Know Your Archives: The Center for Popular Music

Randall Stephens

It takes a certain temperament to be a historian.  For example, you have to, at least on some level, enjoy rummaging through dusty manuscripts and spending hour upon hour hunting down sources, reading, rereading, and conducting keyword searches until your fingers become arthritic claws.

I don't enjoy that last one, but I do enjoy visiting archives.  Some more than others.  I've been to a variety of amazing collections over the years.  Maybe only one of those, the Reading Room of the Library of Congress, matched shear beauty with the amazing scope of materials.  (Getting tired of reading through that bound volume of brittle 19th-century newspapers?  Have a stretch and look up at the beautiful dome.) For the most part, historians don't visit archives for the lovely vistas. Quite a few archives are situated in cold basements with little sunlight and flickering, humming florescent lights.  An ideal setting for a troglodyte, but not a vitamin-D-deprived historian.

Downtown Nashville, summer 2012

This past summer I went on the road to do some initial research for my next book project, currently titled The Devil's Music: Rock and Christianity from Elvis to Larry Norman.  It was a great experience.  All the archivists and assistants I encountered proved terrifically helpful.  I visited some really stunning collections.  Wheaton College's Billy Graham Center may lay claim to being the best place to study all things related to 20th-century Protestantism, and evangelicalism in particular.  (Don't let their hopelessly outdated 1990s website make you think any less of the place.)  To the south of Wheaton I trekked to the Southern Baptist Historical Library. The staff their gave me numerous tips and helped me track down obscure pamphlets, documents, and letters that I could never have imagined even existed.  As a bonus, the Southern Baptist Historical Library is in Nashville.  Music nuts can take a break by boot-scooting over to the Country Music Hall of Fame or dropping some greenbacks at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop, founded in 1947.

My favorite collection that I visited on this cross-country trip was the Center for Popular Music at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, TN. Seldom has research been more fun.  I perused dozens and dozens of books on rock history, gospel, and pop music.  (It was hard not to fall down an rabbit hole.) I listened to a rare, 1956 acetate interview with Elvis Presley from a Texas radio station.  Girls screamed in the background as a flustered Elvis answered with his typical "yessir." I thumbed through anti-rock diatribes from the Carter years.  Through it all I got a better handle on my topic. 

The Center holds acres of records, tapes, magazines, books, manuscripts, and much more. (Search there extensive collection here.)  And the staff at this place, the gem in its crown, could not have been more helpful.  With their aid I found enough research material to keep me working away for months. 

In the Know Your Archives interview embedded above, I speak with Dale Cockrell, Director, and Martin Fisher, Curator of Recorded Media Collections.  They describe the materials the Center collects, the kinds of research being done there, and pretty much explain why anyone doing anything on music history should make the trip to MTSU. 

Christmas Creep and Other Joyous Holiday Traditions

Eric B. Schultz

Not long ago, a friend sent me a video which featured a new holiday character, “Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus,” with a note saying how appalled he was with the way retailers had hijacked

the holidays.

I’m pretty jaded myself by holiday retailers. But even I’ve winced a few times this fall.  There was the Christmas wrapping-paper sale I stumbled upon in mid-October, for example, and the recent news that many large retailers would be opening their doors at 8 or 9 p.m. on Thanksgiving evening.  (Who’s going to eat cold turkey sandwiches with me?)  Now, I’d been introduced to the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus offering proof positive that Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas had finally been smashed together into the twisted wreckage of one long retail extravaganza.

Remember the time when Christmas was simple and less commercial, when you could step out of your door into a Currier and Ives print.  No?  How about a $29 Thomas Kinkade “Memories of Christmas” print?  Precisely.  One of the greatest of all holiday traditions is recalling a holiday season—historian Stephen Nissenbaum reminds us in his superb book, The Battle For Christmas—that never existed at all.


Commercial Christmas presents were already common in America by the 1820s, Nissenbaum writes, and in 1834 a letter to a Boston Unitarian magazine complained about aggressive advertising and the fact that “everybody gives away something to somebody,” turning the holiday into a source of bewilderment.  In 1850 when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her Christmas story, readers could identify with the character who groaned, “Christmas is coming in a fortnight, and I have got to think up presents for everybody!  Dear me, it’s so tedious!”*  Just a few years before, Philadelphia’s confectioners had begun displaying huge cakes in their shop windows a few days before Christmas, actively competing for customers.

Professor Nissenbaum also reminds us that the figure of Santa Claus, all but invented in the early nineteenth century, was first employed to sell Christmas goods in the 1820s.  By the 1840s the jolly old chief of elves had become a common commercial icon.  Christmas had turned into “the thin end of the wedge by which many Americans became enmeshed in the more self-indulgent aspects of consumer spending.”

Few technologies would have a greater impact on Christmas and consumerism than the railroad.  In The Search for Order, Robert Wiebe tells us that it was two great explosions of railroad construction following 1879 and 1885 that, combined, produced hundreds of miles of feeder line designed to connect countless American towns—once isolated communities—into a single, massive, national distribution system.  This was aided by agreement on coordinated time zones in 1883, and a standard railroad gauge largely adopted by 1890. 

Retailers heard the whistle and jumped on board.  In 1872, Aaron Montgomery Ward produced his first mail-order catalogue, in 1874 Macy’s presented its first Christmas display, and in 1888 the first Sears catalog was published.  By 1890 many Americans were trading Christmas cards (thanks to affordable imports), and Santa had gone from icon to messenger, his arrival defining the holiday for many children.   Mass distribution had become a reality, though Santa might have felt more at home in a boxcar than a sleigh.

In November 1924, editor and journalist Samuel Strauss (1870-1953) penned “Things Are in the Saddle” for the Atlantic Monthly, an essay that addressed head-on the issue of American consumerism (or what he termed “consumptionism”, i.e.—the science of compelling men to use more and more things). “Something new has come to confront American democracy,” Strauss sounded the alarm.  “The Fathers of the Nation did not foresee it.”  And then he asked the reader, “What is the first condition of our civilization?  In the final reason, is it not concerned with the production of things?  It is not that we must turn out large quantities of things; it is that we must turn out ever larger quantities of things, more this year than last year?” Writing in the month leading up to Christmas, Strauss concluded, “The problem before us today is not how to produce the goods, but how to produce the customers.”

