Peggy Pascoe is Professor of History and Ethnic Studies at the University of Oregon. Her book, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America, has won two awards from the Organization of American Historians: the Lawrence Levine Prize for the best book on American cultural history and the Ellis Hawley Prize for the best book on political economy or American institutions. In the post below she looks at the actions of Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell.  Read her previous OUPblog post here.

Louisiana Justice of the Peace Keith Bardwell refuses to marry interracial couples. He’s been doing so for years, but it wasn’t until October 2009, when he refused to marry Beth Humphrey and Terence McKay, that his actions attracted attention.

Appalled by Bardwell’s practice of checking with every couple who comes before him to see if they are interracial, then insisting that interracial couples go to other justices of the peace for their wedding ceremonies , Humphrey and McKay, the ACLU, the NAACP, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, and Louisiana Senator Mary L. Landrieu have all called for Bardwell’s resignation.

Bardwell insists he hasn’t done anything wrong. “It is my right,” he said, “not to marry an interracial couple.” He doesn’t even understand why Humphrey and McKay were offended by his refusal. “I’m not a racist,” he insists. “I try to treat everyone equally.”

“In some parts of this country,” a friend of mine commented wryly, “it’s still the 1930s.” For most of American history, Bardwell’s refusal to marry an interracial couple would have been standard public policy. Laws against interracial marriage were, in fact, America’s longest-lasting and most fundamental form of race discrimination.

After the first such law was passed by the colony of Maryland in 1664, miscegenation laws thrived for the next three centuries. By the 1930s, 30 states banned interracial marriage, many of them prohibiting whites from marrying Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, and American Indians as well as blacks.

Courts justified these laws by insisting that interracial marriage was “unnatural,” a claim that became so pervasive that by 1958, 94 percent of Americans told pollsters they opposed interracial marriage. Judges claimed that because the laws punished both the black and white partners to an interracial marriage, they affected blacks and whites “equally.” Like Keith Bardwell, they persuaded themselves that equality somehow demanded that public officials refuse to marry interracial couples.

The U.S. Supreme Court exposed the absurdity of this line of thinking in the 1967 case of Loving v. Virginia, which declared Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage unconstitutional. “There can be no doubt,” Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote, “that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause.” Ever since the Loving decision, refusing to marry an interracial couple has been—and despite Bardwell’s protestations, still is—a clear denial of constitutional rights.

In the forty years since Loving, there has been a historic turnabout in public opinion; today most whites and blacks tell pollsters they approve of interracial marriage. There has also been a steady increase in interracial marriages, which now number in the millions. According to some estimates, in 2005 as many as 7% of American married couples were interracial, though the number of marriages between whites and blacks stood at a much more modest 422,000.

Yet it would be a mistake to assume that attitudes like Bardwell’s can be safely consigned to the past. A significant segment of several state populations still refuses to recognize that interracial marriage is a legal right. In 1999 and 2000, when South Carolina and Alabama finally got around to removing bans on interracial marriage from their state constitutions, the public vote was roughly 60 percent for removing the bans and 40 percent for leaving them in the state constitutions.

In other words, Keith Bardwell is entirely wrong, but he’s not entirely alone. Perhaps this helps explain why he’s gotten away with his outrageous behavior for so long. In the end, though, it only makes it all the more important that he be removed from public office. The disappointed bride, Beth Humphrey, said it best. “He doesn’t believe he’s being racist,” she said, “but it is racist.”

Professor Christian Kay joined the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary project in 1969, working on it right up to publication this month. In this original post, she reflects on the successes and challenges of forty years’ work on this amazing feat of scholarship.

Click here to read more OUPblog posts on the HTOED.

Publication of the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary (HTOED) took place on 22nd October 2009. It was celebrated by a party at Glasgow University, where the project was developed, attended by over 100 people. I was proud to be one of them.

The project was started in 1965 by Professor M. L. Samuels, who, at the age of 89, was present at the party and gave a short talk. Also on the platform was another founder member, Professor Jane Roberts, who supplemented our Oxford English Dictionary-based data with material from Old English (c700 to 1150 AD) not included in the OED. The quartet of editors was completed by Irené Wotherspoon and myself, both of whom joined the project in 1969, as Research Assistants funded by the Leverhulme Trust. By that time, Irené was completing the first postgraduate thesis based on Historical Thesaurus materials, A Notional Classification of Two Parts of English Lexis.

The appointment of Irené and myself was a significant departure for the project in that it was an acknowledgment that it would never be completed without full-time assistance – originally it had been conceived as a research activity for teaching staff and graduate students. We settled down with our volumes of the OED and our packets of paper slips to compile data for inclusion in the thesaurus. My first letter was L, which contains some very challenging words, such as ‘lay’ and ‘lie’, whose meanings I had to distribute around the semantic categories of the work.

The 1970’s brought other challenges. Michael Samuels and I started working on a system of classification suited to large amounts of historical data, and we began recruiting doctoral students to work on specific sections of data, such as Religion or Goodness. We also faced a situation which was to become horribly familiar: running out of money. My job became part-time, and I supplemented my income by freelance work for publishers and writing textbooks. The situation was saved for me in 1979, when I became a full-time lecturer in the English Language Department. Irené had already departed for the south of England, where she raised three children and continued to work freelance for HTOED.

The downside of having a more secure job (‘at last’, said my family) was having less time for project work. In addition to my new role as a teacher, I found myself increasingly involved with thesaurus administration. We took our first tentative steps into computing at the urging of OUP, who wanted the project delivered electronically, and I spent much time in mutually uncomprehending discussions with computing experts. I also developed skills in fund-raising and people management: in the 1980’s we began to take on trainee lexicographers and typists to do preliminary classification and data entry. When Professor Samuels retired in 1989, I took over the administration completely.

