Longs Peak - Rocky Mountain NP (Click for larger)

The early part of our travels led us to the northwestern-most point of the first federally funded expedition to the west which included professionally trained scientists and artists. Unlike the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804-1806, the infamous Zebulon Pike trip to Colorado and the myriad Army Topographic Corps expeditions of the mid-to-late nineteenth century, the western journeys of Major Stephen Harriman Long doesn’t seem to have stuck in the American imagination.

If he’s remembered at all, he’s usually referenced as “that guy who called the Great Plains the ‘Great American Desert’ on his map” or “that guy who climbed Longs Peak.” It’s unfortunate because he blazed a trail for later expeditions that, like his, mixed scientific inquiry and artistic depiction in equal measure. Of course, they also brought their early 19th century prejudices about agriculture, science and scenery with him, thus leading Long not to recognize one of the most biologically diverse and rich ecosystems in the world while he trod over the short-grass prairies.

If you’re interested in learning more about Major Long’s 1819-1820 expedition, you might consider reading “Sandy Wastes:” Exploring and Experiencing the Great Desert, a paper I wrote for an environmental history class about six years ago and then submitted with my graduate school applications. Here’s a short excerpt from the concluding remarks:

[Major Long] inadvertently interfered in the emerging manifest destiny of Americans to overrun the continent. The effective western border he seemed to propose reached barely half-way across the possible extent of the nation. While it is possible that he did slow expansion to the Plains, within three decades a torrent of migrants would make their way through the region and draw their own conclusions. Indeed . . . the idea of the West as a garden held more currency among Long’s contemporaries than the idea of a desert West.

The early appraisals of the West given by Long and other naturalists are complex and require careful consideration, especially when viewed in conjunction with their own scientific evidence which seemed to contradict their conclusions. The volumes of textual, visual, and physical data generated by the explorers ultimately yielded a fairly balanced view of the Plains: a region that is at once hot and dry and yet well-adapted to life, just not necessarily human life. In this respect Long’s conclusions about the habitability of the region prefigured John Wesley Powell’s conclusions about the need for irrigation to aid development in his 1876 Arid Lands report. Moreover, Long blazed the trail for a new type of federally-sponsored western expedition that included scientists, artists, and (later) photographers as an integral part of balanced exploration. Though these explorers were often serving the utilitarian and imperial interests of the state, like Long they strove to help an expanding nation understand and create itself by looking at the land. The conclusions of Long’s party indicate the role of ideological orientation and expectation in the creation of place at the same time that they caution against trusting our initial reactions to alien environments.

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First off, to all my Canadian brethren and sistren, happy Canada Day. I’m still not 100% sure what you’re celebrating, but I’m glad that our Civil War scared you into confederation. Sorry if you thought we were gunning for you after that whole “54º40′ or fight” business.

Denver Convention Center - Click for larger

Anyway . . . We’re only two days into our trip and already having a great time. We just returned from an evening of baseball at Coors Field.

It’s been a while since I saw a really good game. Lisa and I prefer well-pitched games with good defense and a bit of drama. So we were very happy when the Rockies’ Aaron Cook pitched a beautiful, complete-game shutout with just 79 pitches in a shade less than two hours. It’s not like the Padres played poorly either. They had some great defensive plays. The losing pitcher just had a bad fifth inning: four runs on three hits, a fielder’s choice, an errant throw by the shortstop and three stolen bases.

The Colorado Rockies’ park is very nice, and Lisa found us great seats. The weather this evening accommodated us, too. It’s too bad there wasn’t a bigger crowd in the house.

Tomorrow we’re heading to Rocky Mountain National Park. Despite living in Wyoming for several years, I’ve never been there. It looks very pretty from the pictures I’ve seen. We’ll need a little respite after the eventful day we’ve had.

Colorado Capitol Building, Denver - Click for larger

Yes, it was a very busy, hectic day. Let’s see. On account of a small bit of jet lag we got up a bit earlier than expected and had to stand in line with the young urban hipsters at Starbucks on their way to work. (No one here really understands how to pair shoes with an outfit.) Instead of going to the office we toured the Colorado Capitol. It’s kind of quaint. Government was not in session, so the building had the feel of a ghost town. I think we saw a tumbleweed blow through the rotunda. Everything is gilded, but they don’t have a bronze cod hanging from in the assembly chamber; so chalk another one up for the Mass State House.

