Dr. Stephen W. Campbell - Blog

An Unnamed Financier Writes to Nicholas Biddle (1831)

5/14/2017

I've been dealing a lot with primary sources lately in my online and face-to-face classes and I thought it might be kinda cool to have my students analyze a letter I've transcribed from the Nicholas Biddle Papers. What you'll see below is not contained in any edited volume and with the exception, perhaps, of a handful of folks on the East Coast, no one has transcribed this letter. A lot of letters from this era contain handwriting that is very difficult to read, but like many bankers in this era, this guy had excellent penmanship. I've even written an italicized introduction in the style of what you'll find in primary source readers.

As I argued in my article in American Nineteenth Century History, a letter like this, which among scholars of Jacksonian era politics seems to have passed below the radar--understandable for a manuscript collection stored on 51 reels of microfilm--is valuable because it underscores Biddle's ability to use the peculiar institutional makeup of the Bank's system of branches to engage in interregional networking; to communicate with financiers about appropriate monetary policy; to gauge public opinion on the Bank before proceeding with the recharter effort. All of this made for a very early attempt, perhaps one of the earliest attempts, at constructing a nationwide public relations campaign.

Ignorance is Strength: The Buffoon-in-Chief

5/3/2017

I have neither the time, nor the energy, nor the mental capacity, nor the patience, nor the endurance to follow and rebut every ill conceived, juvenile, simplistic, distraction-prone, random assemblage of words uttered from the pampered child that currently occupies the White House. But as the latest act of foolishness and ignorance concerns the topic of historical knowledge, and the historical profession writ large, I'll address this by excerpting articles from History News Network and other venues. It is also worth commenting here because it is a topic in which I have developed some expertise.

For those who don't know, the mantra "ignorance is strength" comes from Orwell's 1984, still one of my favorite books from my senior year of high school. Notice that the overwhelming majority of academic, scholarly historians are in agreement: this was a terribly misinformed, ignorant statement put forth by the President* Trump, something that occurs on pretty much a semi-daily frequency. I have a connection, however tenuous, with every historian cited in these stories. Yale historian David Blight's reaction, shown below, is particularly on point in my view. His classic, Race and Reunion, sits on my bookshelf and is standard reading in graduate school. I met Blight briefly at the Huntington Library in Pasadena. His arguments on memory, race, and the "Lost Cause" appear in my lecture on Reconstruction. Meachem's book, American Lion, sits on my shelf, I took one of Rauchway's classes (where we read his Murdering McKinley) while an undergraduate at UC Davis, and have followed--and interacted briefly with--the omnipresent Nicole Hemmer on Twitter.

This is from Yahoo! News, May 1, 2017: Historians Monday valiantly tried, and mostly failed, to understand and interpret President Trump’s remarks about President Andrew Jackson. Among other comments, Trump seemed to assert that Jackson, who died in 1845, could have prevented the Civil War, which began in 1861, and that the causes of the bloodiest conflict in the nation’s history have not been addressed or discussed.
“I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War,” said Trump in an interview with the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito. “He was a very tough person, but he had a big heart, and he was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War. He said, ‘There’s no reason for this.’ People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question. But why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”
The comments, published Monday morning and broadcast on SiriusXM Radio, led to confusion over Trump’s understanding of Jackson’s beliefs and general American history.
“First of all, historians have actually talked about the reasons for the Civil War quite a bit,” said Kevin Kruse, a professor of history at Princeton, in an email to Yahoo News. “Second, there’s an overwhelming consensus among historians that the Civil War came about because of slavery. Simply put, the war came because the southern states seceded, and they seceded — as they quite clearly said themselves at the time, over and over again — because of slavery. Mississippi’s secession declaration, to take just one, is quite direct here: ‘Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world.’”
“The question of why the Civil War should have happened is not only central to the study of U.S. history but to our entire national mythology,” said Eric Rauchway, a professor of history at UC Davis, in an interview with Yahoo News, “and Lincoln’s answer to that question is literally chiseled on the walls of the Lincoln Memorial about a mile’s walk from the White House.”
“Historians of the U.S. were surprised to learn that nobody asks why the Civil War happened, as it’s one of the central questions of American history,” said Nicole Hemmer, assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, to Yahoo News. “It’s even featured on the test for American citizenship. But when Donald Trump marvels at the ignorance or incuriosity of the masses, what he’s really doing is expressing his own ignorance and incuriosity. He’s saying that he’s never asked about the origins of the Civil War.”
Jon Meacham, author of “American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House,” attempted to parse Trump’s historical commentary.
“The president seems to be conflating two things,” said Meacham in an email to Yahoo News. “The first is Andrew Jackson’s determined stand for the Union against South Carolina nullifiers in 1832-33; Old Hickory believed in the primacy of his federal government and faced down John C. Calhoun and others over the supremacy of federal law. The second is Trump’s thought — one he first expressed to me in an interview for Time last year — that perhaps a deal of some kind could have averted the Civil War.”
“The problem with the latter,” added Meacham, “is that any accommodation with the South would have to have ratified the continued existence of slavery in the old slaveholding states — which, to be fair, was a mainstream possibility in the prewar days. What finally drove secession was Lincoln’s refusal to allow the expansion of slavery westward. All fascinating, complicated stuff — but one has to wonder why the 45th president, who has plenty to do, is blithely relitigating what Shelby Foote called ‘the crossroads of our being.'”
Rauchway also suggested that Trump might have been thinking about Jackson’s actions against former Vice President Calhoun.
“To give the president the benefit of the doubt,” said Rauchway, “I imagine he is thinking there of the Nullification Crisis where Jackson faced down John C. Calhoun over the South Carolinian attempts to nullify a federal tariff law and that therefore Jackson is sometimes referred to as being a strong Unionist, which I suppose is fair enough. But at that point the issue of slavery wasn’t directly at issue or its expansion wasn’t directly an issue, and I don’t think Jackson would have been effective in dealing with that issue in any way.”
There was also pushback against Trump’s musings that Jackson could have prevented the Civil War and his suggestion that the seventh president — whose Indian Removal Act essentially legalized genocide — had a “big heart.”
“Andrew Jackson himself was a slaveholder and the Jacksonians were slaveholders and they despised the abolitionists,” said Rauchway, “so it’s hard for me to believe that they would have been able to prevent the Civil War. And actually it was Jacksonian policies – particularly those of James K. Polk, who styled himself as Young Hickory, as a direct heir to Andrew Jackson – which precipitated the Civil War. That’s entirely wrong in every respect.”
“Jackson had a big heart for white farmers,” said Hemmer, “Less so for the American Indians he slaughtered and the African-Americans he enslaved. Given Trump’s own focus on white Americans over nonwhite Americans, it’s not surprising that he would fail to see the limits of Jackson’s big-heartedness.”

