A Trip to Abilene

So last Thursday afternoon Michele and I got in the car and drove to Abilene. Compared to the panhandle it gets significantly hotter in that part of Texas, and the closer we got to our destination the further our car thermometer went into triple digits. By 3 that afternoon, we were somewhere around Post, Texas when the temperature reached 105.

I had booked a room at the Courtyard Marriott, which looked nice online. It was. We got to Abilene late afternoon, spent an hour or so in the pool, drove a few blocks down for a nice dinner, and then walked across the street to their shopping mall. We were amazed an hour later when we came out of the mall. At around 8:30, the temperature was in the mid-90s! Near sunset, it was still really hot. Did I mention it was hot in that part of Texas?

Anyway, on Friday morning Michele dropped me off at the Center for Restoration Studies which is in the library on the campus of Abilene Christian University. From there, she went shopping and got an afternoon massage that I had scheduled for her. The shopping and the message were the answer to her question, "If you go to Abilene so you can spend time in the library, what do I get to do?"

At the CRS, I gained a bit more in my quest to establish the timeline and travels of R. W. Officer (see previous post). Many thanks to Carisse Mickey Berryhill, who tracked down the Gospel Guide for me, and took care of a dozen other requests that day.

It also was a pleasure to finally meet in person and visit with Mac Ice at the CRS. Mac was preparing to set up an Restoration Movement hymnal display. Among the gems on the cart was the hymnal pictured here, published by Elias Smith at Boston in 1804!

We made it home late Friday evening. We were glad we got to have a quick vacation just before Michele began her new teaching job here in Tulia today.

Joe S. Warlick Encounters R. W. Officer in Arkansas, 1926

Joe S. Warlick (1866-1941), editor and publisher of the Gospel Guide, often included an "Editorials" section in his paper. These occasional pieces told of Warlick's travels, speaking engagements, debates, etc. To anyone interested in Restoration History, they are a must read.

In the June 1926 issue, Warlick tells of a recent trip from his home in Dallas, Texas to Arkansas and to other states north and east. Along the way, he preached wherever he could and delivered at least one school commencement address. His report includes the following:

"Saturday night we began [preaching] at Center Point, the old county seat of Howard County.  . . .

"We had dinner on the ground Sunday, which all enjoyed greatly. Among those who were with us was the venerable R. W. Officer, who now resides in Nashville [Arkansas], not far away."

"Editorials," Gospel Guide, Volume XI, No. 6, (June 1926), p. 4.

What is the significance of this for people interested in the life and times of R. W. Officer (1845-1930)?  Here we have one of the very few references to him in any church paper between about 1906 and his death in 1930. Up until the first few years of the twentieth century, R. W. had been a long-time and prolific contributor to a large array of Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement journals, especially the Gospel Advocate and Octographic Review.

Why he ceased sending notices to the journals and magazines is a puzzle. Shortly before, Officer did complain in print about his rheumatism. It's been some time since I've seen it, but there was also reference to a wagon accident that may have injured his hand. But these obstacles, it seems to me, would not be enough to stop an inveterate writer with the grit of R. W. Officer. Not to mention that during most of that time he had a second wife, several years younger than him, and also a son, Leon V., who lived close to his father.

Although brief, Warlick's notice includes more than one piece of important information. First, it locates Officer in Nashville, Arkansas in the spring of 1926. This is especially interesting because according to the U.S. Federal Census of 1930, Officer, by then 85 years old, was still living in Nashville. He is listed as a "boarder" in home of a "farmer" named Parker Russell (age 66); Russell's wife, Gillie (who was 59); and their son, Garner (19). Also according to the 1930 Census, Officer's occupation was "minister" of the Christian Church. It appears, then, that R. W. Officer spent at least the last four years of his life preaching for the Christian Church in Nashville, Arkansas, while residing with a farmer and his family who were presumably members of that congregation.

Second, Warlick's notice indicates that Officer (a veteran of the Civil War who was then 80 years old) was still vigorous enough to get out and around. Center Point, where Warlick shared lunch with Officer, is about 9 miles from Nashville, where he resided.

Third, it seems to indicate that Officer had not moved away from his convictions in previous years. In the time leading up to his silence in the papers, Officer had been suspected of all sorts of "isms" and heresies. Some people probably imagined that he stopped sending notices to the papers because he had indeed "gone off the deep end" religiously. But Officer's appearance at the Sunday gathering and dinner at Center Point, Arkansas in 1926 suggests otherwise. Officer's "heresy trial" in Alabama in the 1870s includes much the same rhetorical tone and tough stance as one would find in the pages of Warlick's Gospel Guide. If by 1926 Officer had long since changed his thinking in a radical way, then why would he want to venture out to see and hear the likes of Joe S. Warlick, a staunch preacher and debater?