Pioneer Mother, Denver - Click for larger

Just outside, we saw the “Closing of an Era” statue. If you believe the symbolism in the statuary, you might think that Native Americans killed the last bison and thus hastened their own doom. Compare and contrast that with the heroic pioneer woman holding a rifle and raising a child. (Your 2000 word essay is due by the end of the week.)

Closing of an Era, Denver - Click for larger

We continued our Western art historical adventure a few blocks away at the Denver Art Museum, which has a nice collection of Western American art. The rest of the collection befits a city of its size, but it feels a bit hodgepodge in places. Of course, we’re spoiled by the Boston arts environment, which is significant but very little compared to New York.

Western Art, Denver - Click for larger

I have mixed feelings about Western American art. Much of it is backward-looking, sentimental and overly romanticized; yet there are strains within “traditional” Western art that provide wonderful insight into how we experience and imagine the West. Plus there’s a lot of technical and artistic virtuosity in the genre as well. And I really love the landscape art of the West, especially the pieces by artists who show the West as it actually was in their time. I like the re-castings, re-imaginings, and re-examinations of the mythic place. After all, I do believe in the West and the Plains as places distinct from the much of the rest of the country. There’s something in the soil, the rocks and the sky and in the way we came about taking possession of it and struggle to hold onto it . . . or even know it.

Black American West Museum, Denver - Click for larger

Those who know us probably won’t be surprised that after some lunch we took a walk north from downtown, past an invisible red line, to take in the Black American West Museum. I had read a little bit about the “Exodusters” in Nell Irvin Painter’s fantastic Standing and Armageddon, but I really didn’t understand just how much the experience of African Americans in the West mirrored the experiences of almost every other non-indigenous group that emigrated in the 19th and 20th centuries. Doctors, miners, farmers, cowpokes, rodeo cowboys, soldiers, homesteaders, inventors, business owners — not to mention the obvious: fathers, mothers, children, laborers, strugglers — this museum presented a wealth of photographs, documents, and artifacts that showed African Americans chasing and creating the same American Dream that shows up in whitewashed histories and entertainment. It also played down overt racism and suggested that the West was much more egalitarian that those same mainstream sources suggest.

So if you’re in Denver for the Democratic convention or just passing through like us, take a walk up California Street or a short trolly ride to the museum. It’s worth it.

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I just realized I have this biggish, vaguely-annotated bibliography of almost 400 works on early American and Western American history. It’s neither current nor authoritative and only goes through 2002, but it’s free and might have a hidden gem or two.

You can download the bibliography in EndNote 4 format. (Hey, it’s been a while since I used it.) Or you can browse it online. Some of the entries have additional notes not shown in the HTML.

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It’s time for me to own up to something: I possess a much larger than average collection of books and notes about the Indian Removal Act, the Early National Period, and the Nullification Crisis. Like Louis P. Masur, I think 1831 was one of the most interesting years in American history. Through a variety of contemporaneous events, we can start to see a nation moving beyond its revolutionary zeal, becoming something like the America we know today while also sowing the seeds (in the Nullification Crisis) of extralegal struggles over state rights and eventually war.

(And I guess it’s time for me to admit that when I sat on a Bahamian beach soaking up the warm winter sun in December 1999, I was reading a 1924 copy of Benjamin H. Hibbard’s A History of the Public Land Policies. Yep, it was a strange time for me.)

One of the things I love about studying American history is seeing the evolution of the “American Character” — which I believe actually exists, for better or worse (mostly for the better) — or at least the expression of various recurring aspects of an ever-changing character. It’s something I can’t satisfactorily explain even to myself as I stare dimly across the unbridgeable void to the past; but at times I feel like it wouldn’t be much harder to relate to a Midwesterner of the early 19th century than one from today.