What needs to be emphasized every single day in this nightmarish, hellish "presidency" (or regime?) in which we find ourselves is that hateful, bigoted, ignorant, low-information voters "elected" a hateful, bigoted, ignorant, low-information "president" through the anti-democratic electoral college, not the popular vote. Will any conservative and/or Trump voter, beyond just a few handful, have the intellectual credibility to admit that we were right? That they deeply regret their vote? That they were scammed, hoodwinked, and bamboozled by a used car salesman? I doubt it. They couldn't admit we were right about Iraq; about financial deregulation; about tax cuts; about the ACA; about climate change, so why would they suddenly wise up now? When the stakes are this high, it's more important to be right than it is to be nice. As I've been saying for many months and years now, we're way past the point of having thoughtful, reasonable debate with thoughtful, reasonable people. In no way shape or form can this end well. Who better to evaluate presidents than historians? It's sad that Trump supporters are so brainwashed that they don't care what we think.

Irish Through and Through Part 2

4/22/2017

I know the names of all sixteen of my great, great grandparents. I suspect that many people alive today cannot access this information without a fair degree of work. Looking at this family tree above, what immediately strikes you is the large number of Irish names. In other words, Irish people marrying Irish people. When my Aunt Karen conducted research on our heritage many years back, she found a very large number of Irish names, both as direct relatives of mine and those who married into the family: Mahoney; McGrath; Fouhy; Burke; O'Neill; O’Doherty; Murphy; Keating; Collins; O’Loughlin; Barry; O’Brien; Mullany; O’Keefe; Riordan; Kennedy; Driscoll; Lenihan; O’Donoghue; Power; Walsh; Ryan; O’Brien; Dowd; Heffernan; Toomey; Buckley; Vaughan; O’Meara; McFadden; McGinn; McCarthy; and O’Farrell. This is why the ethnicity estimate of 78% Irish does not at all surprise me. For the rest of this entry I will relate the Ancestry.com test results with what I already know about my family history.

Let's start with Mary Anne Cashin, pictured here, one of my great, great grandmothers on my mother's side. She lived from 1861-1901 and was from Waterford County, Ireland. To my knowledge this is the oldest known photograph of anyone in my family. Mary Anne, her husband, Maurice, and one of their sons, Michael, migrated to the United States. As the photograph below shows, Michael became an officer in the San Francisco Police Department.

The red circle in Michael Flynn's registration card for the WWI draft reveals that he was a "naturalized" citizen and not native-born.

The archetype of the Irish cop, much like the drunk and intemperate Irishman, is an old one in America. You'll find it in all of the Irish last names in the somewhat ironically named and reactionary "Blue Lives Matter" movement, as well as David Simon's The Wire, a television series in the early 2000s that took place in Baltimore. I can't say that I have expertise in this area, so others can feel free to correct me. But the basic story is this...when the Irish came over, they had few job prospects, the dominant, Anglo-Saxon majority questioned their Catholicism and "whiteness," and unlike German immigrants, few Irish had money to move out west, which is one reason why there are still so many Irish Americans in the American Northeast. The Irish found refuge in the Democratic Party political machines in urban areas. New York's Tammany Hall was perhaps the most famous, though the Daleys of Chicago surely must have relied on strong Irish support. While justifiably criticized for permitting the interlocking characteristics of trading favors, prostitution, and prodigious alcohol consumption, the party machines did provide a tangible benefit to the Irish American community in jobs and participation in the political process, which was at least nominally democratic in the small 'd' sense of the term. Closed off from other career opportunities and relegated to the bottom of the social ladder among whites, Irish Americans found in the police force a suitable career. This was a job that the political machines could dole out. And for over a hundred-year period from roughly the mid-19th century to the election of JFK, the Irish were loyal Democrats, beholden to the party machines that traded jobs for votes. I know from teaching both US and California history that the voting preferences of Irish Americans were one reason that Woodrow Wilson initially kept the US out of WWI (Irish Americans would not have supported a war fought on behalf of the British, their colonial oppressors) and unfortunately, they were also a driving force behind the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. Racism seems almost synonymous with the white, working-class in America (Trump anyone?) and the Irish, perhaps at least in part because of the economic insecurity they faced, clung to traditional, exclusionary, and morally problematic positions that would theoretically elevate them above the social status of non-white peoples. Thus, the historian in me, in a valiant but fleeing attempt to be as fair as possible, realizes that no one, even one's ancestors, are immune from criticism.

In any case, the point of all of this is to say that a lot of Irish became cops. Most went to cities like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago, but there were also sizable Irish populations in Baltimore, New Orleans, Louisville, and yes, San Francisco, my fav! I am proud to say that on my mother's side of the family, we have been in the Bay Area since the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

Of all branches in my family tree, I can go back the furthest with the Flynns. The second eldest Maurice Flynn, mentioned above and to the right, and not to be confused with two others by the same name, was born before the American Revolution and thus could not have been a U.S. citizen even if he was born here, which we was not. Maurice's mother, Johanna Whelan, was born in 1739, when some of the world's first novels and newspapers were coming onto the scene.

A few things should be pointed out in the blue map above, which shows Munster Irish immigration, indicated by the orange-ish dots, from 1875-1925. Some were continuing to migrate to Great Britain, especially if they could not afford the trip to the United States. Most were going to the urban Northeast and it's worth considering why. I suspect that the urban North, due to its industrial prowess, contained a lot of jobs that attracted cheap, immigrant laborers. But outside of small pockets in Louisville, St. Louis, and New Orleans, why not the South? What makes the most sense to me--and again, I pledge my non-expertise and welcome corrections--is that the South already had an abundant supply of cheap laborers in its African American population. Secondarily, Irish Catholics may not have felt welcome in a region that, compared to the North, was more ethnically and religiously homogeneous, dominated by Anglo-Saxon evangelical Protestants.

Because the Flynns came over in the 1880s, they were not potato famine Irish. While discussions of late-19th century immigration to the US are often dominated by noting the large numbers of Slavs, Russian Jews, Italians, Poles, Mexicans, and Japanese, there were still substantial numbers of English and Irish coming to America at this time. The later Johnson-Reed legislation of the 1920s established quotas that favored immigrants from northern Europe above others.

Staying with my mother's side of the family, we see her father and my grandfather, William "Bud" Smith, pictured here. I never met Bud and don't know much about him. But I do know that he was good with cars and fought in the navy in WWII. Bud's father, John James Smith, apparently born "at sea" in 1883 on the way over from Ireland, was a "hoisting engineer" who lived in South San Francisco according to his registration with the WWI draft. These examples seem to fit with the reputation of the Irish as being mostly working-class in the early-20th century. The fact that I have managed to obtain a doctoral degree, the first in my family on either side, provides some measure of social advancement, even if the money is not great.