What had happened, he concluded with some pain, was that the American citizen had become the American consumer.  Civic duty now meant buying goods as fast as the great machines of industry could produce them, and the great trains of industry could deliver. 

Strauss implicitly understood that the relationship between our year-end holidays and merchant needs has always been incestuous.  While the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus didn’t exist in 1939, for example, President Franklin Roosevelt most certainly did.  When merchants complained that a late Thanksgiving (on November 30) would reduce the number of shopping days before Christmas, he gladly changed the date.   The Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1939 declared the date of the holiday to be not the last, but the second-to-last Thursday of the month.

That same year, Robert L. May created Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer for Montgomery Ward.   And, of course, it’s just a lucky coincidence that 1947’s Miracle on 34th Street wove Santa Claus, Christmas, Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and the company’s flagship store into one happy story.  In 1966, another of our beloved holiday classics, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, frankensteined Christmas and Halloween when Linus sat in the most sincere of pumpkin patches, waiting for the Great Pumpkin to arise and deliver toys to all the boys and girls.  In fact, you might remember that it was in yet another Peanuts special, It's the Easter Beagle, Charlie Brown, when the kids are disgusted to find Christmas store displays in the middle of April and a sign warning that there are only 246 days left until Christmas.

I don’t mean to sound like the Grinch, but hopefully your children have talked you into purchasing tickets (at $115 per seat) to his live holiday show by now.

In any event, Stephen Nissenbaum, Samuel Strauss, and Robert May all remind us that we come by the “Ho-gobble, gobble” of Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus honestly, one in a long line of characters that has contributed to what is now called “Christmas Creep.”  We’ve even developed an entire vocabulary around the launch of retail Christmas, including Grey Thursday, Black Friday and Cyber Monday.  It is the very reason you can hear David Bowie and Bing Crosby singing "The Little Drummer Boy" long before the jack-o-lantern on your front porch goes soft and mealy.

Columnist Yvonne Abraham wrote recently in the Boston Globe that she was shocked to find a house adorned in Christmas lights on the first week of November, and “the red snowman cups at Starbucks came out on Nov. 1. Ditto the elves on shelves at CVS. The wall-to-wall carols weren’t far behind.”  Indeed, global warming scientists warn us that our lawns are moving the equivalent of 6 feet south every year due to climate change.  It seems the Pumpkin-Headed Turkey Claus is here to warn us that Christmas is moving right before our eyes as well, a few hours earlier every year—a cultural movement that is nearly 200 years old and just as traditional as Old St. Nick himself. 

Beatles History Roundup

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Steve Marinucci, "Beatles' Apple has nothing to fear from 'Strange Fruit' film," Examiner, April 21, 2012

It finally hits the street Tuesday, but the release of "Strange Fruit: The Beatles' Apple Records,” the new unauthorized documentary on the history of the record label founded by the Beatles, has had a few rough spots.

Amazon.com and at least one other dealer stopped selling it, but others continued to take orders. And though a few writers suggested it might not get released, it's been available all along direct from the distributor.>>>

Jon Friedman, "Myth-busting, from The Beatles to Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust," Wall Street Journal, April 19, 2012

Ken Scott has as many great stories to tell as anyone in the rock and roll world. And he isn’t shy about sharing them.

Talk about being a fly on the wall. Scott was the engineer on The Beatles’ White Album, among other sessions by the fabled band, and the producer on David Bowie’s classic 1972 album, “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.”>>>

"Beatles unseen photos to be sold," BBC, April 22, 2012

Unseen photos of the Beatles are to go up for sale after lying in a family album for almost half a century.

The 20 black-and-white images show the band as they made their first film, A Hard Day's Night, in March 1964 at the Scala Theatre in London.>>>

"Sir Peter Blake recreates The Beatles' 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' cover," Uncut, April 2012

The Beatles' iconic 'Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band' album cover has been redesigned by original sleeve designer Peter Blake on his 80th birthday.

Noel Gallagher, Amy Winehouse, late Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, The Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger and Paul Weller all feature in the new collage entitled 'Vintage Blake.'>>>

Mr Coffee

Randall Stephens

Americans' taste changes over time, like almost everything else, that is.

Witness the change in diet and the range of good eats available since the 1980s. The food and drink revolution of the 1980s and 1990s even introduced artisan cuisine to the Velveeta cheese belt. In the Midwest microbreweries began to crop up in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Now most Americans who live near civilization can shop for extra virgin olive oil, goat cheese, and cracked-wheat bread at there local supermarket or by a plate of Rare Ahi Tuna with Wasabi Vinaigrette, garnished with some unidentifiable greenery, at an area bistro.

Long ago, we drank Folgers, Maxwell House, and instant coffee. Now, coffee chains have familiarized Americans with the wonders of Mediterranean, Sumatran, and Kenyan varieties. The rage for the exotic even extends into the bizarre. Several years back the ultra-rare Kopi Luwak made a splash, or should I say, plop.

Before the 1970s most Americans brewed coffee at home with inferior peculators. Enter Samuel Glazer, a founder of the company that rolled out Mr. Coffee in 1972. Glazer passed away earlier in March at the age of 89.

Over at NPR Robert Siegel and Oliver Strand of the NYT discuss the change that the Mr. Coffee drip machine wrought:

STRAND: They realized that there was an appliance that they could make that would produce filter coffee that was much cleaner, much sweeter and, frankly, much tastier than percolator coffee.

SIEGEL: Because that's the way that coffee was brewed on an industrial scale, if you will, for big companies and hotels.

STRAND: Yeah, there were these large batch brewers that were basically enormous versions of what we started to use in our homes; these little countertop plug-in coffee drippers.

SIEGEL: And so, he wasn't the engineer himself but they figured out let's get somebody to make a miniature version of a huge coffee brewer.

We raise our cups of Cà phê sữa đá (iced Vietnamese coffee) to you, Mr. Glazer!

Acres of Glitter and Denim: David Bowie's Age of Fracture?

Randall Stephens

Art rock chameleon David Bowie turned 65 yesterday. The BBC has a slew of programs that it lined up to celebrate the star's reaching that milestone. An original 1973 TV performance of "The Jean Geanie," presumed lost, has been rediscovered and re-aired.

