Greetings from Montgomery, where we are feeling a bit waterlogged after experiencing the edge of a tropical storm and another front that came through yesterday. Fortunately, we don’t seem to have any leaks in the roof.
New Content for Paid Subscribers
In 2012 I participated in a symposium on Stephanie Moussalli’s book The Fiscal Case Against Statehood, which had been published earlier that year. The symposium took place at the annual conference of the Association for Private Enterprise Education (APEE), which is dominated by economists. I provided a historian’s perspective on the panel.
Our panel chair got us to write up our remarks more formally and submitted them as a group to the Journal of Prices and Markets, which published them in 2018. (I had completely lost track of this process and only found out they had been published almost two years after the fact from one of the other panelists, whom I had run into at another conference.)
I liked Moussalli’s book a lot. Here’s the abstract of my response, which I titled “Not Letting a Crisis Go to Waste: Statehood, Reformers, and Historians”:
Stephanie Moussalli in The Fiscal Case against Statehood argues that “something about statehood” led to increased taxation in Arizona and New Mexico. Various episodes of increased taxation in English history parallel these states’ experiences in some ways, suggesting that a discontinuity in government gives fiscal and accounting reformers an opportunity to introduce innovations designed to increase government revenue. Moussalli’s examination of the statehood process also highlights deficiencies in most American historians’ treatment of the statehood process, a treatment which serves a nationalist narrative and generally ignores the effects of statehood on the inhabitants of the territories themselves.
Paid subscribers can access the entire symposium (including Moussalli’s replies to the panelists) on the Paid Subscribers tab of this Substack’s website.
What I’m Writing
After many delays, I’m nearing completion of my review of Tim Carney’s Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be. I hope to submit to an editor this week or next week.
This past week, I took a few minutes to list all my current writing projects on a whiteboard at home. I came up with seven: two book reviews, three conference papers, an essay, and the lecture series on the history of England. Four of the seven have deadlines within the next two months. More to come . . .
What I’m Reading
As I mentioned in last week’s post, I am reading along with Sons #3-5 in their homeschool curriculum. Yesterday I finished Olivia Coolidge’s The Trojan War, which was originally published in the 1950s and is part of Son #5’s 7th-grade curriculum. I recognized some of the illustrations in it, making me think I read this back in the 1980s. I was really impressed with it this time around. It weaves together virtually all the major stories about the war from across classical literature. Material from Homer takes up 35-40% of the book. The rest of the chapters offer condensed narratives from other classical writers, mainly Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. By the time I finished it, I was wondering whether I should make it assigned reading in my undergraduate humanities surveys just to plug the holes in the students’ cultural literacy.
Next week I’m scheduled to attend a summit on pluralism, and part of the assigned reading is Amanda Ripley’s High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. The summary on the back cover begins thus: “In high conflict, any intuitive thing you do to end the conflict will usually make it worse. The only good option is to do counterintuitive things—and do them with great care.” I’m looking forward to it.
Update
I’ve had my nose to the grindstone for the past several weeks working on start-of-term things (for both Faulkner and our homeschool) and my writing projects. It has been a month since my last overnight trip away from home!
I did make a day trip up to Birmingham on September 6 for the annual conference of Alabama’s Federalist Society chapters. I listened to great panels on DEI and ESG and the legal issues involved both when those agendas are promoted and when they are resisted. I also got to meet a couple of the other members of the Alabama Advisory Committee of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, which I was named to back in June, face to face for the first time.
Last Monday (Sept. 9), I was able to host Mark David Hall on campus for a Constitution Day lecture under the auspices of the Center for Great Books and Human Flourishing (with the help of a grant from the Jack Miller Center). Mark is the author of many books, including Did America Have a Christian Founding? and his latest, Who’s Afraid of Christian Nationalism?
I’ve gotten to know Mark fairly well over the past five or six years, and this was the second time he has come to Faulkner’s campus.
On this occasion, he spoke about the debates over religious liberty at the American Founding. James Madison and others ultimately succeeded in arguing for the language of “religious liberty” and “free exercise” of religion as opposed to the language of “religious toleration,” which implies a special dispensation from the government as opposed to the recognition of a natural right.
Mark also noted that in recent years, several scholars have attempted to push the argument that religion is no more deserving of special protection than vegetarianism or any other strongly held opinion. Although advocates of religious liberty have enjoyed some big wins in the courts in the past couple of years, that could change if a future president nominates federal judges more hostile to those protections.
It was great as always to visit with Mark, although our time together was limited. He was in Montgomery about 24 hours, and I was unavailable for much of that time. Fortunately, I seem to run into him once or twice a year at different conferences these days.