Three generations of Campbells: Tom, me, Nate, Barbara, and baby Tessa

This brings me to the present. I could go on here and believe me, I have many more thoughts and questions...would I recommend the DNA kit to others? From the standpoint of adding to their collection and forging connections, yes, but it seems it would be most helpful if people who didn't know much about their family history took this test. You do have to be willing to dispense with some money and it seems that the more you spend, the more the website gives you.

Why have so many Irish Americans become politically conservative in recent decades despite the Catholic emphasis on social justice and the group's long history of economic disadvantages and alliance with the Democratic Party? This is a definite downer for me. Is it Catholicism's tendency toward hierarchical authoritarianism and anti-abortion politics? Is it the trend, common among many immigrant groups, that as they become more "white" and more "American" that they also become less welcoming of new immigrants, a platform more closely aligned with today's Republicans? Is it the experience of being in the police force? Is it tribalism?

Does the stereotype of the intemperate Irishman have any merit? My sense is that this has got to be more than just an urban legend. The "Fighting Irish" is the mascot of Notre Dame. Speaker of the House, Paul Ryan (bleck!), once said that one of his fellow House Republicans was "getting his Irish up" after being confrontational (for what exact reason I forget). And my parents will hate me for saying this, but irritability and argumentativeness are definitely family traits! It would be interesting to speculate about whether the fields of genetics can advance to the point of saying that so and so behaves in this way because of his/her genes. If there is a genetic component to our behavior, it certainly undermines the myth of the free and autonomous individual.

My niece, Tessa Josephine Campbell, pictured below, is the closest thing I have to a kid. I hope she reads this some day and gains some insight on her ancestral roots. She certainly has Irish DNA running through her!

Irish Through and Through Part 1

4/20/2017

Last Christmas, my parents gave me a thoughtful gift: a DNA kit from Ancestry.com. Readers may have seen their commercials. You spit into a vile (saliva contains DNA) and send it to a lab, which runs some tests and gives you a scientific reading of where your ancestors came from. The way it works is that the lab looks at the mutations in your DNA and compares it to population samples from around the world. If your mutations match the mutations found in certain parts of the world--in my case, Ireland--then they can say with confidence that this is where your ancestors came from.

I completed my test on January 24 and received the results on April 12. It took longer than the normal span of 6-8 weeks, I'm assuming, because the testing center received a flood of submissions after the holidays. The headline number, indicated above, is that I am 78% Irish. Pretty cool, eh? One thing the Ancestry.com website emphasizes is that siblings with the same parents can often have important differences in their DNA percentages (unless they're identical twins). So if I'm 78% Irish, my brother, Nate, might be 65% Irish, or he might be 85% Irish, or somewhere in between. Although Ancestry provides a white paper with some of the scientific explanations for their tests, I found the material a bit daunting and would really need to sit down with it to figure it out. I doubt I will do this. But the gist of it, from what I've gathered, is that each child takes 1/2 of his/her chromosomes from the mother and 1/2 from the father, but you don't know what will be in that 1/2. Most of us know this already, intuitively, even if we're not familiar with the scientific explanation. There's a reason we hear about recessive traits like red hair that skip generations and pop up in some children, but not in others. Thinking about DNA from the standpoint of evolution, this makes sense. Our species, or any species for that matter, would not have evolved without significant genetic variation. If every sibling inherited roughly the same percentages of genes from their parents, you would not have the mutations and variations that make adaptations--and therefore evolution--possible.

I can't say that I was terribly surprised by, or enamored with, the results. In addition to the late response, the site didn't give me much to look at. I probably finished examining my results within a half hour. My family already has a fair bit of information regarding our Irish roots. We can trace back some of our ancestors to the late-18th century, though going back further would likely require travel to the British Isles. In 2011, when I was working on my dissertation, I did some brief work with the 1830 and 1840 federal censuses, which required a subscription to Ancestry, and along the way, I decided to fill out my family tree. My aunt, Karen Smith, had also done a lot of the hard work on this years ago.

What I was at least somewhat surprised about is that only 6% in my ethnicity estimate was from Great Britain, which includes Scotland. My last name is Scottish. It means "twisted mouth" in Gaelic, apparently because Campbells, who often allied themselves with the English and against the Highland Scots, had a reputation for double-dealing. This goes to show that you can't tell a lot about a person's ancestry just by looking at their last name. There was probably once a time when this was more true than it is today, but consider that "Campbell" is in the top 50 of most popular surnames in the United States (and yet oddly, there are quite a few people who annoyingly pronounce the 'p'), interracial mixing is a lot more common today, and families can acquire a name through marriage, adoption, or in the case of many African Americans, through slavery. I bring this up because you'll find a few examples out there of African Americans today who have the last name "Campbell," and it always takes me by surprise. But then I quickly remind myself that lots of Scots-Irish settled in Appalachia going back to the colonial era. While Pennsylvania and New York have lots of Campbells, there many families of Campbells in slave-owning states like Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee, many of which were connected through friendship, politics, and patronage with President Andrew Jackson. Chances are that if an African American today has the last name Campbell, he/she is probably descended from slaves who took the last name of their master. I am pleased to say that I am not descended from any of these Campbell slave owners, which is good because I already deal with enough guilt!

So why would I be mostly Irish with the last name Campbell? Keep in mind that a name can get passed down over decades and centuries but a Campbell living today may only have a very small percentage of DNA similar to the ancestral Campbell living in Scotland in 1800. So unless that Scotsman married a Scottish wife, and more importantly, that the same trend continued in subsequent generations, you may have a Scottish last name but have very little Scottish DNA in you. Most of my mother's side of the family is Irish and as I show in the next blog entry, my father's side also contains a significant number of Irish people. If I recall a story correctly from my late grandfather, John Campbell, nicknamed "Rusty" because of his red hair, his own grandfather was from Dublin. Although Rusty had a Scottish last name, he was not a Presbyterian, as many Scots are, but a devout Catholic--a religion typically associated with the Irish. My guess is that this is because his mother's ancestors were Irish (his middle name is O'Hara). An Irish bookseller once came to my office at Cal Poly and said that he was aware of quite a few Campbells living in Ireland. This brings up the important point about cross-migration in the British Isles. You'll find lots of people with Scottish last names in northern Ireland and England. You'll also find lots of people with Irish last names living in England today. In fact, I would wager that there has been so much intermixing between various parts of the British Isles that it is difficult to tell someone's ethnic heritage just by looking at their last name. Kennedy, typically associated with the Irish, is somewhat common in Scotland. Liverpool has a significant Irish population because during the Industrial Revolution, poor Irish crossed the Irish Sea to work as dockworkers and other laborers in the bustling port city. I recently found out that the most famous Liverpudlians in the world, the Beatles, have Irish ancestry; all four of them.