At the Guardian Alexis Petridis reflects on the unlikely longevity of Bowie:

It wasn't just the drugs: there was something about the intensity with which he worked during that decade - the scarcely-believable ten-year creative streak that begins with the 1970s The Man Who Sold The World and ends with the 1980's Scary Monsters And Super-Creeps – that suggests an early demise. Someone that burns that brightly probably isn't going to burn for long.

And the Telegraph reports that fans are clamoring for a tour: "Dozens of music industry celebrities from Boy George to Gary Barlow took to the online social networking site Twitter to congratulate him on a remarkable career."

One of the more interesting historical perspectives on the gender-bending, shape-shifting Bowie comes from Peter Doggett, author of The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie And The 1970s

(Random House, 2012), who argues that, in hindsight, the Thin White Duke was the most influential rock star of the 1970s. Certainly, when looking at how instrumental Bowie was in creating the rock persona and inspiring so much music in the 1980s, there's a case to be made here.

Writes Doggett in the intro to his book:

Fragmentation was central to Bowie's seventies. He pursued it in artistic terms by applying cut-up techniques to his language, subverting musical expectations, employing noise as a way of augmenting and substituting for melody, using a familiar formula and distorting it into an alarming new shape. He applied the same tools to his identities and images, assembling each different persona from the remnants of the past. Even Ziggy Stardust, the guise in which Bowie left his most enduring mark on the decade, was assembled like a collage from a bewildering variety of sources, despite his appearance of having stepped fully formed from a passing flying saucer. Elements of Ziggy came from pop: from Judy Garland, the Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, the Beatles, Elvis Presley, Little Richard. Strands of pop art were also visible in his disguise, from Richard Hamilton's assimilation of science fact and science fiction to Andy Warhol's obsession with surface and the borrowed sheen of stardom.

Do we have enough perspective on the 1970s to make those kinds of broad claims? The Age of Fracture through David Bowie's career and music?

Gender Imbalance and History

Randall Stephens

"Every so often, society experiences a 'crisis in gender," writes Kate Bolick in the new issue of the Atlantic Monthly ("All the Single Ladies," ht to Amy Wood). In a fascinating article on the state of marriage and the prospects for single women, Bolick muses on the ways that gender imbalance and social factors weigh on society.

Particularly interesting is her take on how this has played out through history:

Take the years after the Civil War, when America reeled from the loss of close to 620,000 men, the majority of them from the South. An article published last year in The Journal of Southern History reported that in 1860, there were 104 marriageable white men for every 100 white women; in 1870, that number dropped to 87.5. A generation of Southern women found themselves facing a “marriage squeeze.” They could no longer assume that they would become wives and mothers—a terrifying prospect in an era when women relied on marriage for social acceptability and financial resources.

Instead, they were forced to ask themselves: Will I marry a man who has poor prospects (“marrying down,” in sociological parlance)? Will I marry a man much older, or much younger? Will I remain alone, a spinster? Diaries and letters from the period reveal a populace fraught with insecurity. As casualties mounted, expectations dropped, and women resigned themselves to lives without husbands, or simply lowered their standards. (In 1862, a Confederate nurse named Ada Bacot described in her diary the lamentable fashion “of a woman marring a man younger than herself.”) Their fears were not unfounded—the mean age at first marriage did rise—but in time, approximately 92 percent of these Southern-born white women found someone to partner with. The anxious climate, however, as well as the extremely high levels of widowhood—nearly one-third of Southern white women over the age of 40 were widows in 1880—persisted.*

Certainly war takes a toll on society and on private lives in all sorts of ways that aren't imagined. Russia lost approximately 8-10 million soldiers in WW II and roughly 2 million in WW I. Talk about "marriage squeeze." Even in the United States--which, comparatively suffered far less in those conflicts--gender imbalance disrupted daily life and posed new challenges for the country.

Life magazine ran a photo essay on the troubled American family in 1948, lamenting climbing divorce rates and the breakdown of traditional families:

In the picture above an American family is shown in the sad process of breaking up. In city after city scenes like it are being repeated every day, each opening its own small cracks in our society, each a part of a cold statistical record which shows that last year 450,000 divorces were granted in U.S. courts, releasing a flood of children from these broken homes upon society. From such statistics emerges an unmistakable fact: the U.S. family, deep in the millrace of social and technological change, is itself deep in trouble.

American newspapers and magazines spilled gallons of ink on the family crisis and also worried about absent men. "The general fear of a shortage of eligible bachelors persisted even after the war," writes Kristin Celello in her Making Marriage Work: The History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States (UNC Press. 2009). "As the average age of marriage dropped for both men and women, unmarried women as young as twenty or twenty-one often thought of themselves as 'old maids'" (77). In the Life story above expert opinion is trotted out to show the hazards of immature young couples getting hitched.

Those of us who teach in colleges and universities are well aware of the gender imbalance in our classrooms. And today, writers across the spectrum are wringing hands or celebrating the "decline" of the American male.

How will current trends shape the course of history? What will historians be saying about the topic in 50 or 100 years from now?

Edward J. Blum on Race and Religion in Recent History

Randall Stephens

On Wednesday the history department at my institution hosted San Diego State University historian Edward J. Blum, who delivered an intriguing lecture on "What Humor Tells Us about Race and Jesus in America."

Blum is the author, with Paul Harvey, of the forthcoming Jesus Christ in Red, White, and Black (UNC Press, 2012), which "examines the central roles played by depictions of Christ in racial battles from the colonial era to the present."* Blum has also authored a variety of other books and articles on race, religion, and American culture.

In his lecture here on campus, Blum asked students, faculty, and community members to think about how humor in America has changed since the 1970s. What might have been utterly taboo in previous decades--jokes about Jesus, or cracks about religion and race--are now common.

A reporter from the local paper, Dan McCready, showed up and wrote a brief piece on the event. (See the article here along with a short video.) Blum addressed depictions of Jesus and described how Americans have talked about and represented God over the decades and centuries. Those images and ideas about race in general led to innumerable conflicts in the 1960s and 70s, many rehearsed on TV and the big screen. Said Blum to McCready: "What happens in the 1970’s is [that] Americans tire out from the Civil Rights movement, they tired out from all the struggles and we see a backlash to racial problems." Enter Archie Bunker, Dirty Harry, and Rocky Balboa.

