Jack N. Rakove | Lightnews

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 23h

Reminds me of a quasi-seminar I went to with Oscar Handlin circa 1971, including some visiting Russians. Handlin asked, how do historians know when a narrative should begin?Long earnest discussion followed. Then Oscar shrugged his shoulders and basically said, you just decide it somehow.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 1d

There are worse fates when one reads a serious and deeply learned book like Jim's.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 1d

Food fact you'll like: Kettner made fried bananas for us once when his grad school roommie was a future governor of Mississippi (talk about settler colonialism) and secretary of the navy. I have fond memories of Jim hard at work in the main reading room of Widener Library. A legend at Dwinelle Hall

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 1d

Looks like a go and will post it when it appears. Should be fun.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 1d

If you are teaching AP, it might be fun to ask your students to read up on James Plumb Martin or, for that matter, Benedict Arnold (allegations of treason being much in the news these days).
As for watching I'll only say that I thought it pretty boring, visually, beyond my objections to the content.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 1d

and the list could go on and on, which is exactly why studying the Revolution as a political event proves far more challenging and informative than retracing its military history, though of course that subject too is quite engaging

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d

Or maybe 5th grade if you just read the World Book, my go to encyclopedia when I attended the since-renamed J. J. Finley School (an obscure Confederate general) in Gainesville FL in 1956-57 and "edited" our class book on the Revolution.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d

Definitely. But I think it is becoming much more complicated with the recent book by Kevin Kenny and the forthcoming book by @unlawfulentries.bsky.social (a.k.a. Anna Law). Although I still think my grad school friend Jim Kettner's book, The Development of American Citizenship, remains fundamental.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d

Well worth a read for its ironclad reasoning, no matter how much its conclusions will depress you.

www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

This is all John Roberts’ fault

Trump owes his corrupt and abusive reign to one man.

www.motherjones.com

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d

Can I speak up as Mr. Articles of Confederation here? One could easily integrate the western-lands story of why it took over three years to get it ratified with the impact of the Revolution on native peoples.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d

The concluding comments on the Constitution are essentially eighth-grade level.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d

I need a better definition than that, and Charles I might wish a word with you. And then there's the age-old question about the different models of revolution illustrated in the US and France. But my basic point is that the war subsumes everything and this political stuff is pretty marginal.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d

But that goes to my main point: what makes the Revolution revolutionary are the political changes that began when royal power collapsed in 1774-75? You can't talk about 1787 intelligently if you don't go back start to the creation of new governments in the mid-1770s, which the series fails to do.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d

Yes, and I have an idea of how and where I may express them at greater length. Stay tuned.
In the end this is not a story about a revolution; it's really only about a war of national liberation.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d

Having just watched the final episode of Ken Burns' series on the American Revolution reach its platitudinous conclusions, it did seem to me that there was one curious omission. It never asks the question, what was it that made the Revolution revolutionary? Who knows?

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d

It was just an editing error. Once or twice I saw Walton on a bike. Quite a sight.

Hillary Rodham Clinton @hillaryclinton.bsky.social · 2d

With his ultimatum that Ukraine surrender to Russia, Trump finally wins a prize:

The Neville Chamberlain award for betraying peace, freedom, and justice.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d

Whatever one thinks of Mamdani--and I do not think that local chapters of Hamas are about to start drilling in Central Park--he has already proven that he is quite a political strategist, so I would not second-guess him (at least yet).
And at this point, nothing could ever legitimize Trump.

Heidi Kitrosser @heidikitrosser.bsky.social · 2d

The Trump - Mamdani meeting obviously makes Trump look silly. But I confess to feeling unease that Mamdani took the meeting at all. Isn’t it a bit legitimizing? I’m torn on this, so I’m genuinely curious what people think.

Heidi Kitrosser @heidikitrosser.bsky.social · 2d

The Trump - Mamdani meeting obviously makes Trump look silly. But I confess to feeling unease that Mamdani took the meeting at all. Isn’t it a bit legitimizing? I’m torn on this, so I’m genuinely curious what people think.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d

Big oops--I omitted that it was Bill Walton's son Adam who went to the Buttons and Bows Montessori school with my son. (My bad, as you say after you throw the ball away.)

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d

We gave Kaye an honorary degree at Colgate when I was teaching there. It was one of the two times that I felt too shy to introduce myself--why, I don't know. The other occasion was when one of his sons and one of mine attended the same nursery school in Palo Alto, the year he spent at Stanford Law.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d

de gustibus non est disputandum

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d

In class my usual film references were
(1) Arsenic and Old Lace: "When you say others? Do you mean, OTHERS?"
(2) Ghostbusters: "I'm a little fuzzy about this whole good and bad thing."
Never found room, though, for "the vessel with the pestle" routine.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ9f...

The Pellet with the Poison's in the Vessel with the Pestle - The Court (7/9) Movie CLIP (1956) HD

YouTube video by Movieclips

www.youtube.com

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 2d

I can't give you a final grade on this but that's certainly a plausible hypothesis.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 3d

That's a great way to put it. One could have done so much more with the collapse of royal authority everywhere in 1774-75, the way in which the resistance apparatus of the colonists has an effectively republican character, and so on. But if mentioned at all they remain incidental to the war.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 3d

I would say disturbing as well as defining. This is for PBS, after all, not the History Channel. And shouldn’t some part of Southern audiences be disturbed any how?

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 3d

Yes, we all got a kick out of it. Of course it’s not the same as being mentioned in Good Will Hunting, as Gordon Wood was.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 3d

As I wrote in a prior thread, what IS the point of neglecting Reconstruction in order to focus on aging veterans, as the CW series did (I think) in its final episode?

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 3d

Not sure what would be left if you cut Atkinson. He is the dominant voice in the program and now the most popular military historian of the Revolution. But the British authorities have been great.

Jack Rakove @jrakove.bsky.social · 3d

I'd agree with one but not the other. It wouldn't take much to guess which. But neither one is getting much air time.
And as I noted before, Atkinson is taking the part of Shelby Foote in the CW series. Foote was a Lost Cause guy, whereas Atkinson deals only with the war, nothing more, nothing less.

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