The map here shows that I am part of what is called a genetic community, with ancestors who lived in areas in which the following family names appeared quite frequently: Murphy, O'Brien, Walsh, Kelly, Barry, O'Neill, Mahoney, Shea, Fitzgerald, O'Connor. As my Aunt Karen's work showed, many of these names are already in our family tree.

One little plum, shown above, is that at 78%, I am actually not that different, genetically speaking, from a native-born Irish person. My American accent, to say nothing of my habits and mannerisms, would be an instant give-away, but I'd like to think that I could travel to Ireland and fit right in! At least that's what my DNA says!

Some Old Ways Work For a Reason

4/14/2017

This quarter I've been trying out something new that isn't exactly "new" at all but which has produced positive results from the standpoint of student performance. When you reach the ten-year mark in teaching in higher ed, as I've just done, you hit a groove where a lot of what you do in the classroom has been vetted through trial and error. But this quarter I made two significant changes: one, I decided to forbid all electronics in the classroom, whether they be laptops, tablets, or cell phones (which I had always outlawed). I was pleased to have the support of colleagues. I have been at institutions where I didn't have the support for doing what I believed was right. The student-as-customer mentality reigned supreme. The second thing I did was to stop giving all of my students access to my completed, annotated PowerPoint lectures, which I had previously posted on Blackboard. This means that students must actually come to class and take notes on a piece of paper (imagine that, right?) Attendance is up and there are studies suggesting that students will do better if they attend class. If they miss class, they are obligated, as I once did in college, of contacting their classmates to get lecture notes. None of this was new from the standpoint of being cutting-edge or groundbreaking--indeed some in the profession might deride this approach as regressive or reactionary--but it was new from the standpoint of me having not yet implemented it at Cal Poly.

One of the definitions of a pragmatist, I tell my students, is to take a utilitarian view of the world. You go with what works, meaning that if the evidence changes, you have to change, too. It is the opposite of being rigid and ideological. If my new approach backfired immensely, I'd have to rethink it. But so far, and admittedly we're dealing with a very small sample, the results are promising. Each one of my students took the test. All 127 of them. Typically a few people don't take the test, for any number of reasons. But the scores were also slightly higher, by about 1-2 percentage points. What do we make of this? We must be cautious because we're talking about one test during one quarter. Perhaps, just by the luck of the draw, I have brighter students this time around. The scores could have been higher for any number of reasons. I had worked over my spring break to make both my test questions and study guides as straightforward as possible. But my gut feeling is that maintaining a classroom environment relatively free from distraction, and one in which students must take notes the old-fashioned way, is working well. I heard a bit of whining and complaining from students who were not happy that I no longer posted my Powerpoints. And it's a constant struggle to get students to put away their phones. The problem was that too many students in previous quarters weren't coming to class, assuming that having the Powerpoints would save them. It never does and I told them that (some still didn't listen). And besides, if you're a student, and taking notes without laptops had resulted in a higher test score, then what exactly is the problem? This is what every student wants, right? In other words, it's for your own good! You may resent the fact that I have eliminated the possibility of you checking Facebook or texting your friend while I am in the middle of class, but if learning is the ultimate goal here, I'm convinced it will be all for the best.

I can't stand the constant barrage of assaults on higher ed, most of which come from people who have never set foot in the classroom. They mostly come from Silicon Valley types who have a vested interest in pillaging our pensions and privatizing the system of higher ed more than they already have. Your methods are obsolete, they say. You're operating on a nineteenth-century model that has no use for the "modern" or "real world." What a bunch of crap. Capitalism has reared its ugly head again, I'd say. Historians of all people should be the most critical of this pro-business, technophilic impulse; a discourse that assumes an air of inevitability and non-contingency, neglecting how policy and choice matter a great deal. I get emails all the time from publishing companies saying it's unfair for teachers to require their students to go without phones in the classroom. Such consumerist garbage. How dishonorable that you have to insult my intelligence to push a product on me. I'm sorry, but if you can't go five minutes without checking your phones, the problem is decidedly not with my teaching, but with your attitude; your energy; your ability to control yourself. To the extent that the college experience is about more than just knowledge acquisition, and is in fact, in a larger sense, also about preparation for adulthood, what could be more adult that learning to control your impulses? What about all the studies saying the constant distraction of technology has eroded our ability to focus and how we trick our minds into thinking that we're all great multitasking without realizing that multitasking itself is probably one of the worst ways to go about doing things? What about the studies saying taking notes by hand results in greater retention of knowledge than taking notes by computer? I've linked to those studies in previous blogs. I stand by them.

The Transatlantic Financial Crisis of 1837 -- OUP Encyclopedia of Latin American History

3/30/2017

The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History has published my entry, entitled, "The Transatlantic Financial Crisis of 1837." Here is a PDF version. While technically an encyclopedia entry, the experience for me in putting all of this together was much more comparable to a full-length article published in a peer reviewed journal. In other words, a lot of work. Its length, including notes, exceeded 10,000 words. It was an invitation-only process and the article went through a process of anonymous peer review with several editors and scholars involved. If you're interested in nineteenth-century financial panics and recessions, give this a read. In addition to some amazing content, you'll find important links to primary sources, a brief discussion of the historiographical literature on this topic, links to digital materials, images, and a further reading section.

Political Geography: Race, Immigration, and Voter Behavior

2/12/2017

I've recently put together this presentation for my students. Many of them seemed to have found it worthwhile. It's based on maps I've collected over the past few years while reading newspaper articles and it grew out of Facebook conversation with some other professors in the field, especially Sharon Ann Murphy and Jessica Lepler, who reposted one of the maps here from Louis Hyman. By arranging some of the maps together on one slide, I was able to point out discernible patterns demonstrating the influence of race, ethnicity, and immigration on voting behavior. President Trump* (asterisk intended) has made race explicit in his pronouncements and policy prescriptions. If we know that Trump got some of his most enthusiastic support from certain regions in the country (i.e. the "Rust Belt" in the Upper Midwest) and we also know what types of demographic groups live in those regions (i.e. whites who have not completed college, principally of German, Polish, Swedish, Scots-Irish, and Anglo-Saxon ancestry), then we can conclude, with a fair degree of certainty, what these voters think about race relations. One of the most interesting insights is that many of these same demographic groups in the Upper Midwest, as indicated on one of the maps, were once immigrants over 100 years ago, and yet, based on their voting patterns, they seem to exhibit hostility toward new immigrants. This begs the question: have they forgotten their history? Are they not aware that their ancestors once had opportunity--the same opportunity that they are so eager to deny to new immigrants? Race and politics are touchy subjects so instructors should always be prepared to tread lightly. I recommend that this exercise not be linked to any sort of formal assignment or test. Sometimes the most enlightening lessons can come from classroom exercises of this nature; ones that do not put the pressure on students to perform for grades. Having that said, many students, and Americans more generally, could use basic primers on geography. At the very least, these maps are helpful in letting viewers know the different types of cultures that prevail in the United States, and with the right instruction, the historical reasons why certain groups settled in particular areas.