The ever-present question, asked repeatedly by funders, University authorities, and OUP, was “When will the project be finished?” This was a difficult question to answer, and involved such arcane skills as calculating the number of slips to a filing drawer, multiplying by the number of drawers, and working out the percentage completed in relation to the total in the OED. We came close to finishing in the early 1980’s, when we completed slip-making for the first edition of the OED, but by that time OUP had started producing supplements, and then a second edition, so we ploughed on, combining slip-making with classification. For the remaining years of the project, funding became easier, and we were able to employ both full-time assistants and graduate students on a part-time basis. Overall, I calculate that about 230 people played an active part in the project during its 44-year history.

Over the past few weeks, various people (mainly journalists) have asked me “Why did it take so long?” The answer is partly that we never had enough money, but also that work of this kind requires a good deal of careful human input. If you are faced with, say, 10,000 slips containing words which have something to do with Food or Music, arriving at an acceptable classification is not the work of a few hours.

Classification and data entry proceeded through the 1990’s and early 2000’s, with glimmers of light occasionally visible at the end of the tunnel. One highlight of this period was the publication in 1995 of A Thesaurus of Old English by Jane Roberts and myself, which proved that we could at least finish something. Another was my promotion to a professorship in 1996. However, the best moment of all came on 29th September 2008, when the disk containing the final text went off to OUP, followed in August 2009, after a tough period of proofreading, by the appearance in Glasgow of the first copy of HTOED.

The National Book Award nominees were announced earlier this week. Kudos to all nominees, especially to our friends & compatriots at the nominated University Presses. I am glad to see the great good wisdom of the nominating committee at the NBAs. Congratulations aside, it is tradition here in the OUP publicity dept to host a little friendly contest to see who can pick the most NBA winners. This year I am inviting our blog readers to join the fray and send me your picks.  Details below.

Please note there is a point system in this contest. Correct picks in Fiction and Non-fiction will each receive 1 point each, 2 points for a correct pick in YA literature, and 3 points for a correct pick in the Poetry category. Please, only one submission per person. Send your entry to publicity.us@oup.com.

In the event of a tie, all entrants with the highest score will be placed in a raffle for prizes. Prizes include a copy of Garner’s Modern American Usage (3rd edition), the Oxford American Writer’s Thesaurus, The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, and the Historical Thesaurus of the OED. One prize per player. I reserve the right to disqualify anyone I feel is trying to game this friendly competition. Awards are announced on November 18th. Winners here will be announced on November 20, 2009. Good luck.

FICTION (1 point)
Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage (Wayne State University Press)
Colum McCann, Let the Great World Spin (Random House)
Daniyal Mueenuddin, In Other Rooms, Other Wonders (Norton)
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite (Alfred A. Knopf)
Marcel Theroux, Far North (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

NONFICTION (1 point)
David M. Carroll, Following the Water: A Hydromancer’s Notebook (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Sean B. Carroll, Remarkable Creatures: Epic Adventures in the Search for the Origins of Species (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt)
Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King: The Life and Legend of Mithradates, Rome’s Deadliest Enemy (Princeton University Press)
T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (Alfred A. Knopf)

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE (2 points)
Deborah Heiligman, Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith (Henry Holt)
Phillip Hoose, Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
David Small, Stitches (W. W. Norton & Co.)
Laini Taylor, Lips Touch: Three Times (Arthur A. Levine Books/Scholastic)
Rita Williams-Garcia, Jumped (HarperTeen/HarperCollins)

POETRY (3 points)
Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan University Press)
Ann Lauterbach, Or to Begin Again (Viking Penguin)
Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon, Open Interval (University of Pittsburgh Press)
Keith Waldrop, Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy (University of California Press)

Jennifer Fisher, is Associate Professor of Dance, University of California, Irvine, and co-editor of When Men Dance: Choreographing Masculinities Across Borders with Anthony Shay, Assistant Professor of Dance and Cultural Studies at Pomona College.  The book offers a progressive vision that boldly articulates double-standards in gender construction within dance and brings hidden histories to light in a globalized debate.  In the original article below Fisher looks at the Tom DeLay’s appearance on “Dancing with the Stars.”  You can watch the video of his appearance here.

It would be easy to say that Republicans shouldn’t dance because they are out of step with the times, so I won’t say that. Exactly. But sometimes, dance metaphors are really useful—like when you’re confronted with the image of former house majority leader Tom DeLay, who shook his booty as a contestant on this season’s “Dancing with the Stars.” It has to make you wonder if dancing doesn’t always reveal more than we suspect it might. It’s true that the popular TV series has traditionally been used to boost the image of fading or disgraced “personalities,” along with some merely adventurous athletes and soap stars, but this had to be a first. It was not only a moment designed to sell the products in commercials between the action (because it is, after all, television), it was one to make us ponder who should be dancing and who should not, bless their publicity seeking hearts.

I used to get a big laugh when I invited my dance history students to imagine a world in which then-president George W Bush had to study dancing in order to look powerful on the ballroom floor. That’s what world leaders from Louis XIV to George Washington had to do, in an age when a manly image did not exclude the wearing of silk brocade breeches and mastering the art of the pirouette. Alas, guys just don’t dance now if they want to be taken seriously as world leaders—they have to keep both feet on the ground, like John Wayne would have if he’d held elected office. A shame, really. Leaders in many locations in Africa, of course, have always danced to look powerful, taking up space, keeping their own rhythm, ruling a whole bunch of people not afraid to move.