Using episodes from South Park and Family Guy, along with popular films, Blum ably guided the audience through the twists and turns of popular culture and showed how we got from point A to point B. Few topics could get students to think about change over time as this did. And I'm always glad to have that key aspect of history discussed by visiting speakers!

Music History Roundup

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Marc Myers, "The First Wordsmith of Rock 'n' Roll," Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2011



Jerry Leiber wasn't the most artful lyricist in U.S. music history, but he certainly was among the most visionary and authentic. Leiber, who died on Monday in Los Angeles at age 78, was rock 'n' roll's first major wordsmith. With an ear for R&B and urban youth culture of the early and mid-1950s, Leiber had the good sense to keep his stories simple and quirky. He wasn't either of those two things, of course, but he was shrewd enough to know that R&B and rock 'n' roll were about singles, and that singles were about the beat and the passion and charisma of the artists who recorded them.>>>



Anthony Tommasini, "For Liszt, Experimentation Was a Form of Greatness," New York Times, August 23, 2011



. . . First and foremost, Liszt was a colossal pianist, the most awesome virtuoso of his era, who in his playing and his compositions for piano pushed the boundaries of technique, texture and sound. As a composer, beyond his works for piano, Liszt was the inventor of the orchestral tone poem and an inspired songwriter, and he produced a body of sublime sacred choral works. As a conductor, he introduced seminal scores, including Wagner’s “Lohengrin,” in Weimar.>>>



Nidhi Subbaraman, "How music hijacked our brains," MSNBC, August 9, 2011



If you think about, there's no escape, really. Music holds humanity in a vise grip. Every culture you can think of has it, hears it and taps their feet to it. So how did music first take hold? A new analysis proposes that music hijacked our ancestors' ability to hear and interpret the movements of fellow human beings. That claim is at the heart of “Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man,” a new book by neurobiologist Mark Changizi. Changizi analyzed the rises and falls in the rhythm and intonation of more than 10,000 samples of folk music from Finland and found that they bear a stamp — an auditory fossil of sorts — that can be traced back to the rises and falls and rhythms associated with the movement of people. >>>



Greg Allen, "The Banjo's Roots, Reconsidered," NPR, August 23, 2011



"My father was born with this instrument," Laemouahuma Daniel Jatta says. "This is part of our history." Jatta, 55, is from Gambia, a member of the Jola people. He's holding an akonting: a three-stringed instrument with a long neck and a body made from a calabash gourd with a goat skin stretched over it. Jatta's father and cousins played the instrument, but he didn't think much about it himself until 1974, when he was visiting the U.S. from Gambia, attending a junior college in South Carolina. He recalls watching a football game on TV with some of the other students. >>>



Jennifer Shelton, "Classical highlights," Cambridge-News, August 22, 2011



. . . Sounds from the 16th and 17th century will come alive in the beautiful setting of Sidney Sussex Chapel for a concert by early music experts, Passamezzo. In Peascod Time will be performed on period instruments and include ballads, lutesongs, consort music and more. September 5, 7.30pm, Sidney Sussex Chapel. Tickets are £12 (£8 concessions). Contact 07980 516054 / www.passamezzo.co.uk.>>>

The Other Side of the 1960s or "This Is My Country and I Know that I'm RIGHT"

Randall Stephens

There was another side of the turbulent 1960s and 70s era. New conservatism and membership in the Young American for Freedom gained steadily after 1964. The "silent majority" became a slogan for all those Americans who had enough of tear gas, long hair, and endless protests. Yet in the popular imagination this seldom registers. Host a 1960s party and see who comes dressed up as a John Bircher. Who else will arrive sporting beehive wigs and flattops and carrying "Get US Out of the UN" signs or wearing "AUH20" buttons. The popular history of the sixties, still, has probably been told too often in a prescriptive rather than a descriptive fashion. Even historians perhaps have sided with the young marchers who shook their fists at "the man."

However, recent trends in history are starting to change these perceptions and the way of telling the story of the 1960s and 70s. See for example the insightful books that have appeared in recent years on grassroots conservatism, the rise of the new right, and evangelical conservatism:

Darren Dochuk, From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism (W. W. Norton, 2010)

Jefferson R. Cowie, Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class (2010)

Daniel Williams, God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right (Oxford, 2010)

Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, 2002)

Kevin M. Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (Princeton, 2007)

Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton, 2007)

Bruce J. Schulman and Julian E. Zelizer, eds., Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s (Harvard, 2008)

Joseph Crespino, In Search of Another Country: Mississippi and the Conservative Counterrevolution (Princeton, 2009)

Kim Phillips-Fein, Invisible Hands: The Making of the Conservative Movement from the New Deal to Reagan (W. W. Norton, 2009)

David T. Courtwright, No Right Turn: Conservative Politics in a Liberal America (Harvard, 2010)

Donald T. Critchlow, The Conservative Ascendancy: How the GOP Right Made Political History (Harvard, 2007)

I've been tooling around with the idea of making a compilation of conservative country/folk songs, sorta anti-protest numbers, that express the other, fightin' side of the 1960s and 1970s. The criteria does not have to do with the quality of the music, but with the tone of the message. Do the lyrics call for flag-waving, god-fearing, patriotism and support for the local

police? Does the singer lament the state of America's cities and shout down the feral hippies running shoeless through the streets clutching their bongs and incense sticks? Long, long before the Tea Party raised its collective complaint and before Lee Greenwood made grammarians sick with lines like "And I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free," others were charting out a conservative protest genre.

So, here's what I've got so far. (Thanks to Scott Hovey for some wonderful suggestions). This is only a start! There's so much more out there.

Merle Haggard - The Fightin' Side Of Me (1968)

Merle Haggard - Okie from Muskogee (1969)

Jimmy D Bennett - Sapadelic (197?)

Don Hinson - The Protest Singer (197?)

The Goldwaters - Down in Havana (1964)

Up with People - Which Way America? (1966)

Lynyrd Skynyrd - Sweet Home Alabama (1974)

Robin Moore and Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler - The Ballad of The Green Berets (1966)

Sports, History, and Culture

Randall Stephens

With the Super Bowl and the Puppy Bowl over, and the barrage of clever and not-so-clever ads that went with the former, I've been thinking about the history of sports. I admit, I know little to nothing about the subject. (I do know that a class on the history of sports would probably populate.)

