The Whiskey Rebellion was this great example of early American state incapacity, like sub-Colonial, medieval – there’s like no viable currency in circulation so frontier grain farmers are basically coining their own by distilling whiskey and refusing to cut the feds in so George Washington himself raises an army – which basically amounts to insisting an army be raised and threatening to impress stray farmers with a handful of regular troops until he eventually gathers a mass of nearby absolute rabble plus every local elite from the area who all insist on being in command in their own way. This mass then sets off under the sitting President’s personal leadership eating, looting, and likely raping its way across its own country, and is considered a testament to Washington’s leadership that it survives intact all the way to Western Pennsylvania, at which point the rebels have already dispersed (and further sub-military expedition attempts to apply federal authority prove largely fruitless).
It was a complete nightmare the Lewis and Clark Expedition was at-the-time understood as a recovery from, a proof of the ability of the United States to sustain disciplined operations across the continent.
(And then the Civil War, and then like every Western country in the world the executive branch restructured and modernized itself modeled off Prussia.)
The Idaho potato industry is actually an offshoot of Mormonism; the desert-exiled tribe set up farms in the irrigated borderlands to grow the nutritious root vegetables to cater their funerals.
twitter will expose you to types of guys that you thought were extinct
A funny angle of knowing American history is appreciating that a lot of the foreign papist hordes streaming in to corrupt New England in H.P. Lovecraft’s time would have been Portuguese
This is such a strange way of categorizing US religion. The Baptist movement is so important to the history of religion in the USA, but on this map it’s completely subsumed into Protestantism (I think?).
I mean I kind of get what you’re getting at, that in America “Protestant” groups together European-heritage (or early American built in their model) “mainline” churches, distinct “evangelical” or “fundamentalist” traditions, and even Second or Third Great Awakening and other domestically founded stuff like the Adventists in an unhelpfully reductive way.
On the other hand, the notion of breaking out specifically the Baptist movement from the rest of American Protestantism seems like such an even stranger and more foreign way of categorizing things to me that it makes me wonder if you’re not in a much Baptist-heavier bubble than me that the distinction seems that significant.
twitter will expose you to types of guys that you thought were extinct
A funny angle of knowing American history is appreciating that a lot of the foreign papist hordes streaming in to corrupt New England in H.P. Lovecraft’s time would have been Portuguese
I remember the military veterans in 4th of July parades being like WWII vets riding surplus Korea equipment, what’re the parades like now it’s down to like, ‘Nam and Iraq?
Or is it like the turn of the 20th century where the institution of military parades trailed off (into things like the Salvation Army and Second KKK!) as the Civil War veterans died out
The “a Black sheriff?!” conceit of Blazing Saddles (1974) was really about how race interacted with the sort of postwar American identity mythologized in cowboy movies, the actual Western frontier was the most likely place in American history to find a Black man in a respected position of authority over whites until the post-Vietnam military.
Now that this flagpole is in place, after the holiday I will regularly be flying a “tea-stained Betsy Ross flag”, because it may just signify “American history!” but that’s probably the right thing to sign the front door of my residence with.
To people younger than mid-30s: I really cannot emphasize enough that Grand Theft Auto: Vice City played a huge shaping effect on later ‘80s retro and those weird Scottish Ameriboos at Rockstar left the legacy that they have now set some of the actual America’s actual sense of cultural history
You see where the culture’s head is at with all the stuff about the affirmative action case being read in terms of the old black-white conflict and ignoring that the actual case is probably the most important Supreme Court decision regarding specifically asians since Korematsu, and represents another in a recent series of high-profile moves of Asian-American political identity away from that paradigm and it’s Dem-liberal administrators in ways similar to “white ethnics” of the 70s.
Like, I’ll totally agree that California NIMBYs are ridiculous and have committed the state to a poorly chosen path, but I don’t think you guys appreciate how very explicitly central “a civilization where everyone lives in a small-town environment with direct exposure to undeveloped nature” has been to the California Dream
Like before even the postwar Golden Age buildout under Gov. Brown the Elder that really instantiated this suburban paradise, the prewar boom of LA was very commonly framed – embraced by boosters to draw more residents – in terms of a job-rich city that uniquely didn’t have “slum” housing.
(You don’t even hear about “slum clearance” – the postwar practice of demolishing blocks at a time and giving the former residents intentions of something better that much anymore, but large areas of downtown-adjacent land in American cities was hyper-dense and low quality tenements or often formerly comfortable-class housing that had been subdivided all to hell)
California had an idiom for “life at high residential density” – the crowded, warrenlike Chinatowns of LA and especially SF since the Gold Rush, chaotically full of improvised enterprise, drug addiction, and murderous gang violence!
In the early 1980s, Long Beach – the industrialized working class shore to the south of LA, kind of its Queens, was like “ha-HA, we have filled this wonderful location at low bungalow density, time to upzone so as to keep this a functional area for working-class life!”
Of course the thing is the 1980s in Southern California went on to feature a massive illegal immigration wave (Cheech Marin’s 1987 Born in East L.A. is called that because it’s about an American-born bilingual Mexican Angelino experiencing this) which often landed in Long Beach AND the crack- and gang- heavy nadir of South LA-area Black communities.
Which is to say, in actual historical precedent that informs cultural sentiment, dense housing in California (let’s talk *Oakland*) consistently means “the white average-Joe neighborhood becomes overrun with inscrutable, addiction-riven, gang-murderous Others”
And the whole environmental stuff – there’s a clear line from John Muir and the Sierra Club through Paul Erlich and The Population Bomb to the Bay Area types who want to cap tech jobs or the people who worry about water (or road!) use coming from new development that the way to keep properly stewarding the land without exhausting finite resources was to limit population.