But in today’s American political climate, nearly every man fears looking dorky while dancing—just picture Bush in that youtube clip trying to “get down” with between an African drummer and dancer on Africa Malaria Day. It’s no wonder it’s impossible for my students to imagine a conservative man in a suit who can let his hair down and boogie in flashy clothes like John Travolta. Could a solid but goofy looking Republican dip his partner? Let his backbone slip? Bust a serious move? The very idea was hilarious. And yet, in an odd twist of fate, this fantasy became reality on “Dancing with the Stars”. Tom DeLay actually became the poster boy for Republicans gone wild. When he made his first entrance as a contestant, wagging his nether regions and playing air guitar to the strains of “Wild Thing,” it was hard to know where to look. Maybe the intent was to look fun and vulnerable. He only succeeded in looking out of step.

Of course, because there is always a need for “news of the very weird” somewhere between the real news and the sports, we had been prepared for the event. Journalists must have burned the midnight oil winnowing down the number of catch phrases to describe it—“Republican Steps Left,” “The Hammer does the Hustle,” and, more to the point, “DeLay dances back into the limelight.” After all, no one mistook Delay’s decision to compete on a TV dance competition as a bid to master another skill or find his next career as a comedian. “Dancing with the Stars” is all about gaining visibility for the “stars” (the personalities) and, for the producers, it’s all about selling products with personal tales of triumph over the odds. Very quickly, dance metaphors in the press pointed to the real subject—partisan politics and a possible comeback for the disgraced politician. “DeLay dances all over the leaderless GOP,” one said after DeLay was interviewed, and “Delay cha-cha-ing back into the GOP fray.”

Stephen Colbert came up with a joke about how DeLay “gerrymandered” the bones in his feet in preparation for the competition—not a great laugh but a reminder about the fact that the former congressman had been accused of gerrymandering schemes and was indicted by a Texas grand jury for breaking campaign finance laws. “DeLay is no wild thing,” his reviews said, and surely they were referring to his terpsichorean skills rather than trying to counter the allegations that shadowed his political career. Or were they?

In the process of covering this painful (for dance lovers) DeLay dance debut, a lot was revealed about perceptions of dance, as well as the fear most men have of dancing. A few examples: An ABC interviewer started out by pointing out that DeLay’s daughter is a professional dancer, but DeLay himself was a very serious guy, so how did he put the two things together? Strike one for the seriousness of dance. But that wasn’t the point. DeLay answered that conservatives can also let their hair down and have fun. Strike two—we’ve all seen Bush wave his hands in imitation of dance and Obama sway with the instincts of the adept, so we know not everyone has success letting their hair down. Strike three was a rhetorical slip when Delay responded to, “Why go on Dancing with the Stars?” He said, “I love dancin’, I’ve been dancin’ all my life—I haven’t danced for about 20 years, but I love dancin’.” Yes, congressman, but are you or have you ever been a member of a dancing party? Dance-wise, he should have taken the fifth before he proved so inconsistent a witness.

But, you say, give the guy a break—he gave dancing a try, big-time. At least you might have said that after seeing him struggle in that “Wild Thing” number (check youtube if your stomach is strong). Does that make him part of that maverick breed of American men who don’t care about the “real men don’t dance” stereotype? It’s a very brave category of individualists who choose to dance despite the obstacles for men. It takes a man who is secure of his masculinity to let go of the iron man mentality and embrace his softer, more bodily articulate side. Now, they are brave, bucking macho trends and creating new visions of what men can do. Is Tom DeLay one such guy? Nah. In a pre-show interview, DeLay exhibited the classic timid male fear of sequins and pink and, although there was much kidding about developing his “feminine side,” this seems more of a gimmick that a growth experience for the man who’s house when he was a bachelor used to be known as “Macho Manor.”

You want to give him credit for wearing a sequin lined vest for his first cha-cha appearance, and for the sheer nerve of risking choreography in an arena where he couldn’t hide his incompetence. But then you feel an agenda somewhere, based on the knowledge of DeLay’s past views and inflexibility. Somehow, his dancing doesn’t look like he’s learning how to go with the flow or make a move in the right direction. It looks a whole lot more like faking it to get attention. “The body never lies,” Martha Graham said famously. But the jury is still out on that one.

Stephen T. Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, where he holds the title of Distinguished Scholar.  His newest book, On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears, is a wide-ranging cultural and conceptual history of monsters-how they have evolved over time, what functions they serve, and what shapes they are likely to take in the future.  It is with this monstrous perspective (sorry I know it is an awful pun) that Asma looks at Where the Wild Things Are in honor of its release this weekend.

With hindsight it seems fitting that Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are (1963) first appeared in cultural space somewhere between Elvis Presley and the Beatles. Where the Wild Things Are is a rock’n’roll story, about being misunderstood, rebelling against authority, letting your hair down, and generally indulging in the Dionysian rumpus. It’s not surprising, then, that the new film version (Warner Brothers) is brought to us by skateboarding music-video director Spike Jonze and literary mega-hipster Dave Eggers.

As the movie’s trailer reminds us, “Inside all of us is a wild thing.” And in our therapeutic era, we generally accept that it is good and healthy to visit our wild things –to let them off their chains, let them howl at the moon. You can also taste some of this Romanticism in the recent relish of the Woodstock anniversary, with its celebration of noble primitivism. But the hippy view of “the wild” is quite sunny, whereas Sendak (who lost family during the Holocaust) wanted to acknowledge some of the darker aspects of uncivilized life (even, or especially, through the eyes of a child). Despite these darker notes, however, Where the Wild Things Are still affirms the idea that danger, at least in small doses, is good for you. And this latest fascination with beasties, together with the approach of Halloween, reminds us that we have a love/hate relationship with monsters generally. We are simultaneously attracted and repulsed by them.