The Talk (Almost) No One is Willing to Have - Grade Inflation, Part 2

1/26/2017

For this post, the second in a four-part series, I will present and analyze the abundant evidence we have pointing to significant grade inflation over the past few decades in American colleges and universities, which is based on various articles written by journalists and a growing body of academic research. Then I will show how this trend harms both students and faculty, eroding the quality of education.

If you are a student of mine who is reading this blog because you are disappointed in the grade you earned, I contend that your frustration stems less from my grading policies, though this may be part of it, but more from the little-discussed fact that you have grown up and gone to school in an environment of persistent and seemingly irreversible grade inflation. Grade inflation is the gradual rise in average grades earned over time without a commensurate rise in performance. Scholars have located the start of this trend in the late-1960s, when professors purportedly began giving out higher grades to keep students out of the Vietnam War. Grade inflation abated somewhat in the 1970s, but began rising again in the 1980s, where it has continued until this day. We see grade inflation when most students in a class earn an A, A-, B+, or the occasional B. In the field of economics, price inflation generally occurs when more and more dollars chase the same amounts of goods and services. In this scenario, prices rise because the dollar has lost its value and the dollar can lose its value if there is a sudden spike in the number of them in circulation. Consider that if dollars grew on trees, as the expression goes, we would be paying very high prices for goods like milk and bread (yes, I’m aware that mild inflation has a number of benefits as I’ve written about elsewhere, but I’m just giving this example to clarify what grade inflation is). So just as price inflation often corresponds to a devaluation of the currency, grade inflation corresponds to a devaluation of student performance. A’s are handed out just like the dollars that grow on trees.

More and more studies are documenting the realities of grade inflation. It is most observable at the Ivy League schools, where exorbitantly high tuition comes with the expectation of higher grades. The Boston Globe reported that in 1950, about fifteen percent of Harvard students received a grade of B+ or better, whereas in 2007, more than half of all Harvard grades were in the A range.[1] According to Rosovsky and Hartley, between 1960 and 1997, average collegiate grades increased nationally from a 3.07 GPA to a 3.34.[2] Gradeinflation.com has datasets that show these statistics. If trends continue, virtually every college student will get an “A” by the mid-21st century and the average GPA will approach 3.8, which is higher than my own undergraduate GPA. One study of the CSU and UC systems, where I have spent over fifteen years as a student and faculty member, showed grades inflating at about forty percent of the 32 schools surveyed (9 branches of the University of California and 23 CSU branches). A small percentage of these schools were actually deflating grades while at a larger number of schools, grades had stayed about the same. The study, which analyzed grades between 2009 and 2013, reported an average GPA at UC campuses of 3.03 while the average GPA at the CSUs was 2.93.

A rise in grades would be acceptable if it reflected a rise in student performance. But if anything, the data suggest that performance has been declining. American millenials, when judged against their peers in other countries, have performed quite badly in literacy, technical skills, and math skills. This is true even for those with advanced graduate degrees. And while SAT scores and the average number of hours per week that students spend studying outside of class has decreased, enrollment in remedial courses has increased.[3] All of these metrics come with important caveats, of course. For as long as I can remember, there has been a heated debate as to what SATs actually measure. Like any standardized test, SAT scores are not by any means the final word on “aptitude,” as the abbreviation would suggest, let alone intelligence. Students may be studying less outside of class because the internet allows for fewer trips to the library and higher tuition has forced students to take up more of their time working rather than studying. And more remedial classes could be a natural consequence of allowing greater numbers of students access to higher education.

But as a growing chorus of professors are arguing, grade inflation is harming both students and faculty. It harms students because it packs a wide range of student performance and achievement into a narrow range of grade distribution. Let’s say 80% of students in a class receive a B+, A-, or A. This would be an example of what is known as grade compression (sometimes scholars distinguish between grade inflation and grade compression but I would prefer to view them as part of the same phenomenon). As grade compression occurs, we are less able to parse out and differentiate the truly exceptional work from work that is only slightly above average. This devalues hard work. It rewards the underachievers and punishes high-performing students. If a professor gives an A- to a person who slacked off most of the term but managed to put together a strong effort on only one exam without truly internalizing the material, and yet at the same time gives an A to the person who has performed extraordinarily well, the exceptional student is not rewarded in a manner commensurate with his/her effort. Getting a B+ or an A-, moreover, as I said in my previous post, doesn’t motivate students to do better. As one student at Princeton University commented, “if I get the same grade for my very best work that I get for work that is not my very best, I’m less motivated to try to stretch as far as I can.”[4]

The late UCSB economist, Philip Babcock, in a 2010 essay, wrote that average study time would be about 50% lower in class in which the average grade expected was an “A” compared to the same course taught by the same instructor in which the average grade expected was a “C.” To rephrase, if professors gave lower grades throughout the term, students would make the natural adjustment of studying harder. And to the extent that more study leads to more learning—at least up until a certain saturation point—we see, therefore, that passing out lower grades will actually lead to more learning. And that’s what we want, right? For what else is the job of a university, and the professors who work there, than to provide an environment in which the student learns the most??!!

An additional harm to students wrought by grade inflation comes in the form of leading students into fields for which they are ill suited. By giving out higher grades, colleges give an implicit endorsement to employers that a given student would make a strong candidate for a position. The student who shows up late, talks and texts in class, and doesn’t do any of the reading—but yet pulls off a B+ because the professor is a pushover—may be in for a rude awakening upon entering the workforce. As a professor in the humanities, I think that there is too much emphasis on the utilitarian and vocational aspect of the modern university. I would much rather have students pursue learning for its own sake. Having that said, we cannot ignore that there is a vocational and career-preparing element in college, and this necessarily places at least some burden on professors to adequately prepare students. Call me a disciplinarian or old-fashioned if you wish, but I personally believe that we do students no favors for what lies ahead by being too lenient.