All of this suggests two basic conclusions regarding Officer between the ages of 60 and 85. First, he did not stop publishing in the papers because he was no longer able. Second, it does not seem that Officer had significantly changed his views. Even if he had, he was still willing to go hear and visit with Joe Warlick, a preacher who certainly had not.

Early American History: A Dandy Baker's Dozen

So here's a short list of recent titles in the field of Early American History. If you want to get a sense of the state of the art, these books will get you started. While all of them represent an impressive achievement, some are even more significant that others. However, being so new to this area of study, I have a difficult time knowing which ones might still be popular and influential among scholars and their students, say, thirty years from now.

The list represents a good mix: there's the Atlantic Ocean, fish, fishing, the Boston Tea Party, Indians, the French, pirates, more tea, slaves, the British army, etc. For what it's worth, I put an asterisk by the titles I simply enjoyed more than others. So note well: an asterisk does not necessarily mean it's a better, more-important book, or that I especially agreed with the author's main point(s). It simply means I enjoyed reading that book more than most of the others.

*Bolster, W. Jeffrey. The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail. Harvard, 2012.

Carp, Benjamin L. Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America. Yale, 2010.

*Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. Revised edition. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.

Fichter, James. So Great a Proffit: How the East Indies Trade Transformed Anglo-American Capitalism. Harvard, 2010.

Gould, Eliga H. Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire. Harvard, 2012.

Jasanoff, Maya. Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World. Vintage, 2012.

Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity. Knopf, 1998.

Little, Ann. Abraham in Arms: War and Gender in Colonial New England. Pennsylvania, 2007.

*Rediker, Marcus. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Beacon, 2004.

Richter, Daniel K. Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America. Harvard, 2001.

*Taylor, Alan. The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832. Norton, 2013.

Wood, Gordon S. The American Revolution: A History. Modern Library, 2002.

Yokota, Kariann Akemi. Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation. Oxford, 2011.

Adler, Selig. "The United States and the Holocaust." Abstract

Adler, Selig. "The United States and the Holocaust." American Jewish Historical Quarterly 64, No. 1 (September 1974): 14-23.

Adler cites in footnote 1 several authorities who agree that "the United States could have done more to mitigate the catastrophe" (14). But the U.S. did not because of three factors: (a) Washington's incorrect assumptions about the Jewish plight in Europe and what the U.S. could do in order to alleviate it. (b) The refugee predicament came far behind other concerns of the time, especially the war. (c) The aid which did come was too little, too late (14). Most of the article concerns the political mistakes and misdeeds of the U.S. during the Holocaust which resulted in many, many more deaths.

Preachers at the South Thornton Church of Christ, Piggott, Arkansas, 1965-1993

It's now been more than twenty years since I and my young family moved from NE Arkansas to Southern New England. In August of 1993, we said our sad good-byes to members of the South Thornton Church of Christ in Piggott, AR. Then, we spent three days (me driving a diesel truck with my wife and two small children in the cab, and with one of our cars in tow) making our way to Wallingford, CT, where I became the preacher for the Ward Street Church of Christ.

During the last two years before my move from Arkansas, especially in late 1991, I conducted a good bit of research on the history of the South Thornton congregation. More about that in a future post perhaps. Here is the best information I have about pulpit preachers for the congregation from 1965 to 1993:

C. Ray Miller, July 1965--December 1975
Carroll P. Bennett, June 1976--September 1981
Glen Goss, October 1981--May 1983
Kenneth Burton, June 1983--July 1988
Frank Bellizzi, October 1988--August 1993

Richard Runions, served as an associate minister 1974--1983

The American Revolution: A Brief History by a First-Rate Scholar

Wood, Gordon S. The American Revolution: A History. New York: Modern Library, 2002.

In the "Preface," to this brief survey, historian Gordon S. Wood suggests that the American Revolution should simply be "explained and understood." And that's what this book sets out to do: to explain  "[h]ow the Revolution came about, what its character was, and what its consequences were" (xxv).

Wood's approach differs from the standard telling of the story. Whenever I hear the phrase "the American Revolution," I naturally think of what I was taught were the high points of "the War of Independence": events like Paul Revere's ride, battles at Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill, and Cornwallis's surrender to George Washington at Yorktown. It's the stuff of old-style history. Great men and events. Kings and wars. And, when describing wars, guns and trumpets.