Sendak’s monsters are just repulsive enough to be alien, foreign, and mysterious, but they’re also vaguely cute and familiar enough for us to identify with them and recognize our emotional selves in them. Sendak claimed in later interviews that the monsters were based loosely on his boyhood perceptions of his frightening aunts and uncles. Like a distant relation, our uncanny monsters are alien aspects of our own identity –they are parts of who we are, unfamiliar aspects of our psyches. This common way to read monsters –as primitive, uncivilized versions of ourselves –is obvious in Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or the forthcoming Universal Pictures remake The Wolfman, starring Anthony Hopkins and Benicio del Toro. Monster stories have a cathartic function, in the sense that they give our tamed, repressed impulses a brief holiday of Bacchanalian revelry. And after these virtual trips to our own hearts of darkness, we can better return to our everyday social world of compromise, accommodation, and compliance. On this account, the monster story is the favorite genre of our reptilian brains (the real home where the wild things are).

However, every era has its own uses and abuses of monsters. The lesson of Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, is often taken as a liberal lesson in tolerance: we as a society must not create outcasts, or persecute those who are different. Or consider that the medieval mind was obsessed with giants and mythical creatures as God’s punishments for the sin of pride. And the medieval period also began the Church’s long fascination with demon possession. For the Greeks and Romans, monsters were prodigies –warnings of impending disaster.

Besides the cuddly monsters of Where the Wild Things Are, our present day fascination seems dominated by zombies, vampires, and serial killers. Why are we so entranced by these specific creatures –why do we love to hate them?

Not only are there more zombies around these days, but they seem to be getting faster and more aggressive. Gone are the slow lumbering goons of the George Romero-era zombies, and in their stead we have lightning fast undead predators. Zombies, just like vampires, serial killers and most other monsters are terrifying because you cannot really reason with them. Unlike your other enemies, you cannot appeal to monsters to recognize that you’re a good hearted person, or you’ve got kids, or you really understand their pain, or you only want to understand them in the name of science. They’ll pummel you and eat you anyway. There’s not much common ground, in terms of rationality or emotional solidarity. One suspects there is a link between a decade of American fear of terrorists, and a rise in zombie monsters that do not respond to negotiation.

But zombies also have unique qualities that trigger the dynamic of love/hate, attraction/repulsion. Everybody wants to live forever. That’s a given. If you can’t remember wanting to live forever, then you’re probably a successful and functional adult. But the inner narcissist –the one that thinks he’s God and wants to live forever –is still in you somewhere, buried deep. The zombie, like the vampire, is a kind of immortal: chop his leg off, he’s still coming; blow a hole in his chest, he’s still coming. His life span is indefinite and he’s indestructible. So the little narcissist inside us really likes the immortal aspect of the zombie and the vampire. We unconsciously crave that kind of staying power and durability, but our narcissistic desire to cheat death is impossible to sustain in the face of mature experience. Reality regularly reminds us, as we are growing up, that we will not cheat death. No one actually cheats death. To carry on in the fantasy world of the narcissistic inner-child is impossible given the brute facts of our animal mortality. So the universal urge to live forever must be repressed, as we grow up. This repression means that the desire must be transformed from positive to negative –from something we like, to something disgusting (just like in potty training).

We love to hate zombies because they simultaneously manifest our craving for immortality, and our more mature realization that the flesh always decays. As “living dead,” all zombies elicit those conflicting impulses in our psyche. The more disgusting they are, the more we are reminded of our inevitable decomposition, but the more they keep getting up and chasing, the more we are delighted by the promise of immortality. The psyche seems to carry out an unconscious vacillation: the zombies live on forever, those lucky sods, but wait…they’re disgusting and repellent and…and…run!

Vampires are a much more glamorized and sexualized version of the attraction/repulsion dynamic. From Polidori’s original Vampyre, to Stoker’s Dracula, to today’s teen vampires of Twilight, the blood drinkers are, generally speaking, totally hot. The play of sexual taboos in vampire stories is well appreciated. But in addition to the always titillating presence of neck-kissing and the exchange of bodily fluids, we have to recognize that vampires are romantic monsters. They are incarnations of the irresistible but damaging femme fatal for boys, and the “bad boy” or cad for girls. A vampire is frequently an archetype of the charismatic, handsome, man, who seduces women by his very indifference toward them. Women find him alluring and seek chase, only to discover too late that they are broken upon his heartless unmovable nature. The vampire holds out the promise of love, but alas lacks even humanity.

Vampires and zombies share another well-spring of horror: you could easily become one. You or your loved one is just a little bite away from contracting the disease. In the age of AIDS, swine flu, SARS, and myriad pandemic anxieties, it’s easy to see why monsters who transmit their monstrosity through bites (both sexual and gustatory) are especially frightening. In the medieval mind, monsters and demons were metaphysically different from you and I, and in the unlikely event that you were transformed into one you could be sure it was the result of serious sin. Nowadays, however, casual, accidental contact can make you “one of them.”

One suspects that losing one’s humanity, or becoming one of them, is also at play in our dread fascination with serial killers –real and imagined monsters. We have extensive media coverage, and corresponding public appetite, for real serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer, Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Ed Gein, as well as the popular fictional characters Norman Bates, Sweeney Todd, Hannibal Lecter, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface, Michael Myers, and so on. Why are so many of us repelled, disgusted, and morally outraged, but also willing to lay out cash to see psychotic murderers hang people on meat hooks, sever limbs, and of course eat their innocent victims?