I am fascinated by how recreation has changed over the centuries. Has it become less violent, less like hand-to-hand combat? Of course, we do have ultimate fighting in are era, and their are all sorts of ways to die in a high-speed Nascar race, but it strikes me that common sports are less violent than they were in previous ages. A man does not need to train an animal to kill another animal to show that he is a force to be reckoned with.

Is it natural that sports should become more humane? Would dog fighting or bear baiting have struck late antebellum Americans as being as cruel and debased as most Americans think those are today? Ideas about propriety and impropriety appear to have dominated conversations about recreation for centuries.

There are still class and cultural connotations to sports in our age, much as there were hundreds of years ago. (One of my favorite Onion articles in recent years revealed that "a professional wrestling 'fan' has written a shocking new book that claims wrestling fans are actually paid actors.") But were class and cultural markers much stronger 150 or 200 years ago?

What do sports tell us about the people who have enjoyed them? How long have sports been woven into consumer culture? What can we know about western history be looking at the way men and women "recreated." (I hear that those who work in the subfield of cricket studies have some interesting things to say about empire and global culture.)

Anthony Fletcher's Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500-1800 (Yale, 1999) explores some of these topics. On sport in 17th-century England, he writes:

The gentry enjoyed the sport of their deer parks, their bowls and tennis; communal sports tested men's physical prowess and endurance, absorbing competitive vigor. Local tradition was deeply founded in this respect. In Wiltshire football was entrenched in the downlands, while bat-and-ball games like stoolball and trapball flourished in the vales of the north. East Anglian villages had their 'camping' grounds with their own indigenous and popular team games. There was something for everyone at the Whitsun Cotswold games, held annually from around 1611 on Dover's Hill, a marvelous green amphitheater outside Chipping Camden which is now owned by the National Trust. There was hunting and horse-racing for the nobility and gentry and the old sports, like wrestling, singlestick fighting and shin-kicking, for the country populace. The games were a veritable celebration of manhood which, at least until the 1640s, attracted people of all social ranks from miles around. (94-95)

An observer of late-17th-century England, Guy Miège said a little about sports in his country. Notice the praise for bloodsports and the comment about foot-ball's popularity among the lower sort.
Guy Miège, The New State Of England Under Their Majesties K. William and Q. Mary: In Three Parts (London, 1691), 39-40.

Writing History and the Crisis in Punditry

Heather Cox Richardson

Participating in the discussion over the media’s role in the tragedy in Tucson, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi makes the point that media figures get their market share by offering their audience a certain kind of emotional charge, reassuring them that they are better than “the other.”

Where entertainers will go for inspiration now that that dog-whistle kind of performance is suspect, he doesn’t have a firm idea.

It seems to me that historians have, at this point, a great opening to jump into the public conversation. My friend and literary agent, Lisa Adams, is always reminding me that readers want to feel smarter after they invest time reading something. If, indeed, there is a market for making people feel superior, why can’t we invest our energies in making people feel smarter with good facts and argument, presented accessibly?

There is an unfortunate tendency among academics to suggest that anything written for a popular audience must be “dumbed down.” This is wrong. On the contrary, pieces written for non-academics must be smarter than anything we consume within the academy. Untrained historians will not accept a book that uses theory as shorthand in place of an explanation for how something actually happened (but they will happily accept theoretical constructs if they are proven). They will not endure poor writing, or incomplete explanations. Indeed, rather than dumbing down our arguments, it seems to me that writing for a non-academic audience often forces academic historians to give up the jargon and shortcuts that allow them to advance arguments their facts don’t prove.

At a time when there is a vacuum in the public arena waiting to be filled by writers who can offer a new kind of intellectual rush, historians have a unique opportunity to step up to the plate.

And it might just be good for us.

Amateurs, Professionals, and Popular Histories

Dan Allosso

As I look at the historiographical “tree” I drew, it strikes me that the books on it have all been chosen by historians. I wonder what it would look like, if it included books that were especially important at imparting historical ideas to the general public?

The other day, Lisa responded to Chris’ post with a comment about appreciating older scholarship, and the “parents/grandparents” element of our intellectual lineage. I’ve been thinking about that, as I’ve been reading professional historiographies (John Higham, Peter Novick, Ian Tyrell) this week, along with assessments of the influence and popularity of books: Frank Luther Mott’s Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (1947) and Cowley & Smith’s Books that Changed Our Minds (1939). Malcolm Cowley and Bernard Smith's book, dedicated to Charles Beard, consists of a series of essays on authors or books deemed especially influential by American intellectuals responding to a New Republic inquiry. While it does not provide first-hand information about the books that influenced regular people (or even women, since all the respondents were apparently male), many of the people they polled had written books that did influence large groups of Americans. Carl Becker, for instance, nominated William Graham Sumner's A Study of Mores, Manners, Customs and Morals (1907), “which impressed me with the relativity of custom and ideas,” and Hans Vaihinger's The Philosophy of 'As If ' (1911), which “confirmed me in the notion that social thinking is shaped by certain unexamined preconceptions current at the time.” (quoting Becker’s letter, 6) Beard said “Brooks Adams’s two books are thumping,” which the editors took to mean The Law of Civilization and Decay (1895) and Theory of Social Revolutions (1913). Both Becker and Beard recommended Benedetto Croce, History: Its Theory and Practice (1923).