You can work racial or wevs angles too, a lot of the West Coast issues with natives and Chinese workers came from the way that the coast’s founding culture really came from a “Free Soil” philosophy, common among smallholders and “mechanics” in the (then-“West”), one of the two strains that went into the Republican anti-slavery stance along Boston moralism (New York, as the major port city of an international economy powered by cotton, was fairly pro-Confederate), that this was supposed to be a country to enable white men’s ability to establish self-sufficient petty dynasties of their own, and that indulging all this nonwhite work – creating a national economy oriented around slave-produced agricultural exports rather than white artisan industrial development, Pacific landowners recruiting natives or Chinese in a labor shortage rather than letting white wages rise so the workers could establish their pioneer fortunes – were, fundamentally, taking their jerbs.
And the pastoralism! This was the pleasant climate where the ranch house really blew up, integrating the outdoors and living area. Backyards – and home gardens – were key.
(In a LOT of ways Portland as I came to it at the dawn of the 2010s suddenly reminded me of things I had read about midcentury LA far closer than the one I saw in the 2000s)
Pete Seeger in 1963, “little boxes made of ticky tacky”, Joni Mitchell in 1970, “paved paradise and put up a parking lot”, these were laments for greenfield development coming before the activist-driven 1970s downzonings that saw that greenfield development was the ONLY way for California to add housing.
Also to anyone complaining about countries devoting resources to this sub, the US maintains deep sea capabilities for reasons of state, which includes deep sea rescue capabilities mostly relating to the SLBM leg of the nuclear triad, this was a free practice scenario and like, enrichment for those guys.
Like Air Force SERE and search & rescue, a lot of this isn’t really justified in terms of per-incident return on investment, but by affecting combatants’ senses of the lethality of defeat it changes their payoff matrices in ways that minimize principal-agent problems.
Same as the Great Ghost Dance or General Butt Naked convincing warriors they had magical protection from the enemy, or Japanese, Christian, or Islamic ideas of death at war as an honor bringing afterlife rewards (with chaplains embedded with armies to reinforce the sense of protection against ultimate annihilation), or even a lot of the function of battlefield medics in an explosive age (from a government perspective a multiple amputee soldier is just as much a total loss as a dead one, and costs for ongoing care besides) – shifting some margin of your forces’ energies from self-protection to mission success is huge
I 100% first heard about the Great Ghost Dance via the Shadowrun sequel.
when two musicians sing into the same microphone and lean in very close to each other… like omg are you guys gonna kiss now to relieve the homoerotic tension?😳
THIS IS NOT ABOUT ONE DIRECTION I DON’T KNOW WHO THIS “HARRY” PERSON IS GO WATCH BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND CLARENCE CLEMONS KISS ON STAGE RIGHT NOW
op is the only valid person i’ve ever met. everyone else needs to come to the light
Okay, but this is really important: Bruce Springsteen occupied this really weird place in music history. His songs were all from this pessimistic, nihilistic view of an America that had let him down:
Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.
Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.
It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thriller video.
Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.
So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.
Passages from American Popular Music by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman
I used to think that Bruce and Clarence kissing onstage was exuberance, showmanship, and telling racist homophobes to fuck off. Like, they picked up a certain kind of audience and went “Racist homophobes? Not in our house!” And started the kissing then but then I actually looked it up and
It was a story where… we remade the city. We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing. - Bruce Springsteen
It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage
It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own
Clemons said in one interview. “Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for.” In another version of the story, Clemons says “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love.”
I’m having some emotions about it!
“He was elemental in my life,“ Springsteen adds, “and losing him was like losing the rain.”
Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!
We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!
God I’m not okay about it
Now I’m mad that this is not among any of the things I was ever told about this artist.
I knew about this in general (& via all those fabulous photos), but this just adds even more beautiful context <3
Just to add to the pile: this was the cover of Springsteen’s break-through album Born to Run, in 1975:
I mean, will you LOOK at this:
This was the pic chosen for the album cover from an extensive photoshoot, too. A few others:
There’s a lot more online if you search. They’re all pretty amazing. But the photographer is right, the one chosen for the album cover just pops.
Love.
@executeness i just need you to know that from the moment i first saw your addition a little over a year ago, “Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world! […] In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!” has rarely left my brain.
“In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!” fundamentally rewrote something in my brain.
thank you.
The American Reagan 1980s represented a successful reactionary reconstruction and anything that originated before them but retained a presence in American culture through to the other side had been largely reinterpreted to fit; I remember in the 1990s Springsteen was understood as a tribune of the (Eastern seaboard) white working class and the tribulations they endured as industrial Keynesianism failed (and Democrats substituted Blacks for The Working Man as the beneficiaries of their efforts)
if i ever write something set in the united states im just going to do zero research whatsoever and make stuff up to sound cool it’s equality
the lush impenetrable jungles of massachusetts
try driving through the historic part of Boston and you’ll see that this is true
New England was heavily forested, its major utility on behalf of Britain was producing wood (incl. large old-growth trees for unspliced masts) and sap-derived tar for sealing ships (also ashes for lye production!) it was essentially a EUIV Naval Supplies province.
Americans making up the weird-ass fake name “Waldo” instead of using the real normal name “Wally” that the rest of the world uses is so strange
It’s German. The early population of America was heavily German – with no overseas colonies of their own, the German diaspora (starting before German unification, of course) spread through the Americas – the thing about Nazis expatriating to Argentina postwar was that was the most advanced Germanophone community outside the WWII combatants – but a serious ethnosuppressionist campaign around entry to WWI has obscured this ever since.