Before the 1950s, very few people would have suggested that a serial killer was anything like you, or I, or churchgoing folks. And yet, now it is commonplace for people to think of psychopaths as just slight (albeit horrifying) deviations on the otherwise normal brain or psyche. A murdering psychopath is not a demon-possessed creature or an offspring of Cain, but a guy who failed to develop normal levels of human compassion. Most of us believe that the exact causes of monstrous serial killing will be found eventually in brain science or developmental psychology or some combination, but we don’t think that Gacy, Dahmer, Hannibal Lecter, or Leatherface, are metaphysically different from us. We have secularized the evil of such psychopaths only recently, and maybe this is one reason why we love to hate them.

Just as Sendak’s monsters give us a kind of Rousseauian view of going “back to the wild” (wherein the authentic self is discovered, uncorrupted by society), so too Leatherface and similar monsters of “torture porn” give us a kind of Freudian view of going native. We’re attracted to serial killers because they lack conscience, hurt their enemies with impunity, and feel very little. They do the stuff we might do, if we had not been socialized properly. We’re attracted to their animalistic primitive powers. But we’re simultaneously repulsed by them because they lack the precise qualities that make us human.

If Rousseau and the hippies are right, then our inner primitive monsters will be more like Sendak’s beasties; weird, a little dangerous, but ultimately helpful. If, however, Freud is right about the kinds of monsters inside us, then we shouldn’t go too often or too long to where the wild things are.

Like rock’n’roll, the wild primitivism of monsters is tempered by bourgeois (and simply human) needs for security, safety and stability. Howlin’ Wolf is sanitized into Elvis, the “long haired” Beatles have to wear suits, the mud-soaked Woodstock kids are ready to go home after the weekend, and Sendak’s little “Max” misses his mom and leaves his monsters to return to “his very own room where he found his supper waiting for him, and it was still hot.”

In honor of the new Ken Burns series starting on PBS next Sunday we asked Donald Worster, Hall Distinguished Professor of American History, University of Kansas and the author of A Passion For Nature: The Life of John Muir, to take a look at the series and let us know what he thought. His response is below. Tune in on Sunday and let us know what you think in the comments.

I have been watching the new Ken Burns series for PBS, “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea,” and it is a gorgeous and inspiring achievement. The hero of the series, and of our long history of creating national parks, is John Muir, the subject of my recent biography. Muir had nothing to do with setting aside Yellowstone park in 1872, but he was the main force behind the preservation of Yosemite, and he was the founder of a movement that would go on to add the Grand Canyon, Great Smoky Mountains, Big Bend, Cape Cod, Haleakala, Glacier Bay, and many others. Altogether, Americans would set aside more than two hundred million acres in a vast, diverse system of terrestrial parks and marine preserves spanning the continent and the Pacific Ocean. Muir would have endorsed the claim that those parks are this nation’s best idea ever. But what is the idea behind the parks?

“Recreation” is a commonly expressed purpose of the parks, which usually means outdoor exercise in the form of hiking, camping, fishing, or boating. But one can find mere physical exercise in a gymnasium. Muir understood that recreation should be a “re-creating” of our inner selves through immersion in nature. In his 1901 book Our National Parks he wrote that the parks should offer “wildness” (another word for “nature”) and that “wildness is a necessity.” A nation of “tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people” seek in the parks an escape from “the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury.” They go there to reawaken something deep within their souls—a sense of being part of the natural world. Modern society has repressed that feeling of connectedness, of kinship with other forms of life, and has buried people under the burdens of too much work, too much economic insecurity, too much noise and machinery.

Muir thought the parks should be preserved for poor people as well as rich. Americans of all sorts shared the same need for getting back in touch with nature. The rich could buy a private summer retreat in the Adirondacks or a ranch high up in the Santa Barbara mountains, but the poor could not. They could, however, claim a right of access to the “people’s parks,” although it was not clear in 1901 how an impoverished sharecropper or a low-wage factory worker could afford traveling to a park. Muir seems to have assumed that eventually the railroad and the automobile would be cheap enough for almost everybody to use—and in fact that has come true. As well, he supported the creation of urban “natural” areas, like Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and Central Park in New York City. It took art to design them, but they could bring the green world within reach of city dwellers.

Besides restoring Americans’ psychological and physical health, the great parks were supposed to serve a religious purpose. Muir was one of this country’s greatest spiritual prophets, and he envisioned the parks as a kind of church or temple. They should become sacred places, rigorously protected in their pristine beauty from too much profane intrusion. He would never draw a rigid line between what is sacred and what is profane; after all he wanted people to come to those new churches and they would need food, lodging, and transportation while there. It was an old dilemma that has plagued all religions. “Thus long ago,” he noted, “a few enterprising merchants utilized the Jerusalem temple as a place of business instead of a place of prayer, changing money, buying and selling cattle and sheep and doves.” He was under no illusion that the temple of Yosemite or Mount Rainier would be safe from the ancient struggle between what is appropriate and what is not.

For people who do not share Muir’s religious stance toward nature, the whole idea of setting aside and carefully preserving national parks may seem loony. Conservative Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and Muslims may find the idea of national parks a dangerous slide toward paganism or pantheism, a threat to their traditions. On the other hand, there are a lot of “nature atheists” who find Muir’s religion misguided, anti-human, or too restrictive. They don’t find nature at all inspiring or holy—it’s just a set of economic resources to be used for the benefit of humankind. Why shouldn’t we let snowmobiles into Yellowstone? Or why shouldn’t we give the parks back to their “rightful owners,” the Indian tribes that once hunted and gathered there and let them use the lands for economic development? That the parks should have a predominately religious purpose is not a universal point of view, and thus they are constantly embroiled in America’s cultural wars.

