One of the American Revolution’s more obscure figures to have left a good record is the memorably named Harbottle Dorr, a merchant and selectman of colonial Boston with a gift for political diatribes. (For more information, see Bernard Bailyn’s classic essay on Dorr, collected in Faces of Revolution; an earlier version is archived on JSTOR.) His lasting legacy is the 3,280-page “Index and Commentaries of Harbottle Dorr”—a kind of proto-blog in which he assembled, indexed, and marked up decades of newspapers and assorted print materials.

Like most Boston residents, Harbottle Dorr was deeply upset by what became known as the “Horrid Massacre” of May 1770, in which British soldiers stationed in Boston fired on a crowd of civilians.

People used to take away the sand that had touched his feet as relics—one relation kept Gandhi’s fingernail clippings—and modern biographers seem to treat him with much the same reverence today. Mr. Lelyveld is not immune, making labored excuses for him at every turn of this nonetheless well-researched and well-written book.

Andrew Roberts for the WSJ on why Gandhi doesn’t deserve his reputation, and is in some ways an unrecognized failure. I get the sense that Roberts is conflating “he’s a gross person” with “he’s an ineffective politician” but the two parts of the accusation stand on their own. An admirable piece of mean contrarian writing in the Hitchensian tradition, if less funny.

This post is adapted from an assignment in a California history course.

In 1940, the Regents of the University of California dismissed teaching assistant Kenneth May on the grounds of his being an admitted Communist. Nine years later, the Regents formally amended an existing oath of allegiance to the California state constitution—to include an anti-communist clause, with the provision that “the foregoing statement is a condition of… employment.” Many professors refused to sign, and a few were fired. The ensuing conflict over this loyalty oath was largely limited to faculty members (via the Academic Senate and other groups) and the administrators concerned about their politics. But students, too, were drawn into the controversy. In a few cases, they were called on to take the oath themselves; generally, they supported the faculty in opposing “McCarthyism” and the problems it posed for academic freedom. Sources collected in the Bancroft Library’s California Loyalty Oath Digital Collection indicate that UC students were active and vehement opponents of the oath—in many cases just as radical in their opposition as the faculty and staff who were actually required to take the oath.

“There’s a way in which you could think about Cornel as a kind of sick soul,” says Glaude. “In the sense that he begins with the dead, with darkness. He begins with suffering. The blue note. And all too often people want to move too quickly beyond that.”

“That’s the American way,” says West when I raise the question of the blue note and its dismissal, the common conviction that looking forward means forgetting the past. “‘No problem we cannot solve,’” he says, paraphrasing conventional wisdom. Well, that’s a lie. I don’t know why Americans tell that lie all the time.” He laughs, shaking in his chair, mimicking a voice that sounds like a suburban golfer in pants a size too small. “‘No problem we can’t get beyond.’ That’s a lie! But—it generates a strenuous mood.”

Great profile of a fascinating person. I can’t vouch for West’s own writings, or the extent to which he’s just playing a character, but this is worth reading.

The fact that many ordinary Americans continue to want to ask about the Founders evokes no sympathy or understanding whatever from Lepore… Memory is as important to our society as the history written by academics.

This is very weird criticism coming from Gordon Wood, an academic historian at the top of his profession. I thought Lepore’s book was quite fair, and those parts of it that Wood has concrete problems with were mostly anecdotal and personal—“Hearing this person say this reminded me of this counterexample,” that sort of thing. The Whites of Their Eyes is about history, but it’s also by necessity about politics and what Lepore identifies as “historical fundamentalism”—because that’s what the Tea Party is all about. There are perhaps good reasons to leave the Tea Party movement unexamined and unprovoked, but Wood’s argument that disagreeing with misinformed people is rude? Not a good reason.

Bonus link: Gordon Wood, “In Defense of Academic History Writing,” April 2010:

If academic historians want popular narrative history that is solidly based on the monographic literature, then they will have to write it themselves.

Unless they wind up being disrespectful to the memories created by “ordinary Americans,” I guess.

The PirateBox consists of a Debian Linux server running a light-weight Python web server connected to a wireless router configured with DD-WRT Linux firmware. When users join the PirateBox wireless network and open a web browser, they are automatically redirected to the PirateBox welcome page. They can then begin uploading or downloading files.

A file-sharing site in a lunchbox.

Just because you haven’t played it in years doesn’t make it any less fun, and let’s just say it has been a sanity-saver on a few long and Internet-free flights as of late.