Now, how does grade inflation harm faculty? In a number of ways. Let’s say, in a hypothetical example, that a philosophy department has a close-knit group of faculty who all give out an average grade of C+. Yet, the number of philosophy majors is down post-2008, as are the number of philosophy degrees that the university graduates (this recent decline in humanities majors has many causes but let’s save that discussion for another time). To attract more philosophy majors, some professors in the department start upping their grades, from around a B- average, and later, to a B. At first, out of principle, not everyone in the department goes along. But a problem develops when students, who generally prefer professors who grade easily, start flocking to the classes where one can earn an “easy A.” This means the professors who wish to keep high standards see declining enrollment. If they are contingent faculty, as most professors are nowadays, they risk losing their classes when faced with consistently declining enrollment. Pressure, much of it economically driven, begins to mount from above. No department chair or dean ever says explicitly to a professor that they must inflate grades to hold onto their jobs, but the message, however subtle, is clear: there is an easy and convenient way to respond to this pressure that entails the least resistance. And that way is to raise grades. It is no surprise that grade inflation has taken place in the very same years that higher education has taken a marked turn toward relying on non-tenured, contingent faculty. Professors who fear for their jobs will raise grades to keep students happy. Happy students make for happy administrators and happy parents. And contingent faculty now comprise 70-75% of college instructors in the United States compared to less than 30% in the 1970s. Thus, inflated grades are at least partially result of labor trends in the academy and the pressure of keeping enrollment numbers high. Professors have to compete for attracting customers…oh, I’m sorry, you’ll have to excuse me…did I say customers? That must have been a slip. I meant to say students! The sad fact of the matter is that grades are a factor in determining whether a professor is popular. And a professor’s popularity will influence enrollment numbers, the number of majors, whether that professor gets hired again to teach the same class, funding, and new tenure-track hires in that department.

To be clear, required classes may mitigate some of the most harmful effects of this phenomenon, and what I have described above is not something I experience at my current place of employment. Nonetheless, I’ve taught at six colleges and some are better than others at respecting their professors’ grading policies. And this is not something I just conjured up on my own. I’ve not only heard about it through the grapevine, but have read numerous articles on the subject. In short, the student-as-customer model poses a fundamental threat to academic integrity. If one professor in a department starts to inflate grades, other professors may soon find themselves under pressure to do the same. Rarely, if ever, does the pressure go in the opposite direction. In other words, a hard grader almost never compels other professors to be hard, unless there is a concerted effort on the part of the institution, collectively speaking, to reverse grade inflation, as Princeton once did.

In the next two parts of this series, I will delve more deeply into how grade inflation is built into the current profit-driven orientation of higher education, and especially, the increasing reliance on student evaluations to measure teaching effectiveness.

[1] Talia Bar, Vrinda Kadiyali, and Asaf Zussman, “Grade Information and Grade Inflation: The Cornell Experiment,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 23, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 93-108.
[2] William M. Abbott, “The Politics of Grade Inflation: A Case Study,” Change (January/February 2008): 33.
[3] Ibid., 32-37; Steven Pressman, “The Economics of Grade Inflation,” Challenge 50, no. 5 (Septemer/October 2007): 94.
[4] Abbott, “The Politics of Grade Inflation: A Case Study,” 36.

The Talk (Almost) No One is Willing to Have - Grade Inflation, Part 1

1/23/2017

Half Moon Bay High School tennis, c. 1998

When I first sat down to write about this topic, I thought it would be confined to one blog post. Soon I discovered that the entry was getting long and it involved numerous related topics that could not be left out. The result was a four-part series, the first of which begins here…

The chances are likely that if you’re reading this blog, you are a student of mine who has earned a grade that does not align with your expectations. Notice that I deliberately used the verb earned when I might have chosen received. There is an important difference. Language matters. Even if their intentions are good, and I have no reason to assume otherwise, I must confess that I have come across too many students who have an undue focus on their grades, and their grades alone. My first bit of advice, with plenty more to come later, is to take a deep breath…cool off…try to get some perspective. I will help you with this. Do not internalize the grade you earned as a reflection of your character, worth, or intellect.

Perhaps in your cooling off period, and assuming that your essay is your chief concern, you noticed that I left comments that are particular to your individual paper, as well as some general thoughts for the entire class. I was abundantly and meticulously clear in my expectations for this assignment, having gone over the prompt with you, having shared with you the numerous handouts that explain the categories and factors I would use to determine your grade, including a grading criteria handout, helpful hints for writing, a handout on plagiarism, and how to construct an effective introduction. We also went over examples of introductory paragraphs in class, discussing aloud what constituted effective writing and relating this to the strategies and manners in which I suggested that you write your introduction. In the process we discussed A-level, B-level, and C-level work.

I would be curious to know how you worked on your essay, and more generally, how you approached studying for my class. Whenever I encounter a student who has struggled in my class, I usually ask about two things: 1) note-taking and 2) the number of hours per week outside of class that you dedicate to studying for my course. The expectation is that for every one unit of coursework, you will need to spend two hours of work per week outside of class studying and reading the material. Some students may need more. If your lecture notes are less than one page long, you need to bring your game to the next level. See the examples of note-taking that I posted. When you wrote your essay, did you turn your phone off or at the very least put it in a place where buzzes, vibrations, bells, and other notifications would not distract you? Did you try to put all of your energy into the essay, staying disciplined enough to not go on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter? In most cases I emphasize that multi-tasking inhibits our ability to learn and retain information. I’ve blogged about this before and even discussed the numerous articles that reference scientific studies on the subject. Did you take it to heart when I said that writing is a process and that it is best not to write an entire assignment in one sitting? The best work comes from constant revision. Did you print out your essay and read it aloud rather than examining it solely on the computer screen? Did you have a friend or classmate look at your work to make sure it made sense to them? Did you check your essay one final time before submitting it?

If you answered “no” to any of these questions, it would seem difficult to expect an A on your essay or your overall course grade. When I discussed the 2:1 ratio of hours of study per week, one student in my class scoffed audibly. When I asked if any students turned off their phones when they worked on major assignments like essays, no one raised their hands. This was a major bummer, man.

It might help you to learn that I did not always get A’s in college. I remember most of my classes and professors from UC Davis and while I am eternally grateful for my educational experience, there were at least a couple of times that I complained. It is from the perspective of hindsight and more importantly, from the experience I have gained from being a teacher at the college level for ten years, that I regret those decisions. I look back and realize that I was not deeply committed to all of my classes. I had other priorities: a social life, two rock bands, an on-campus job. My experience, I hope, will be valuable to you in at least two ways. One, despite encountering disappointment in the form of B-level grades, I did not give up. I tried my best and ended up earning a doctorate, presented my research at academic conferences, and published my arguments in peer reviewed journals. This didn’t happen overnight, so hopefully my own experience in academia, filled with both triumph and defeat (and seemingly, more often, defeat), will show that a slow and steady pace, exercised with patience and long-term thinking, can yield positive results. Two, I realized that I really just wasn’t a great writer as an undergrad. It was only by reading students’ writing as a teacher that I could dial down my own inflated ego.