However, historians like Wood want to tell us that, although never incidental, the war was not the essence of the Revolution. It was, instead, something more like a result, or a series of events that accompanied the Revolution. Consequently, only one of the seven chapter titles in this book contains the word "war." Indeed, Wood pays surprisingly little attention to events whose names we easily recognize.

Instead, he tells about the social, economic, political, and cultural forces that created a burden for great change in the British American colonies, a burden that was so compelling that it lead to open rebellion against an imperial king. Even more, Wood describes the new world, with new sensibilities, that came in the wake of the war; an emphasis on the rights and responsibilities of individuals, and what America could and ought to become. Above all, the qualified sense that all men were created equal began to change attitudes toward women, marriage, children, and slaves. Economic questions, international trade, political theory and practice. Nothing, it seems, went untouched by the Revolution. To cap it all off, a spirited debate between Federalists and Anti-federalists resulted in a federal constitution for the United States of America, a document that from the very beginning, recognized the political sovereignty of "We the people."

Aargh! A Book about Pirates!

Rediker, Marcus. Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age. Boston: Beacon Press, 2004.

Marcus Rediker's Villains of All Nations is a cultural and social history of pirates on the Atlantic. By all accounts, the book distills Rediker's previously published writings about pirates, which first began to appear in 1981. The author identifies the years 1650-1730 as piracy's "golden age." He says those 80 years break down into three distinct periods, each one connected to a particular group: (1) the buccaneers: European "sea dogs" who attacked the ships of Catholic Spain, 1650-80, (2) pirates who worked the Indian Ocean, with their base on Madagascar, during the 1690s, and (3) the subjects of this book, the largest, most successful of the three groups: pirates who terrorized the Atlantic just after the War of Spanish Succession (1701-1714)—which had established the perfect conditions for the rapid growth of piracy—until 1726, by which time the war against pirates was won.

This book focuses on those few thousand outlaws at sea who were active from 1716 to 1726, the decade described by the author as the heyday of piracy. Rediker highlights that, even when standing on the gallows, pirates routinely and defiantly announced that their short lives of crime were at least happy lives. Compared to serving on the crew of an abusive, tyrannical captain, their lives of piracy had been downright “merry.” Essentially, condemned pirates claimed that they had been driven to live as outlaws. Taking their claims seriously, Rediker argues that, in spite of the common image of pirates as greedy treasure seekers, the subjects of his book started out as abused, impoverished working seamen. Upon becoming pirates, they organized themselves in ways that were highly democratic, and they spoke of themselves as "honest" men (and a very few women) who were not seeking loot so much as justice for the common sailor.

As the foregoing suggests, Rediker works with what appears to be a wide array of sources, and seems to have had the primary data under a microscope for a long time.

To see and hear Rediker himself, check out this presentation he made about pirates back in 2007.

Abstract of M.E. Aston article about Lollards

Aston, Margaret E. "Lollardy and Sedition 1381-1431." Past & Present 17 (April 1960): 1-44.

Aston summarizes the main point of this fine, substantial article in her first paragraph: "Before 1381, though the English governing classes had encountered heretics as well as rebels against society, they had never had to deal with either on a large or concerted scale. By the end of May 1382 both had been on their hands, and heresy (in the event) had come to stay.  . . . A heretical movement and a major upheaval among the lower orders of society had arrived, in point of time, together" (1). Having detailed the political aspects of early Lollard history, Aston concludes: "This is not, at all, to deny that there was, throughout, a very genuine alarm for the salvation of souls, and concern for the maintenance of the orthodox faith; nor to say that this aspect of the Lollard movement was not, and is not, the first to be considered. But the nature of the heresy, of the society in which it spread, and of the government which had to deal with it, were such that its religious implications could not be considered alone. And other happenings of this period ensured that they were not. Sedition and dissent had come of age together" (35-36).

Reading List for Vietnam

The following reading list is for the topic of "Vietnam" in a much longer list for U.S. History after 1877. It includes seven titles. I am an Americanist, but I do not focus on the Vietnam War. So this is a set of books for the topic, geared toward preparation of a nonspecialist for comprehensive exams. Recommendations? Suggestions? Tell me what you think:

Berman, Larry. Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent. HarperCollins/Smithsonian, 2007.

Bilton, Michael and Kevin Sim. Four Hours in My Lai. Penguin, 1992.

Milam, Ron. Not a Gentleman's War: An Inside View of Junior Officers in the Vietnam War. North Carolina, 2009.