Ars Technica reveals you can play Minesweeper on Kindles; the latest model (Kindle 3) also ships with Gomoku. From the Home menu, press Alt-Shift-M to play.

A long and thrilling profile of John Cunningham Lilly, America’s foremost mad dolphin scientist.

In fact, by 1962, Lilly even presided as the “Grand Dolphin” over a kind of semiserious secret society of prominent astrophysicists, radio astronomers, atmospheric chemists, and computer engineers who called themselves “The Order of the Dolphin,” wore small, engraved Tursiops insignia (a little like a tie clip), and exchanged messages in binary code to test each others’ readiness for extraterrestrial contact.

One of these visionary “Dolphins” was a brilliant young Harvard astrophysicist named Carl Sagan, who made his way down to St. Thomas several times in these years to meet Lilly’s dolphins and muse about alternate forms of life in the cosmos.

By 1964, “Want to come and see my dolphins?” had become an irresistible invitation.

This post is adapted from an assignment for an American intellectual history seminar.

Scott Nearing’s Social Sanity: A Preface to the Book of Social Progress (1913) is a call to arms for the late Progressive Era. Nearing’s primary argument in it aligns with a homily often delivered by one of my high school teachers: “Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.” Sanity, in this case, is defined by the willingness to try something new in terms of social and economic organization. The book is an extended discussion of the proposition that “man” is the master of his domain, and need not be shackled by any so-called laws of the status quo:

“We are no more subject to the laws of economics than our ancestors were subject to the laws of military tactics… there is an economic lawgiver—man, who can unmake or remake that which he has made.”

Unlinked means I recommend against getting it. Linked and italicized means it’s actively recommended. Linked but not italicized is somewhere in between. The ordering is not entirely accurate.

This guy does what I do! He has a more specific emphasis on books about current events and political economy, though. And it’s totally cheating to redact certain titles.

This summer, I read and transcribed a lot of California newspapers (Daily Alta California, Sacramento Daily Union, and the S.F. Chronicle) from 1868 and 1856, as part of a research project on 19^th–century communication practices at the School of Information. In the course of this reading, I discovered some weird aspects of California history. Here are some of the more light-hearted bits of newspaper culture, not counting the racism, misogyny, and genocidal anti-Indian sentiments of the period…

Constellations have always been troublesome things to name. If you give one of them a fanciful name, it will always refuse to live up to it; it will always persist in not resembling the thing it has been named for. Ultimately, to satisfy the public, the fanciful name has to be discarded for a common-sense one, a manifestly descriptive one. The Great Bear remained the Great Bear—and unrecognizable as such—for thousands of years; and people complained about it all the time, and quite properly; but as soon as it became the property of the United States, Congress changed it to the Big Dipper, and now everybody is satisfied, and there is no more talk about riots.

—Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897), pg. 80.

I’ve never been very good at recognizing constellations, and now it occurs to me that the names are probably why. If Pegasus) was known instead as The Box with Things Sticking Out of Two Corners, maybe that part of middle school would have been more effective.

“Big Sur is the California that men dreamed of years ago, this is the Pacific that Balboa looked at from the Peak of Darien, this is the face of the earth as the Creator intended it to look.”

—Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

You may, if you are a science nerd, know Robert Hooke (1635-1703) as the author of the Micrographia, the accomplished observer who first identified cells; as the originator of Hooke’s law, a physical approximation of elasticity in springs; or as the man who claimed to have come up with gravitation before Newton. You may even know him as the cranky-but-loveable mascot of the Royal Society in Neal Stephenson’s historical-fiction epic The Baroque Cycle. But you probably don’t associate him with the birth of drug culture in England.

Along with his other duties as a university lecturer and a city surveyor charged with rebuilding London after the Great Fire of 1666, Hooke served as curator of experiments to the Royal Society. This meant, in practical terms, keeping rich dilettantes and impressionable visitors entertained at the regular meetings and trying to raise interest in the Society’s scientific projects. He was charged with procuring and figuring out every imaginable kind of experimental instrument, and arranging demonstrations of all kinds at the Society’s meetings. He was a founding member of the new generation of scientific “virtuosi” in seventeenth-century England.

Living a stressful, experiment-based life, and being in addition a frail yet determined hypochondriac, it’s no surprise that Robert Hooke took all the drugs he could get his hands on.

And, as curator of the Royal Society, he was in a position to get his hands on many drugs.