Today in History: March 9

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Adam Smith’s book on economics and philosophy, “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,” or, more familiarly, “The Wealth of Nations,” was published by W. Strahan and T. Cadell in London 240 years ago today. It was an instant, influential, best-seller and began to be cited in taxation policy discussions within months and referenced by politicians in London and America within a year of publication. Here is my attempt from last year at explaining my understanding of economics and Adam Smith’s influence: “Higgling, Haggling, Swapping, Dickering.”

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Sixty-two years ago tonight, CBS broadcast “A Report on Senator Joseph McCarthy” on its half-hour “See It Now” news broadcast. Hosted by Edward R. Murrow, it was a close look at the Wisconsin Republican’s several year-long campaign against Communists that he had claimed had infiltrated our government and the armed forces. Murrow used video and film of McCarthy’s own speeches to show his many contradictions, obfuscations, and possible lies. McCarthy’s only replies to the show were personal and insulting against Murrow and did not address anything of substance. The McCarthy Era in its then-specific guise was ending; McCarthyism still exists. A clip (below the fold):
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Today in History: March 8

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Shad vary, right enough. I thought of my own Olympic fish—two and half hours on the line at Lambertville. Had I not interfered, she would have gone up to the Little Beaver Kill, jumped that waterfall, jumped the Catskill divide, swum up the Hudson to Lake Champlain and down the Richelieu River to Montreal, gone up the Ottawa to Lake Nipissing and down the French River into Lake Huron and on across Superior and up the Pigeon River and on to the Lake of the Woods and Lake Winnipeg and Reindeer Lake and Lake Athabasca and the Great Slave Lake (doing the Methye Portage in a heavy rain) and down the Mackenzie to the Rat, and up the Rat to the Porcupine, and down the Porcupine to the Yukon River, and down the Yukon River to the Bering Sea. It’s a shame I ate her.—John McPhee, “The Founding Fish”

John McPhee is 85 today. As far as I am concerned, a single paragraph by John McPhee selected at random carries more lessons about and examples of graceful writing than almost every other journalist’s Complete Works. He still teaches his course, “Creative Non-Fiction,” at Princeton University.

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Today is International Women’s Day, an official holiday in many countries, mostly in Asia and Eastern Europe, but also in several African nations and in South America. It has been celebrated each year since 1909. “Pledge for Parity,” or #PledgeforParity, is the slogan for 2016’s celebration.
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A Sentimental Journey Through …

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Laurence Sterne was dying of consumption, the polite yet dramatic term that people used to employ for pulmonary diseases, especially tuberculosis. He had contracted it by 1740, when he was still in his 20s, and he fought for his every breath for his remaining three decades of life.

In 1765, he left England in search of better breathing, and he traveled abroad to France and Italy. He was a surprise best-selling author by this point, a clergyman who had decided on a whim to start telling the life story of a character but by not telling it in a straightforward manner, to comically digress his way through “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.” One of the earliest novels in English or any language, “Shandy” was an instant success when its first two volumes started appearing in 1759.

The genre we call “travel writing” was not as common in the 1760s as it is now, and most works in that genre at that time were quite unsentimental: verbal pictures of natural phenomena and wonders of the man-made world and warnings-slash-complaints about the foreignness of foreigners on their strange home turf. In his 1765 journey, Sterne encountered fellow novelist Tobias Smollett, and the stern, dry Smollett left such an impression on the always amused Sterne that in his book, “A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy,” he based a character named “Smelfungus” on Smollett. Nice revenge.
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