Yet I am impressed by the extent to which Muir’s way of thinking has spread through American society and the parks have become part of the nation’s religious life. The Ken Burns series promotes this success. It suggests again and again that we should come to these places in a spirit of awe and respect for something grander, more transcendent, more beautiful than we could ever create. Here are places to make us proud but also make us humble. They are the result of immense forces working over immense periods of time, and the outcome is goodness and beauty beyond our capacity to improve. This is a view that has gathered power in our culture. I am convinced that democratic societies are especially open to the religion of nature, for it takes faith out of the hands of priests and gives it back to the people. As long as Americans hunger for religion and as long as they pursue democracy, the national parks will likely be treasured as places where the people can go to worship as they see fit.

In the post below, Gordon Thompson Professor of Music at Skidmore College, remembers Bobby Graham who passed away on Monday.

Forty-five years ago in September 1964, the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” stormed to the top of British charts and would soon accomplish the same on Billboard’s American rankings. The raucous guitar and explosive drums declared a new era of pop and an aggressive voice for rock. Indeed, in that juxtaposition of angry instruments and whining voice can be heard the beginnings of punk. With this recording and many others, Bobby Graham offers the example of a musician many have heard, but too few have heard of.

The leader of the Kinks, Ray Davies remembers in his autobiography how he suddenly understood what rock drumming was all about when they hired Bobby Graham. He and producer Shel Talmy arranged to record “You Really Got Me” at a midnight session in London’s IBC Studios with session musicians Graham and Arthur Greenslade (piano). They had made several attempts, but tonight when Graham played, he brought all the power and the authority to the session it had lacked. The drummer abandoned “the complicated introduction he had planned and just thumped one beat on the snare drum with as much power as he could muster, as if to say, ‘OK, wimp, take that!’ For the next three minutes he was one of us” (150). Graham would continue providing the beat for the Kinks until around 1966 when he tried his hand producing records and serving as a music director; but drumming would always be his first love.

Bobby Graham may not have looked like a mod, but his drumming graced many of mid-sixties British hits, including those by the Dave Clark Five (especially those disks featuring horn sections such as “You Got What It Takes”) and Them (“Gloria” and “Baby, Please Don’t Go”). His association with the Dave Clark Five proved particularly problematic given that the bandleader WAS the drummer; moreover, Clark routinely declared that no other drummer played in the studio. However, a close listen to early recordings such as “Do You Love Me,” “Glad All Over” and “Bits and Pieces” reveals double-tracked drumming, suggesting that the drummer/producer had assistance from another musician. Graham maintained to the end that he was that drummer (a claim supported by unofficial correspondence) and who could doubt Clark’s good judgment at hiring the best. Indeed, many a British drummer cringed when they saw Graham at a session, knowing they had just been demoted to playing tambourine.

Graham had played on earlier hits by Johnny Leyton (“Johnny Remember Me”) and Joe Brown and the Bruvvers (“Picture of You”), but with the explosion of pop groups in 1963, Graham’s proven abilities in the studio made him the choice of producers looking to make quick hits. Younger musicians might break into a sweat when the red light burned in the studio indicating that the tape was running; but musicians like Graham buckled down and did what they knew best: play near flawlessly.

Bobby passed away in London on Monday 14 September 2009 with loved ones by his side. He leaves behind a treasure trove of great music. In my last communication with him, he lamented that he could no longer gig, not that he did not crave to be on the stage again, having a bash while the world danced to his drumming.

Richard English was born in 1963 in Belfast, where he is Professor of Politics at Queen’s University. He is a frequent media commentator on Irish politics and history, and on terrorism, including work for the BBC, ITN, Sky News, NPR, Newsweek and the Financial Times. His latest book is Terrorism: How to Respond, which draws on over twenty years of conversations with terrorists themselves, and on analysis of a wide range of campaigns – Algeria, Bader Meinhof, The Red Brigade, ETA, Hezbollah, the IRA, and al-Qaeda – to offer both an authoritative, accessible analysis of the problem of terrorism, and a practical approach to solving it. In the original post below, Professor English lays out what he sees as the seven key elements in responding to terrorist violence.

This summer’s fatal terrorist attacks in Afghanistan, Spain and Iraq in their various ways reflect a paradoxical reality: despite the unprecedented efforts made since 9/11 to combat terrorist violence, the terrorist problem remains at least as prevalent as it was before the commencement of the ‘War on Terror’.

Indeed, the situation has in some ways grown worse. The number of terrorist incidents recorded globally in 2001 was 1732. By 2006 – five years into the War on Terror – the figure had risen to 6659. The monthly fatality rate from terrorism in the years immediately preceding 9/11 was 109; in the five years after 9/11, the monthly death-toll from terrorism rose to 167 (and this excluded deaths from attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq – with those included, the monthly death-toll rose to 447).

Of course, there are no easy solutions to the terrorist problem. The longevity of this form of violence is a testament to that. But this long history of terror is, perversely, a tremendous resource as we seek to deal with this global, murderous challenge. For we do, in fact, have a huge body of experience to draw on as we consider how best to deal with the terrorist threat. There are – or should be – a long list of ‘known knowns’ in terms of what we should and should not do about terrorism.