Any professor who has taught long enough will tell you that predictable stream of grade complaints generally fall into a few categories. I worked very hard in this class, many students say. An article in Vitae channeled Angela Jackson-Brown, an assistant professor of English at Ball State University, who gave a fitting response: “It always amazes me when students feel like their English paper grades should be based on effort. I sometimes wonder: Do you ask the math teacher if she will give you points for trying even though parts of your mathematical equation are incorrect? If you took an astronomy course, would you want partial credit because even though you identified a star as a planet, you at least recognized that they are both in the sky?” As sad as it is to burst your bubble, you don’t get an ‘A’ just for working hard and you certainly don’t get one just for doing the work. Everyone works hard. This is what we expect. A-level work should be exceptional. A college degree should mean something beyond perfunctory work. It should signify a certain intellectual achievement and communicate to others that you have attained a basic mastery of a subject (your major) and at the same time have covered a broad and well-rounded literature spanning many subjects.

For some students, my response is this…if you were really that concerned about grades, you should have come to see me in my office much earlier in the term to talk about study techniques and any advice I’d have for you. More importantly, there are many other factors besides grades that you should consider when you assess what you have gotten out of a class. Some of them might include: did the professor challenge me intellectually? Did the professor give me a new way to look at something that I had not considered before? Have I acquired new skills and/or reinforced old ones? Have I gotten a general sense of the major themes that have played out in American history?

I once got an email from a student who said that she was the only person in her group who actually did the reading in preparation for group activities. I honestly don’t know how to respond to this. I’ll probably either take the safest route of saying nothing or just kind of saying, “yeah, that’s really not something you should be telling your professor,” but you can imagine my urge to scold. In another instance I received a panicky email, riddled with punctuation and grammatical errors, expressing surprise that she did not receive her A. This is the world of high tuition we must now struggle to confront. It is a customer-is-always-right mentality. I was professional in my response and have taught long enough to know that sarcasm doesn’t go over well with most people, but can’t a student see the irony in this? Might a poorly constructed, hastily conceived email be indicative of a level of effort and performance that is decidedly not A-quality material? Then there is the always sharp and amusing Slate writer, Rebecca Schuman, who undoubtedly captured the sentiments of countless professors when she opined in an article: “as a professor, there is little worse than spending an entire semester attempting to connect about a subject you find both interesting and important, only to have [students] ignore everything you do until the moment their GPA is affected.” Schuman went on to say that if you (as in the student) need a certain grade (and you’d be amazed how many needs there are nowadays), then follow my advice. If you concentrate on learning the right habits, good grades will fall into place.

There are lots of theories of how best to distribute grades, but one overriding concern is whether a student has truly mastered the material. Whether you master the material may not always correlate with effort. Some students, having harnessed their own inner talents or gone to prestigious schools or having encountered teachers before who pushed them, need very little effort to master material. Others may work numerous hours and just get by with a “C.” Grading, it should be known, is also a way to compare student performance. It may be tough to hear, but if you’re a student who is unhappy with a grade, a very likely reason is that many of your classmates just put up a better performance.

I look back at all of the time I spent stressing about grades as an undergraduate or graduate student, and I think, man, what a waste of time and energy! Because in the grand scheme of things, whether or not I got accepted to graduate school; whether or not I received a fellowship; whether or not I got a job all seemed to depend very little on my GPA. Much larger structures were always at play; structures that were far greater in magnitude than any individual’s ability to control. Let’s say a history department wants more gender or Latin American historians and less political and economic historians. Do you think that all that groveling and extra effort to turn a B+ into an A- would really matter when it came to whether a department hired me or not? No, state budget cuts, economic forces, changes in the discipline—all these things would arguably matter much more. This is one thing I’ve been trying to tell my students…larger structures often matter much more than individual choice. Your decision to work extra hard may be irrelevant when five reactionary, religious men in robes with a narrow, pre-1929 mindset of the Constitution decide to rule, with no other intellectual fortitude than their own whims, that labor unions are somehow inconsistent with Congress’s ability to regulate interstate commerce.

Whenever we go through something like college, we are confronted with the choice of emphasizing either principles or outcomes; the journey or the result. In this example, the outcome is the grade you earn and whether or not you receive unit toward your undergraduate degree while the journey is the hours you spent cultivating sound study habits, studying for exams, attending class, taking notes, writing an essay, etc. I can assure you that you’ll get a lot more enjoyment out of your college experience if you focus on the journey and not be so consumed with the outcome. Focusing only on an outcome puts a lot of pressure on yourself! Let me be clear: I am not saying that you should forget about grades or ignore them. Yes, they are important. But what I am asking you to do is to bring your emphasis on outcomes more in harmony with the process.

While I personally believe college should be tuition free (it pretty much was according to the California Master Plan of 1960, signed by Governor Pat Brown), you pay a lot of money to take my class. The default setting, unfortunately, for too many students and parents is to assume that paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for a class should equate to a desirable grade. Wrong. I’m turning that argument on its head…What would you rather have, paying lots of money for a class in which you learned very little and got an “A” or paying lots of money for a class in which you learned a lot but got a “B” or a B+? In our consumerist, instant-gratification culture, have we completely lost sight of the notion that learning should be its own end?

Besides, a lower grade can also push you to do better. That’s kind of the point, right? If you get an “A” with minimal effort, you haven’t really pushed yourself. Say you get a “B” in a class but then work incredibly hard to improve your writing skills and then in the next class you get an “A” by the same professor. Wouldn’t it have been worth it? Wouldn’t you feel proud of yourself for the real, measurable improvement in your skills? But you wouldn’t have gone through this unless you had a professor who gave you a B.

Here’s an analogy from a completely different phase of my life, when I was a junior tennis player. Let’s call this the Wes Hollon approach. When I started out as a junior tennis player, I would put a lot of pressure on myself. I would get nervous and blow matches I should have won. Wes diagnosed this flaw fairly easily and he told me that my problem was that I was too focused on winning and losing (the outcome). Instead, he wanted me to focus on mastering plays, whether it was hitting forehands crosscourt, taking less risks on my first serve, or whatever. These plays, in effect, were the process, not the outcome. His philosophy was that if you focus on the process, the outcome will fall naturally into place. And you know what? He was right! I started winning more matches! Now apply this to your studies: focus on developing your academic skills as part of a lifelong journey; don’t sap up all of your energy by focusing on outcomes.

In the next installment of this series, I overview some of the academic literature behind grade inflation and why this ends up hurting both students and professors alike.