Beard himself was the second-most widely recommended author, just behind Thorstein Veblen (really!); An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution and The Theory of the Leisure Class got an equal number of votes. Authors popular with the surveyed intellectuals for their body of work rather than a particular title included Sinclair Lewis, H. L. Mencken, George Bernard Shaw, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Autobiographies included Henry Adams’, Theodore Dreiser’s, Joseph Freeman’s, Robert M. La Follette’s, and The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens, which is called “the key book of the depression...[that] came at exactly the right moment.” (12)

Several of Cowley and Smith’s picks also appear in the lists of popular, “amateur” history I’m compiling from Higham, Novick, and Tyrell, which focuses more on the question of whether or not an author was academic, and how he (yes, 99% of the time, he) fit in the growth of the profession, but nevertheless offer some guidance regarding popularity. For example, former Senator and amateur historian Albert Beveridge’s Lincoln (1928) earned $51,000 in royalties in its first six months (Higham 75). H.G. Wells’ Outline of History (1920) was “issued by a hesitant publisher at an exorbitant price . . . it sold one and a half million copies--one copy for every twenty homes in the country--within twelve years.” (Higham 74) Although the multi-volume set is global in scope, it deals extensively with American history and perhaps contextualizes it in a way that resonated with readers. Volume Four begins with back-to-back photos of Lincoln at Antietam and Bismarck at Versailles. Novick compares sales of Wells’ Outline with J. Franklin Jameson’s American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (1926), which sold less than a thousand, and John D. Hicks’ Populist Revolt (1931), which “took seventeen years to sell fifteen hundred copies.” (Novick 193) Allan Nevins, always interested in popular history, said that Mark Sullivan’s Our Times (1926) had “probably done more to interest people in American history than anything else written in our generation.” (Tyrell 49)

Cowley & Smith mention that Robert Lynd responded to their survey on the most influential books, with authors like Alfred Adler, John Dewey, William James, Veblen, Thomas Huxley, and with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. These suggestions, the editors noted, were much different from the “books taken from the Middletown public library in 1935,” which Lynd described in Middletown (Chapter 17) and Middletown in Transition (Chapter 7). Those chapters probably deserve a closer look, alongside the titles I’ve pulled together on reader response theory and interpretive communities.

See also:

Waldo Frank, Our America

Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming of Age

Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World

Sigmund Freud, Interpretation of Dreams

Herbert Croly, Promise of American Life

Louis Brandeis, Other People’s Money

Joseph Krutch, The Modern Temper (said to be “very influential in the colleges,” 13)

V. I. Lenin, Imperialism

John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World

Graham Wallas, The Great Society

John Strachey, The Coming Struggle for Power

Gustavus Myers, History of the Great American Fortunes

James Frazer, The Golden Bough

Yuletide Roundup

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"Queen's Speech: history of the royal Christmas broadcast," Telegraph, December 24, 2010

The Queen's grandfather King George V delivered the first royal Christmas broadcast live on the radio from Sandringham more than 75 years ago.

He had reigned since 1910, but it was not until 1932 that he gave his first festive speech.

He was unsure about using the relatively untried medium of the wireless, but eventually agreed and read a message composed by author Rudyard Kipling.>>>

Adam Goodheart, "Ghosts of a Christmas Past," New York Times, December 23, 2010

The Yuletide season was an unquiet time throughout the nation on the brink of the Civil War – and not just among black Americans. Judging from period newspapers, Christmas 150 years ago was just as politicized as it is now, if not more so. With the nation splitting in half (South Carolina had seceded on Dec. 20), each side of the Mason-Dixon Line tried to claim the holiday as its own.>>>

"A look back at big Christmas snows in D.C.," Washington Post, December 24, 2010

The largest storm on Dec. 24 or 25 was one which ended, and dropped most of its snow on, Christmas Eve in 1966. This storm was among a select group in a case study done by Paul Kocin and Louis Uccellini for their book Northeast Snowstorms. The storm center tracked from central Texas and across the Southern United States along the southern edge of an Artic high pressure dipping into the northern tier.>>>

Suzy Khimm, "Deck the Halls With Partisan Warfare," Mother Jones, December 24, 2010

Though revived by the rise of Christian fundamentalists, the purported "war on Christmas" goes way back in American history. Industrialist Henry Ford, a notorious anti-Semite, blamed Jews for stifling Christmas carolers and school-based religious demonstrations, notes Time magazine. "The whole record of the Jewish opposition to Christmas...shows the venom and directness of [their] attack," Ford writes in 1921.>>>

"Durham University the history of Christmas carols," BBC, 23 December, 2010

Did you know that Christmas carols were not sung in churches until the 19th Century?

That is one of the many interesting facts about Christmas carols shared by expert Professor Jeremy Dibble from Durham University.

He recently appeared as an expert on the Songs of Praise 'Edwardian Christmas' programme on BBC One in December.

Jeremy believes that the carol-singing tradition is getting stronger.>>>

Elvis and the American Dream

Heather Cox Richardson

Forty years ago today, Elvis Presley showed up at the gates of the White House with two bodyguards and handed the guards a letter addressed to President Nixon. He said he knew the president was busy, but was hoping he could say a quick hello and present the president with a gift.

One can only imagine the flurry of astonished commentary in the White House when news arrived that Elvis wanted to drop in for a chat. An aide skimmed Elvis’s letter and sent a quick memo to Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman. “The thrust of Presley’s letter is that he wants to become a ‘Federal agent at large’ to work against the drug problem. . . . Drug culture types, the hippie elements, the SDS, and the Black Panthers are people with whom he can communicate since he is not part of the establishment.” The aide warned that it would be a bad idea to push Elvis off on the Vice President, since “it will take very little of the President’s time and it can be extremely beneficial for the President to build some rapport with Presley.”

While the aide was right that Presley wanted a federal badge, the thrust of his letter was not that he could talk to members of the counterculture. The gist of his note was that, more than anything, he wanted legitimacy. Elvis wanted to achieve the American Dream—not to be rich and famous (although he certainly was), but to be respectable.

Elvis had been an enormously talented young man with pretty moderate ambitions, in part because his horizons were so limited that he couldn’t see beyond stability and respectability. He wanted to take care of his parents; he wanted a job and a nice house. When his career took off, he bought Graceland, and decorated it in the fanciest way he could imagine—not with fine antiques and expensive art, but with a wall of mirrors and a carpeted ceiling.

Elvis seemed to be the epitome of the American dream. And perhaps he was, but not in the way that concept is usually used. As Elvis’s career went upward, his control over his success sloped inversely downward. Elvis’s life made it clear that even a man with such superlative talent could never rise to security without an education and connections. He took his financial advice from his father, a man who went to jail for altering a $4 check. He took career advice from a manager who was taking 50% of his earnings by the time the singer died (the going rate was 10%) and who pushed him constantly to make more and more money. By 1970, Elvis’s talent had become a commodity over which he had little control. Rather than enabling him to achieve the American dream, his ability was destroying him. His grueling schedule had him increasingly dependent on prescription drugs, and his marriage was falling apart.

