prize in economics and Swedish citizenship rendered him an objective observer. That year James Baldwin wrote a scathing critique of what is now a long forgotten book—Daniel Guerin’s Negroes on the March. “Labor’s interests may often be identical with the Negro’s interests,” Baldwin explains, “but Mr. Guerin fails to understand that, in the light of the white worker’s desire to achieve greater status, his aims and those of the Negro often clash quite bitterly.” (Baldwin, “The Crusade of Indignation”) In the 1986, sociologists …

Dog Days Classics: Robert H. Wiebe and The Search for Order

“Men in confusion clutched what they knew.” This is how Robert Wiebe describes the actions of America’s leaders in their “rudimentary bureaucracy” as the nation entered World War I in 1917. Much of the debacle that followed – both the wave of violent repression at home and the political failures of Woodrow Wilson, outfoxed at Versailles and in the Senate – resulted from just such limits of knowledge and practice. In essence, Progressive leaders used old solutions to solve new problems. But rather than a condemnation of human weakness, this sentence encapsulates Wiebe’s subtly empathetic historical vision: that historical actors of all stripes – radical or conservative, …

Dog Days Classics: A Look Back at Barbara Fields’s “Ideology and Race in American History”

Thirty years after its original publication, Barbara Fields’s essay, “Ideology and Race in American History,” remains one of the preeminent academic investigations into the development of race and racial ideology within American history. I was first exposed to Barbara Fields’s work during a graduate seminar at Columbia University on the post-Reconstruction American South. Fields’s analysis of the roots of racial ideology in American society had a profound impact on my own intellectual outlook. In this post, I aim to reexamine Fields’s classic essay, “Ideology and Race in American History,” along with a later piece, “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of …