The difficulty tends to be this: each state faces each its own new terrorist crisis in effectively amnesiac fashion. Depressingly for those of us who research the history of terrorism, the same mistakes tend to be made each time, as though the lessons required re-learning. I remember a conversation with a scholar in Washington DC in 2006, in which I suggested that the US might have learned far more than it apparently had about how to deal with terrorism, from historically-informed scrutiny of what other states had been through. ‘Ah, but we have to see our own crisis as exceptional,’ I was told. This is, perhaps, true enough as a depiction of prevalent opinion. But it is no less depressing, and damaging, for that.

In 2003 I published a history of the IRA. At that time, the IRA was in the process of leaving history’s stage just as the post-9/11 crisis meant that terrorism itself was becoming a global preoccupation as never before. So it seemed worthwhile to try to set out the lessons of history – Irish, but also drawn from other settings – in a systematic and accessible way, to try to address the problem of what we should do when the next terrorist crisis strikes.

My argument as a result of that process is that we can only effectively respond to terrorism if we learn the lessons of terrorism’s long history, but that we can only learn those lessons if we adopt a proper means of explaining terrorism, and that we can only explain it if we are honest and precise about exactly what terrorism is in the first place. So, what is terrorism? Why do people resort to terror? What can we learn from terrorism past? How should we respond?

The seven key elements in a response to terrorist violence, as I see them, are:

First, learn to live with it. Politicians have all too often tried to give the impression of a resolve to uproot terrorism altogether, which is self-defeating and unrealistic. Individual terrorist campaigns will come to an end, terrorism itself will not, and our best approach is to minimize and contain it.

Second, where possible, address the root causes and problems which generate awful terrorist violence. This will not always be possible (neither the goals of the Baader-Meinhof group nor of Osama bin Laden could be delivered). But there are moments in history when effective compromise can be reached, normally after terrorist groups themselves recognize that their violence is not bringing anticipated victory, and that a turn to more conventional politics makes sense.

Third, avoid an over-militarization of response. There is an understandable temptation after terrorist atrocities to respond with military muscle, and this can have beneficial effects. It has also, on very many historical occasions, back-fired, with rough-handed military action and occupation stimulating that very terrorism which it was intended to stifle.

Fourth, recognize that high-grade intelligence is the most effective resource in combating terrorist groups. From 1970s Germany to 1990s Northern Ireland there have been many cases where intelligence has decisively aided the constraining of terrorist campaigns.

Fifth, adhere to orthodox legal frameworks and remain wedded to the democratically produced framework of law. All too often the Abu Ghraib pattern has been evident, with the state transgressing the line which distinguishes its own legal activity from illegal brutality: such transgressions tend to strengthen rather than undermine terrorist violence.

Sixth, ensure the coordination of security, financial, technological and other counter-terrorist efforts, both between different agencies of the same state, and between different states allied in the fight against terrorist violence.

Seventh, maintain strong credibility of public response. Any resort to implausible caricatures of one’s enemies will prove counter-productive among that constituency which is potentially supportive of terrorist violence but likely – if presented with credible alternatives – to recognize the futility as well as the appalling bloodiness of terrorist action.

All of the above points were ignored during the post-9/11 response of the War on Terror, and each of these errors has made our current position more difficult.

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at reconciliation. See his previous OUPblogs here.

There is a lot of hushed talk about using the Reconciliation procedure to pass health-care reform in the Congress these days, so Americans need to know something about this obscure parliamentary procedure, and what is at stake.

Reconciliation is an optional, deficit-reducing procedure that was created in the 1974 Congressional Budget Act. The Reconciliation process is a two-stage process. First, Reconciliation directives must be included in the annual Budget Resolution (as they were in the 2010 Budget Resolution passed on April 29). These directives instruct the relevant Congressional committees to develop (in this case, health-care) legislation by a specific date (in this case, October 15) to meet certain spending or revenue targets. The instructed committees then send their legislative recommendations to their respective Budget Committees, who then package all recommendations into one omnibus Reconciliation bill. Enter Stage 2, when this bill is then considered on the floor of both chambers of Congress under expedited procedures; of greatest political note is the 20-hour limit on debate on any Reconciliation measure, which effectively strips the minority party of the filibustering option in the Senate. That means the Democrats can pass health-care reform with a simple majority.

But there is an attendant cost to the majority party for using Reconciliation. The Byrd rule, passed in 1985, sets out the rules for what Reconciliation can and cannot be used for. In particular, it specifies that Senators will be allowed to raise a point of order against “extraneous” provisions in a Reconciliation bill which, among other things, “would increase the deficit for a fiscal year beyond those covered by the reconciliation measure.” Critically, cloture must be invoked to overcome a point of order. So the filibuster power is back.

Here’s the bottom line. Since the Budget Act states that the Reconciliation measure covers the next ten years, the Byrd Rule had the effect of allowing a point of order to be raised against any spending increase (or tax cut) that does not contain a ten-year sunset provision. That’s why the Bush tax cuts, passed via the Reconciliation route in 2001, 2003, and 2005, had sunset provisions written into them. If Democrats use Reconciliation, they will get a health-care bill, but it will expire.

Now let’s talk politics. There’s a debate within the debate that only seasoned politicos know about. Since the actual benefits of Reconciliation are mixed – a health-care bill can be passed with a simple majority in the Senate but it must have a sunset provision – the real power of Reconciliation is not in its actual usage, but in the mere threat of its usage.

The benefits of issuing the threat of going the Reconciliation route are akin to the threat of a presidential veto. The threat of a presidential veto sets the boundaries of permissible legislative action; it lets Congress know what is out-of-the-question and therefore powerfully guides legislative outcomes in the direction of the president’s preferences. By letting it be known that they will resort to Reconciliation if they had to, Democrats in Congress are incentivizing Republicans to be part of the making of a bi-partisan bill rather than be shut out of a purely partisan one. In making the threat, Democrats are specifying the costs of Republican non-compliance to the tune of: “if we let you stay in the kitchen, at least you can determine some of the ingredients in the cake. Make us shut you out and you won’t have even the slightest say.”