What Elvis wrote to Nixon was that he craved solid middle-class respectability. “I . . . admire you and have great respect for your office,” he wrote. Countercultural figures might call the president and his advisors “the establishment,” but “I call it American and I love it.” “I can and I will be of any service that I can to help the country out,” Elvis wrote. He and President Nixon had something in common, and the singer made sure to point it out: “I was nominated this coming year one of America’s Ten Most Outstanding Young Men,” “I believe that you, Sir, were one of the Top Ten Outstanding Men of America also.”

Well over a hundred of Elvis’s records had gone gold, platinum, or multi-platinum, but when Elvis met with President Nixon at 12:30, he felt obliged to explain to the president who he was. And he didn’t focus on his music; he focused on the law, respectability, family, government. The first thing the singer did was to show the president his collection of police badges. He gave President Nixon some Presley family photos and a commemorative WWII Colt 45, and warned him that the Beatles had been fomenting anti-Americanism.

Then, as the White House notes from the meeting relate:

“Presley indicated to the President in a very emotional manner that he was ‘on your side.’ Presley kept repeating that he wanted to be helpful, that he wanted to restore some respect for the flag which was being lost. He mentioned that he was just a poor boy from Tennessee who had gotten a lot from his country, which in some way he wanted repay. . . . At the conclusion of the meeting, Presley again told the President how much he supported him, and then, in a surprising, spontaneous gesture, put his left arm around the President and hugged him.”

Nixon’s people managed to get Presley a special badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The badge was a symbol of what Elvis wanted, but it couldn’t give him the middle-class respectability that was at the center of his American dream. It couldn’t buy him the economic understanding that would enable him to rearrange his business affairs, or admission to a professional culture of lawyers and agents whose knowledge would protect him from his parasitic manager.

Ironically, it also couldn’t stop Elvis from dying of drugs only seven years later, sad proof that all the talent in the world could not produce success if it were not protected by education and connections.

Counting Flowers on the Wall

Randall Stephens

The Associated Press site has a "Today in History" page. History Today regularly features it-happened-on-this-day posts on its blog. The History Channel, the purveyor of pop and trivia history for the masses, has something similar. (I wonder if they feature the days on which ancient aliens completed the construction of pyramids or the dates on which Nostradamus's predictions came true.)

A fun twist on the theme comes from a computer scientist trained at the University of Cambridge. In an interview, William Tunstall-Pedoe tells All Things Considered that after he had run 300 millions facts through a program he had come to the conclusion that April 11, 1954, was "extremely notable for having almost nothing happen."

A little from the transcript of the interview:

Mr. TUNSTALL-PEDOE: It's not that nothing happened. It's that it was spectacularly unnotable in terms of the events that happened that day. So it was the most boring day in recent history.

SIEGEL: Well, perhaps someone in our audience knows of something that happened on April 11th, 1954, that might lead some revision of this judgment.

Mr. TUNSTALL-PEDOE: I'm totally up to the challenge.

SIEGEL: You're up to the challenge.

Mr. TUNSTALL-PEDOE: Up to the challenge, yeah. A lot of people have tried already in the last few days. So but yes, absolutely.

SIEGEL: There was, I think, an exhibition baseball game between the then-New York Giants and Cleveland Indians, who would go on to play in the World Series later that year.

Mr. TUNSTALL-PEDOE: And you think that counts as...

Listen to the full story here.

Oral History and Iconic Red Desk Objects

Heather Cox Richardson

Morgan’s post on oral history struck a chord. (Among other things, he observes how valuable information is lost from one generation to the next.) I was shocked, recently, when talking to a high school student about her National History Day project, to learn that she had never heard of the Cold War hotline between the US and the USSR.

Indeed, why should she have? She was born after the end of the Cold War, and knows the USSR only from history books, most of which are too general to mention the hotline.

But in the 1960 and 1970s, everyone knew the story of the Red Telephone. It was such common knowledge that no one, apparently, has bothered to make a point of passing it down.

The significance of that loss goes far beyond understanding the mechanics of the connection. Indeed, the actual hotline was not a red telephone on the President’s desk; it was a teletype machine at the Pentagon. (The history of the hotline is told wonderfully here, by Webster Stone, now producer and executive of the American Film Company.)

The mechanics of the line are far less important than the cultural context it evoked. Imagine watching TV or films from the era of the Cold War without the knowledge of what a red telephone meant. Everyone who lived during that time understood that when a red phone sat on a desk, it was not a fashion accessory. It was a symbol of an enormously important link on which hung the fate of the world. (See this clip of a 1967 episode of Batman, for instance.)

But to a more recent generation, it’s just a red telephone.

For younger readers who don’t see why this matters, think of a red Swingline stapler. It’s a key prop from the black comedy Office Space. It represents the stifling bureaucracy of the modern office, cut into cubicles staffed with faceless paper pushers. (This is also the film that gave us “Didn’t you get the memo?”) To a certain generation, a red stapler carries an indictment of the soul-crushing big business of the early twenty-first century. Ignorance of that meaning tears a critical understanding away from modern popular TV and film.

But will anyone bother to tell their children what a red stapler signifies?

It seems to me that such cultural context is one key aspect of history that is lost without oral history. People simply don’t write down what is common knowledge. It is more likely to get recorded in a passing comment made to an oral historian.

Pre-Holiday Stress Relief

Heather Cox Richardson

When I was in graduate school, the story circulated that one of our very few female professors had protested the scheduling of a committee meeting on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. “The next day is Thanksgiving,” she reportedly told the room full of male colleagues. She then asked: “Just who cooks in your house?”

We thought she was brilliant (and the meeting time got changed).

In honor of everyone stressing about the upcoming holiday, for whatever reason, I offer some classic moments in the popular culture of Thanksgiving:

There was the problem of commercial advertising, covered brilliantly by WKRP in Cincinnati, when the station manager decided to hold a turkey giveaway:

There’s the problem of politics, expertise, and celebrity. This was covered well by West Wing, when the President checks out the Butterball hotline:

And then there’s the problem of dissent in a democracy. This was covered, of course, in the all-time classic "Alice’s Restaurant." (Updated here. Would embed it here, but that's been disabled.)

Enjoy.

