Additions, remarks, and odd things I learned this year:
Harvey Milk was essentially an old-style ethnic politician, just with sexual orientation as his organizing principle. Loved the film, but what Milk skimps on is how much hardball Harvey could and did play--there were a lot of gay dollars around SF in the 70s, and he knew what to do with them to win political representation, union jobs, and a seat or two at the table. He also was a Goldwater Republican who in some ways never really changed his political colors. (Randy Shilts, The Mayor of Castro Street)
Max Allan Collins gets to write too many novels for Hard Case Crime. I like pulp as much as the next person, I really believe that, but he writes the same damn thing every time. Almost exactly. I think this is taking the whole verisimilitude bit too far.
Gloria Steinem took CIA money as a student activist in the 50s, as did Richard Wright and Nina Simone. A bunch of former Communists put on the payroll, though, were pretty unsatisfactory employees, as they took the agency's money and continued on a campaign of factionalism and plunder of anyone who did not share their exact strain of beliefs. (Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer)
being a 19th-century criminal was really not fun: talk about nasty, brutish, and short. And once you talked to the cops, you were pretty much dead meat on the street. And the prisons were even worse. (Gilfoyle, A Pickpocket's Tale) Also, running a gang is hard, particularly as regards the question of punishment and deterrence--how hard do you discipline people? when do you need to lay down the law, and when can you outsource? when do you just let things go? (Venkatesh, Gang Leader for a Day)
Jacob Riis pretty much invented the multimedia presentation, touring with his photos of NYC slums in the 1890s, and made a pretty good career of it as well (Yochelson and Czitrom, Rediscovering Jacob Riis)
Thomas Jefferson was attacked as a dangerous atheist, and John Adams as a religious fundamentalist who would turn the US into a theocracy in the election of 1800 (Larson, A Magnificent Catastrophe)
you can tell how hard farm people in the 30s worked by their recipes, which all seem to call for massive amounts of soaking and cooking in cream. Either that, or they were all really fat and this has been excised from photos (Kalish, Little Heathens)
intellectual stunt-journalism books are harder to pull off than it looks: Jacobs' The Know-It-All, where he reads the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, is funny most of the way through, but can someone with a Brown BA really be as ignorant as Jacobs sometimes shows himself to be?or is that part of the shtick? Shea's Reading the OED, where he, well, reads the entire OED, is basically a bunch of odd words with a few pages of OK rumination dressing them up. He sounds like a nice guy, but it's a thin book. Honestly, Ken Jennings' autobiography/apologia/trivia-nerd defense, Brainiac, which is far better than it has any right to be, remains the cream of the crop for me.
you can draw some interesting homologies between dominant modes of social experience and sports--football, with all of its regimentation and military lingo, was of particular cultural centrality in the 60s and 70s, when those experiences had formed a central part of the lives of many Americans (Mandelbaum, The Meaning of Sports)
people were making waterboarding jokes, in a satirical context, 100 years ago, given that the tactic was being used in the Philippines--and thus it must have resided at least somewhere in the collective consciousness. What happened in the interim? (Crosby, Captain Jinks, Hero: from the NYT review, Aug. 30, 1902: "A good American sitting among his broken idols and ruefully rubbing the welts and bruises his patriotism receives from the bastinado which Mr. Ernest Crosby wields in Captain Jinks, Hero, may, nevertheless, find balm in the thought that he wrote it in six weeks -- as his publisher announces.")
the Inquisition pretty much invented every tactic of spy agencies and tribunals, including agents provocateurs, going after financial assets, forcing accused people to denounce others to survive, and using secret evidence (Kirsch, The Grand Inquisitor's Manual)
someone could make a great movie about Venice Beach around 1980-81, when steroids were making their way into bodybuilding culture with what can only be called great bursts of energy. The whole revolution of everyone and everything around Arnold, and the shady dudes prescribing everywhere the informed eye knew to look, would be one of the cooler and mostly unexplored subcultures to put on the screen (Assael, Steroid Nation; see also the excellent documentary Bigger, Stronger, Faster*)
Abraham Lincoln came into office with no knowledge of military affairs, so, in order to prevent his generals from steamrolling him, he gave himself a crash course in military history. George McClellan, who had graduated from West Point at 20 ranked #2 in the class (the famous class of '46 that also included Stonewall Jackson, Pickett, and 20 other Civil War generals), had had so many experiences of early success that all he would do was sit around and whine about how Lincoln never gave him enough troops. Reason #50 why Lincoln rocks. (McPherson, Tried by War) When McClellan ran as a Peace Democrat in 1864, he was actually more pro-war than some in his party, who were openly rooting for a Confederate victory; there were significant disturbances and attacks on military recruiters in places like Ohio (home of exiled congressman Clement Vallandingham), which does at least make me both defend and worry about the kinds of civil-liberties measures Lincoln chose to win the war (Weber, Copperheads)
it's far too easy to buy your way into college. When I read about, say, the Olsen twins or whoever going to NYU, I thought, well, maybe they're actually smart. Or maybe not, since there are all sorts of loopholes to let dumb children of the rich and powerful, or famous people with no particular academic distinction, into prestigious schools, no matter how horrid their academic records. This has been going on overtly for most of the century, and semi-covertly for the past 15 years. Duke has more or less leaped two levels in reputation over the past 30 years on the backs of such development admits (Golden, The Price of Admission; Karabel, The Chosen)
it is not so dangerous to attend soccer matches in England now, partly because you can't buy tickets to matches unless you have a previous history of ticket-buying. Also, there are lots of police stationed everywhere, and a lot of the louts have been priced out. (Culpepper, Bloody Confused!)