Like the presidential veto, the power of Reconciliation is maximal at the level of a threat. For between the time a threat is issued and the time when a bill is passed (via Reconciliation or not), there is a powerful incentive for Republican Senators to come back to the bargaining table because there is the distinct possibility that they could be shut out. Reconciliation is the Democratic antidote to the Republican Party becoming the “Party of ‘No’” For if Republicans keep saying “No,” then they box themselves into the plea of Nolo Contendere.

That is why different spokespersons for the Democratic Party are keeping the Republicans guessing and making sporadic and cryptic references to the Reconciliation possibility. And Republicans are trying to minimize the power of the threat by characterizing it as a no-go “nuclear option.” Unfortunately for Republicans, theirs is an empty threat because there is no Mutually Assured Destruction in this asymmetric power situation, and it is both a legal and political fact that, as the White House says, the Reconciliation option “is out there.” It is a win-win situation for Democrats to issue the threat, for if Republicans are unmoved by the threat, Democrats could materialize the threat and get what they wanted having known that an effort at bipartisanship had failed anyway.

What is missed in the debate out there now is that the effect of Reconciliation is already underway, for its power lies in its threat.

Elliott J. Gorn is author of Dillinger’s Wild Ride: The Year that Made America’s Public Enemy Number One, is Professor of History and American Studies at Brown University.  John Dillinger, celebrity outlaw extraordinaire died 75 years ago today.  In the wake of his death a photo leaked to the press which showed Dillinger to be much larger than legend.  In the original post below Gorn explores the myth of Dillinger’s member in honor of the anniversary of his death.

I’m reasonably sure that most American boys who reached adolescence in the 1960s knew about Dillinger’s dick. It was enormous, preserved in formaldehyde at the Smithsonian Institution. Friends of mine who grew up on the east coast told me years later that on high school trips to Washington, the boys would spread out and look for it. Some even claimed that they saw it. A less well-known version of the story insisted that no, it wasn’t in the Smithsonian, but at FBI headquarters, that for years it rested in a jar on J. Edgar Hoover’s desk. Others said it actually was nearby at the Army Medical Museum. Anyway, boys identified with the dead gunman and his parts—everyone knew what you meant when you referred to “my Dillinger.”

As it turns out, the Smithsonian keeps a file of letters from citizens enquiring about the legendary dingus. People write in trying to resolve arguments or settle bets or finish term papers on human anatomy. The Smithsonian has a form letter they send out routinely, denying any knowledge of Dillinger’s missing member.

Even before the Smithsonian legend, Dillinger’s manhood was part of oral tradition. Back in Indiana, the outlaw’s home state, some said that he was so large that he was not a great lover; he’d lose consciousness when aroused because so much blood drained toward his groin. Others claimed that the Woman in Red betrayed him that July night in Chicago in 1934 when the feds gunned him down because Dillinger was her lover, and she just couldn’t take it anymore.

The story of Dillinger’s legendary proportions originated with a morgue photo that circulated just after he died. There he is on a gurney, officials from the Cook County Coroner’s office gathered around, and the sheet covering him rising in a conspicuous tent at least a foot above his body, roughly around his loins, though truth be told, it looks more like where his naval should be. Probably his arm, rigid in rigor mortis, was under the sheet. No matter. It looked like he died with an enormous hard-on. Newspaper editors quickly realized how readers interpreted the photo, withdrew it, retouched it, then reprinted it in later wire-service editions, with the sheet nice and flat against the dead man’s body.

But the damage was done. Soon, Dillinger’s likeness appeared in crude pornography. Mostly, however, rumors of his enormous manhood persisted in oral tradition until roughly thirty years after his death, when it congealed into the urban belief tale centered on the Smithsonian.

In a literal sense, the story is almost certainly not true. Dillinger’s autopsy reported nothing unusual about the man. Government workers just look perplexed when asked about the legendary object. No one has ever produced substantial proof that the famed member exists.

So what does the story mean? It is a trope, a metaphor, a symbol of the whole Dillinger saga. He must have had a big one. In the midst of the Great Depression, with hunger and hopelessness everywhere, Dillinger went out and took what he wanted. He robbed from banks, which many Americans assumed had robbed them. Guns blazing, he escaped the feds time after time, and humiliated local authorities. He broke out of prisons, once famously with a wooden gun.

On the side, he had multiple liaisons with good-looking women, and they aided him in his exploits. Even as he walked out of Chicago’s Biograph Theater to his death, newspapers reported, he had a woman on each arm. The Dillinger story was one of America’s great noir moments of sex and violence, freedom and betrayal.

Americans are fascinated with rebels and renegades. We love stories about escape from the hum-drum of daily life. In fantasy, anyway, we admire those who walk away from crushing boredom and killing routine. We make heroes of anyone bold enough to live on the open road. We love our outlaws, men who oppose the over-civilized life with virile action, and who dispense rough justice.

But we also take care not to get too close, and certainly not to emulate them. Even as it makes Dillinger larger than life, the Smithsonian story is also a cautionary tale. It warns that the price of living so free and defiant is death, and in the legend, castration.

Metaphorically, it certainly was true what they said about John Dillinger. True because he lived his wild year hard and died young. True because he did it with style, coolness, and élan. And true because, in reality and in legend, he paid for it.