The Western Image, Continued

Heather Cox Richardson

The classic version of the American Western hero is Louis L’Amour’s Flint. Flint is a westerner, adopted by a gunslinger, then educated at fancy eastern schools. He plays the eastern game, becoming a rich businessman in the cutthroat world of industry. But his life has a twist. The secret to his eastern success is that he listens to the little guy, the cabbie who hears a stock tip, the waitress who learns about a business takeover. He values them and their hard work; he treats them as equals.

When an eastern doctor incorrectly diagnoses Flint with cancer, he chucks over his fame as a robber baron to go back to his roots. There, he sticks up for the small ranchers against the big guys, backed by the eastern system. He wins, of course. He’s better with cards, guns, and women than any easterner ever born. And he’s a lot smarter.

Does this image still appeal to Americans?

This TV show (below), appropriately named Outlaw, starts this week.

The Enduring Power of the Cowboy Image

Heather Cox Richardson

Many years ago, I had the good luck to hear Werner Sollors illustrate the importance of cultural understanding in interpreting popular history. He did it by describing what a Martian would guess about American life

if his only source of information was The Brady Bunch.

The Martian would assume that American humans in the 1960s reproduced by cloning, Sollors guessed, since it was clear that the adults had no sexual contact. Male clones were always brunette and females blonde. And a Martian could easily conclude that humans kept older members of the species set off from the others in the kitchen, like a sort of pet.

I remembered Sollors’s talk recently when I discovered the new Old Spice advertising campaign. The ads have certainly hit a popular chord; the videos have gotten more than 12 million hits and have boosted sales of Old Spice by more than 107%.

And the ad campaign shows, again, just how much cultural understanding you need to make sense of popular history. This particular image plays on age-old popular stereotypes of the American West, with their heroic men and devoted women. But without that cultural knowledge, what on earth would a Martian examining modern American life through this image conclude?

Their D-I-V-O-R-C-E: Mad Men, Infidelity, and Life in the 1960s

Randall J. Stephens

Some of us go around the world three times, divorce, remarry, divorce again, part with our children, make and waste a fortune, and coming back to our beginnings we find the same faces at the same windows, buy our cigarettes and newspapers from the same old man, say good morning to the same elevator operator, good night to the same desk clerk, to all those who seem, as Johnson did, driven into life by misfortune like nails into a floor.

-John Cheever, The Wapshot Scandal (Harper & Row, 1964)

The suburbs of New York City in the 1950s were a homogenous and extended community held together by common interests: children, sports, adultery, and lots of social drinking

-Susan Cheever, Home Before Dark: A Personal Memoir of John Cheever by His Daughter (Houghton Mifflin, 1984)

Frank could not escape the impression that she was asking him to get a divorce. Meanwhile, our advisory capacity in Vietnam was beginning to stink and the market was frightened, frightened yet excited by the expanding war. Basically business was uneasy with Kennedy; there was something unconvincing about him.

-John Updike, Couples (Ballantine Books, 1968)

Our D-I-V-O-R-C-E; becomes final today Me and little J-O-E will be goin' away I love you both and it will be pure H-E double L for me Oh, I wish that we could stop this D-I-V-O-R-C-E.

D-I-V-O-R-C-E, recorded by Tammy Wynette (1968)

More heavy drinking, more chain smoking, more prefeminist barbarity, more impeccably dressed businessmen, and woman. Mad Men, season 4, is kicking off on Sunday night.

Benjamin Schwarz wrote an insightful, appropriately skeptical piece on the series in The Atlantic back in the fall. Among other things Schwarz wondered about some of the over-the-top boorishness on display, condescending social commentary, and the overall historical accuracy of this "megamovie."

Watching the program, which I'll admit I'm a big fan of, has amazed and perplexed me. (How did the production crew get the colors and the tone just right? Scenes often look like staged advertisements from LIFE or Look Magazine.) Mad Men's interiors--wood paneling, ab-ex paintings, and sleek modernist surfaces--is as nearly as cool as the set of a Jacques Tati flick. The "lush styling and art direction," wrote Schwarz, "which make the series eye candy for its (again) target audience, already in thrall to the so-called mid-century-modern aesthetic—-an appeal that’s now further fueled by the slimline suit/pencil skirt marketing tie-in with Banana Republic, that canny purveyor of upper-mass-market urbanity."

How about the behavior, attitudes, and values of the characters? How does America in the early 1960s compare to America in 2010? The latter seems to be one of the chief questions the program raises. (At least for me, as a nerdy historian.) See, for instance, this John McWhorter piece from The New Republic, "Mad Men In a Good Place: How Did People Sound in 1963?" September 1, 2009. (Did they sound different after 1964? I'm wondering if a Beatles episode might feature Fab Four music. Doubtful. Would cost a fortune.)

And what about the infidelity on parade? Lead ad man Don Draper is a whiskey-soaked, feral Don Juan. Couples on the show occasional make fools of themselves in drunken revelry. Many of the chief men and women have had shaky relationships, boozing it up and forgetting their vows. One agent sleeps in his office after his wife discovers his alcohol-fueled, one-night stand with a secretary. Nearly all of the main male characters are unfaithful. Divorce, though not easy to obtain, is an ever-present option.

So what did the divorce rate look like in the swinging sixties? Brown University historian James Patterson notes that a significant rise in divorce rates seriously affected American families from the mid-sixties on. "Divorce rates per 1,000 of population doubled--from 2.5 per 1,000 people in 1965 to a peak of between 5 and 5.3 per 1,000 between 1976 and 1985."[1] Indeed, the divorce rate rocketed up 100% from '63 to '75. The current rate is 3.5 per 1,000 population.

What about infidelity? Is that more difficult to measure? David Gudelunas observes that we can gauge some national opinions by looking at letters to advice columnists. "The most frequent complaint from women in the 1960s was their cheating husbands," notes Gudelunas.[2] Polls and social science research from the day could also reveal much.

All that is to say that the show has made me more and more curious about how even the recent past can look decidedly strange, remote through the eyes of the present. Fun stuff.

On Sunday night when episode one of season four airs, I'll have my trusty DVD recorder at the ready. (A device, by the way, of pure science fiction by the standards of 1964.)

[1] James T. Patterson, Restless Giant: The United States from Watergate to Bush v. Gore (Oxford University Press, 2005), 50.

[2] David Gudelunas, Confidential to America: Newspaper Advice Columns and Sexual Education (Transaction, 2008), 112.