Moyar, Mark. Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965. Cambridge, 2006.

Prados, John. Vietnam: The History of an Unwinnable War, 1945-1975. Kansas, 2009.

Sheehan, Neil. A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. Vintage, 1989.

Vuic, Kara Dixon. Officer, Nurse, Woman: The Army Nurse Corps in the Vietnam War. Johns Hopkins, 2010.

All's Fair in War? Larry Berman's Wonderful Book about Pham Xuan An

Berman, Larry. Perfect Spy: The Incredible Double Life of Pham Xuan An, Time Magazine Reporter and Vietnamese Communist Agent. New York: HarperCollins/Smithsonian, 2007.

This finely-written book tells the story of one of the most fascinating real-life characters ever. If you like history with a bit of mystery, you'll love this.

*Spoiler Alert*

In early 1953 in the southernmost province of Vietnam, the legendary Le Duc Tho presided over a ceremony in which Pham Xuan An, the subject of this riveting story, became a member of the Communist Party. Shortly afterward, the Party determined An's career. They realized he had the intellect and disposition to become a first-rate spy. For many years to come, An would lead a brilliant double life.

As historian and author Larry Berman explains, in the early 1950s, the leaders of the Communist Party fully realized that the United States was in the process of replacing the French colonialists in Vietnam. To the U.S.--in spite of American propaganda--Vietnam was never about the Vietnamese people. It was always about Cold War containment and the incredible task of keeping all of the dominoes in Southeast Asia standing straight.

For their part, many of the Vietnamese people had no interest in being told by the French or the Americans or anyone else that they would not be allowed to determine their own national future. As they had with the French, the Vietnamese would do everything they could to resist the Americans. Secretly, Pham Xuan An and his network would become a powerful component of that resistance.

In 1957, An came to Orange Coast College in California where he learned English, became acquainted with American culture, and developed many contacts inside the U.S. He even worked for the college newspaper where he made several new friends. Upon returning to Vietnam, An was at first quite nervous. Living in Saigon, he wondered, would he be suspected and arrested? Once he settled down, An began to develop relationships with important Americans and high-ranking leaders within the South Vietnamese government. In the years to come, An worked for the Reuters news service, the New York Herald Tribune, and eventually for Time magazine. All along, he was one of Hanoi's most valuable informants. He didn't have to steal information. It was freely discussed and shared with him by people who considered An a colleague and friend.

In short, Pham Xuan An may have been the one of the greatest con men and informants ever. For many years, he lived as both a first-rate journalist in Saigon working for American news outlets, and also as a hero of the Communist government headquartered in Hanoi.

Jon Butler on Jack-in-the-Box Faith

Butler, Jon. "Jack-in-the-Box Faith: The Religion Problem in Modern American History." Journal of American History 90 (March 2004): 1357-1376.

Butler observes that historians typically have assumed that religion was a vital aspect of pre-Civil War American history. Citing U.S. history textbooks and survey courses, he notes that by contrast religion "has not fared well in the historiography of modern America" (1358). One symptom of this difference is that "[a]fter 1870, . . . religion more often appears as a jack-in-the-box." It "pops up colorfully on occasion . . . But as with a child's jack-in-the-box, the surprise offered by the color or peculiarity of the figure is seldom followed by an extended performance, much less substance" (1359). The question arises, "Was religion important in American public and private life after 1870, and how should historians describe it?" Butler breaks down the question along three lines: "the problem of assuming 'secularization' in America after 1870; religion's continuing importance in twentieth-century American politics and elections; and religion's adaptive capacities in the face of modernity's technological, economic, and intellectual challenges" (1360). For the remainder of the article, Butler provides an historiographical essay in which he demonstrates that historians and observers of America have produced a rich variety of resources so that those who write textbooks and who teach should be able to include religion as a vital aspect of American history following 1870.

A Visit with Bill Humble

I shared lunch and had a nice visit with Bill Humble today. He'll turn 88 in September. He's lonely without Geraldine, "Gerry," who died in March 2013. They were together for over 64 years. At his home church here in Amarillo, Bill just finished teaching a Wednesday-night series on the Holy Land. He fills in some for the chaplain at his retirement community, and plays "Texas 88" dominoes with some men and women there. A nice new gazebo on the property is being named in Gerry's memory. Bill continues to get out and walk five or six mornings a week. His most recently-read book: Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, by S. C. Gwynne. I told him I had recently read his 1965 article on "The Influence of the Civil War." We laughed when he asked me what the article said.