Archive for the 'Links' Category

The Iowa Caucus results last night got me think­ing about the many com­pet­ing polit­i­cal cul­tures present through­out Amer­i­can his­tory. Indi­vid­u­al­ist vs. com­mu­ni­tar­ian, rich vs. poor, urban vs. rural… but, at the core of our national psyche is this ten­sion between the lofty ideals set forth by the Founders, and our attempts and fail­ings to live up to them. For every shin­ing exam­ple of Lin­coln, FDR, and Martin Luther King Jr., there are gen­er­a­tions of back-​sliders who prey upon fear in order to gain polit­i­cal advan­tage. Sure, to every­thing there is a season, but I’m glad to see that the voters in Iowa embraced hope and rejected cyn­i­cism, on both sides of the polit­i­cal spectrum.

His­tory is writ­ten by the win­ners, which is why Amer­i­cans tend to think of our colo­nial past and demo­c­ra­tic begin­nings as built upon and in reac­tion to Eng­lish insti­tu­tions alone – but the story is a little more com­pli­cated. It’s not often that I do book reviews, but I just fin­ished re-​reading The Island at the Center of the World, The Epic Story of Dutch Man­hat­tan and the For­got­ten Colony that Shaped Amer­ica [excerpt] by jour­nal­ist his­to­rian Rus­sell Shorto, and wanted to rec­om­mend it to anyone look­ing for some inter­est­ing read­ing on the ori­gins of this country.

The tra­di­tional telling of colo­nial Amer­ica focuses almost exclu­sively on the Eng­lish colonies in Vir­ginia and New Eng­land. But, Shorto reminds us that the Dutch were the first Euro­peans to settle the island of Man­hat­tan, and built some of the most last­ing ideals and insti­tu­tions into the fabric of Amer­i­can polit­i­cal and cul­tural life.

Con­tinue read­ing ‘The Island at the Center of the World’