My Review of Paul Kahan, The Bank War (Westholme, 2015)

1/22/2017

Formal book reviews in academic journals can often be quite dry. The majority of them, it seems, are more descriptive than analytical and written carefully so as not to offend. Occasionally one comes across a blistering, scathing critique written by a senior scholar who, cushioned by tenure, can afford to ruffle feathers, but these are rare. Because the medium for this review is my own personal blog, and not an academic journal, I will be fair, but will also call things out directly and honestly, at least as I see them.
            Author Paul Kahan has written a straightforward and accessible book entitled The Bank War, published by Westholme Press, in 2015. An adjunct history instructor at Ohlone College, Kahan promises “a fresh synthesis of the Bank War that reexamines this critical moment in US history in light of current events” (viii). The Bank War, as Kahan argues, exposed the inherent conflicts between democratic accountability, represented by Andrew Jackson, and the non-partisan technocratic expertise of Nicholas Biddle, the president of the Second Bank of the United States (BUS) (xi). Related to this were crucial constitutional debates over the power of the presidency and the federal government’s authority to charter a public-private corporation at the national level. Kahan demonstrates a competent understanding of arcane financial principles that are often hard to grasp and has picked up on many of the nuances of Jacksonian era politics. There are elements of encyclopedic knowledge on display and helpful biographical details.
            Because The Bank War is a derivative work built primarily on secondary sources and intended for a lay audience, some may downplay the critiques I am about to offer. Had Kahan sought to write a scholarly work for a more specialized audience, I would have raised several important issues, some of them more serious than others. One subject he might have explored more deeply is Biddle’s relationship with the press and members of Congress. The Bank’s use of its own funds to bribe newspaper editors and lawmakers was one of the Jacksonians’ most persistent rallying cries and the subject of an intensely partisan and prolonged congressional investigation in the spring of 1832 that the author mentions only briefly (101). This critique is not a selfish plug for my own research interests—it actually goes to the heart of what the anti-BUS Jacksonians meant about democratic accountability, one of the key themes in Kahan’s work. In addition, there are times when the book’s chronology loses focus. If the author was consciously prioritizing thematic coherence over a strict, day-to-day chronology, as one presumes, then by all means, go ahead, but at least alert the reader that this was a conscious choice, not an inadvertent one. Somewhat oddly, the first third of the book provides background and describes events that predate Jackson’s inauguration, which is typically the starting point for most Bank War narratives. In chapter 3, Kahan begins to drift around quite a bit, making it difficult for the reader to discern a causal narrative (58-63). After contextualizing the Bank War with the petticoat affair and Maysville road veto in the spring of 1830, for reasons that are not entirely clear Kahan shifts abruptly to the fall of 1831, where he discusses the famous duel between Thomas Biddle, Nicholas’s brother, and anti-BUS Representative Spencer Pettis of Missouri. No citations are provided for this duel. Then, inexplicably, he resumes his exposition of events in 1830 (76-81).
            Kahan is principally concerned with how conflicts over debt and finance played out in American politics. To this end, he has written competently, but it is worth noting that the direction of the field has become decidedly more international in scope in the last few decades. This explains why almost every job ad on hnet, even for positions in political history, usually include a global or Atlantic World dimension. My own thoughts are that there is nothing inherently wrong with choosing to focus exclusively on domestic politics, but the topics that Kahan covers have important international considerations that should not be ignored. Kahan discusses two economic contractions—Biddle’s Panic of 1833-34 and the Panic of 1837—but other than briefly mentioning “developments in Europe” (152), Kahan has nothing to say about the Bank of England, cotton prices, money markets, global movements of silver linking Mexico with China, and Anglo-American merchant banking houses like Baring Brothers. All of these factors are essential to a comprehensive understanding of the various panics of the antebellum era. When writing about the Panic of 1837, Kahan states, “This economic panic, which started in Manhattan, quickly spread across the country,” (145) as if to profess a nonchalant certainty about a historically complex and multilayered event. Experts are far more equivocal. One might just as easily locate the origins of this panic with the failure of the New Orleans-based cotton commission house, Hermann, Briggs & Company, as Jessica Lepler does, or with London money markets.
            Then there are long and detailed passages that do not have citations. I cannot help but think that, again, this relates to the type of work he set out to write, his audience, and the press. Before reading this book, I had never heard of Westholme Publishing, a small, Pennsylvania-based company that, according to its own website, operates as “an independent publisher of trade books.” These weren’t the type of random typos that appear in even the most polished of books. They occurred repeatedly and lasted for several paragraphs. They included detailed facts, figures, dates, and dollar amounts that could not in any way be construed as common knowledge (2-7; 11-17; 23-26; 39-41; 96-97). In some lengthy sections there is only one footnote to one page of one book; in others, there is a condensed summary of other authors’ work without citation, and at others, one can only guess. No omnibus footnotes alert the reader to the key works the author relied upon to write certain sections. One suspects that a higher standard of rigor would apply to publishing a scholarly work with a university press.
            In far too many cases The Bank War essentially repackages the work of previous studies—principally Thomas Payne Govan’s Nicholas Biddle (1959) and Edward Kaplan’s The Bank of the United States and the American Economy (1999). Govan and Kaplan, analytically speaking, do a lot of the heavy lifting for this book. Out of 305 total footnotes, 95, or 31%, cite just these two works (161-170. Calculations performed by reviewer). This not only suggests unoriginal work, but is doubly problematic because Kaplan’s 1999 synthetic work rested heavily on the work of previous monographs. In relying on Kaplan so much, Kahan has unwittingly created an added layer of distance between himself and the original primary sources. He has also assumed implicitly that Kaplan had gotten everything right, leaving no opportunity to challenge his conclusions or complicate the received wisdom that has been passed down over generations. Almost all of the quotes in this book have appeared in previous monographs and there is little evidence that Kahan conducted archival research. This would seem to undermine the claim of providing a “fresh” approach. And when Kahan argues that he seeks to reexamine the Bank War “in light of current events,” here, too, he does not follow through with any depth. There are brief nods to the Great Recession of 2008, the Federal Reserve, and some Americans’ skepticism of paper money, but these points are underdeveloped. They seem relevant only in the broadest sense, ignoring how politics, society, and even central banking have evolved in complex ways during the last 180 years, rendering many historical analogies tenuous at best. Today’s Federal Reserve, with its ability to significantly alter the money supply through open market operations, including its recent purchase of approximately $4 trillion of government assets in an unprecedented and yet largely successful move known as quantitative easing, is a very different kind of central bank than Biddle’s institution, which was constrained by an international specie standard.
            A few final points…Kahan has published five books since 2008, a relatively short span of time in which some authors may struggle to produce one monograph. He seems to have carved out a niche in quickly publishing derivative works that chronicle key events in the history of nineteenth-century Pennsylvania. As of this writing, there are 52 reviews of The Bank War on Amazon, the overwhelming majority of which are glowing. Many of these reviews were written within a few days of each other, lack substance, and contain only a few lines. There are countless works of terrific scholarship that barely get any reviews at all on Amazon. One commenter suggested that the reviews were coerced—that is, Kahan assigned his book to his class and asked his students to write positive reviews—which seems like a definite possibility. If that is the case, Kahan is giving us a really hard sell; too hard, in fact. However clear his writing may be, in the end the book lacks the type of deep expertise that can only be accumulated with several years of time.