Yet, despite being a Westerner who knew militia folks and who thought for a while that federal laws made by D.C. bureaucrats and Northeastern elites were at best advisory when applied to a wild place like Wyoming, I still have trouble grasping the fire and passion in the mid-18th century over states’ rights conflicts, abolition, and Indian Removal. I can understand but not feel the ardor of the Second Great Awakening, which helped inspire the latter two. (For that matter, I can barely understand 1968 and am pretty sure I would have been a conservative square.)

Anyway, let’s bring this rambling reminiscence to a halt and get to the point. In 2000 I wrote a paper that examined Andrew Jackson’s differing reactions to the Marshall Court’s 1832 ruling in Worcester v. Georgia (in which he nullified the Supreme Court’s decision to exert Federal supremacy over states’ right regarding so-called “Indian removal”) and the Nullification Crisis (when he was ready to send federal troops to South Carolina to enforce an act of Congress.)

I never got around to revising it when I applied to grad schools in 2002, opting instead to go with a paper I was writing at the time about the western journeys of Major Stephen H. Long. (Perhaps I would have had better results if I had.) But if you can stand a few rough edges, you might be interested in reading To Raise Up an Interesting Commonwealth: Jackson’s Reaction to Worcester and Nullification.

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If you can believe it, I once made a serious go at becoming a historian. I wanted to go to history grad school, but I hadn’t taken any coursework as an undergrad. Feeling extremely self-conscious and very far behind, I set out to get caught up. I took classes, first at U.Mass and then at Boston College. I went to AHA meetings and lectures at local universities. I read tons of book reviews. It was simultaneously enrapturing and terrifying.

But it was not to be. It’s hard to make up that much lost time, and I didn’t really have the mindset for researching in original sources, a skill that my “catch up” survey classes didn’t push. Now that I know better and have no serious desire to be a professional history, I would really love to do some original research (which probably explains why I’m so fascinated with tombstones these days).

And more than anything, I’m prone to scratch at an itch until I’m satisfied that I know enough about it to be able to define its key features, its edges, its historiography, and the why (not just the when and what). Since I finished my class early this month I’ve been reading voraciously about Afghanistan.

Afghanistan: the crossroads of the world, the graveyard of empires. Its recorded history extends thousands of years — Alexander of Macedonia lent his name to Kandahar, for goodness sake, and there’s another four to five thousand years in the archaeological record before he showed up. I’ve been reading a bit about that history recently, and I’d like to share it with you; but there’s way too much for one dispatch.

Its modern history intersects many of the 20th century’s historical themes: empire, globalization, the Cold War, and transnational terrorism. I think I was like most people who could only briefly describe Afghan history by giving a few keywords: Soviet invasion, mujahideen, Taliban, al-Qaeda. Not surprisingly, there’s a lot more to it than the plot of a Rambo movie. Since Sunday marked the round-number anniversary of the beginning of what might euphemistically be called the “Afghan’s troubles,” let’s take a closer look at the last thirty years of Afghanistan’s history.

Important note: Be sure to see the “Important Note on Sources” at the end of this dispatch.

An Overview

The last thirty years in Afghan history trace an arc that began with instability and war and continued downward to disaster intermingled with stability through totalitarian theocracy before the reemergence of a fragile civil society in the midst of war. It’s fair to say that Afghans have endured one insurgency or another since 1978. Here are some of the key dates for future reference:

• April 27, 1978 — Communist coup
• December 24, 1979 — The Soviet Army invades
• February 15, 1989 — The Soviets withdraw
• April 1992 — The communist government falls to the Mujahideen
• September 1996 — The Taliban take Kabul
• December, 2001 — The Taliban flee Kandahar

The Saur Revolution

Picture it, Kabul 1978. King Zahir Shah had been living in exile for five years since a mostly bloodless coup led by President Mohammed Daoud Khan. Afghanistan was a poor developing country with powerful neighbors. Its western neighbor, Iran, was close to theocratic revolution in 1979. Pakistan, to the east and south, had seen General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq seize power in a coup the year before. And the Soviet Union loomed large on its northern border. Though nominally unaligned, the Soviets poured billions of rubles of influence south over the preceding decades in the form of economic and military aid.

(more…)

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