"Mysterious Jackson area lawyer's blog about history, literature, and whatever irks him."
—NMC
And therefore, reader, I myself am the subject of my book; it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.
—Montaigne, Essays, "To the Reader."
"I shall see myself, I shall read myself, I shall go into ecstasies, and I shall ask -- Is it possible that I have so much ésprit?"
—Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols.
... the torturer has become – like the pirate and slave trader before him – hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind.
—Filártiga v. Peña-Irala, 630 F.2d 876, 890 (2d Cir. 1980)
... that makes me elitist? Good! If "elitist" just means "not the dumbest motherfucker in the room," I'll be an elitist!
—David Rees, Get Your War On # 34 (Apr. 16, 2004)
DISCLAIMER: In case it isn't obvious, this blog's discussions of legal issues are solely the private opinions of its proprietor, are not intended as legal advice, and should not be acted upon by any sane person, no matter how obviously correct they in fact are.
You mean… market power failures? Genius, man, genius!
You say that just as I’ve bought a 600 page history of (actually, it looks pretty good. Which is why I bought it, I suppose.) When I think about needing more time to read, I think “I should just back away from the internet sort of reading”
please add a close tag to that link…
We didn’t get the “history of ____” part or the HTML address itself, so I’ve just removed the [a] tag. Please relieve us from our suspense!
A history of the settlement of English North America, 1600-1675 by Bernard Bailyn. I hope this comment works better.
Oh yeah, saw that in the store. I hadn’t realized he was still alive!
Say, do you have Gordon Wood’s “Creation of the American Republic” on your shelf somewhere?
Nope. I should but dont.
Just getting into Bailyn’s book. Really enjoying it– the sort that produces a lot of tangential reflection on my part. One tonight: He compares the attitude of the first generation of English settlers toward the Native Americans to the attitude they’d have had toward the Irish, basically saying the attitude was identical. Reading him compare the two, I was struck by how much the language of the English describing the Irish “barbarians” survived into late 19th and 20th C descriptions of backwoods folks or hillbillies. Read the way folks from outside wrote about the Hatfield and McCoy feud; there’s just not a huge leap from the way the Elizabethans viewed the Irish.
It’s always been the Percys (weirdly enough, a name that continues from back then to now, in Mississippi. The first illustration in this book is a portrait of George Percy) versus the rednecks, I suppose.
I’m only 50pp in but it’s pretty fascinating so far. Part of my interest is that I have not read deeply in this era, and it’s when “my people” came in– my father’s first antecedent in this country was a Scots indentured servant in Maryland circa 1640, and my mom’s family was already in the Connecticut River valley by 1680ish.
I intend to post more about this on my blog.
Interesting – please do. My reaction to the book was that I’m just not all that curious about the period, but then, that was how I felt about 1815-48 until I read “What Hath God Wrought” by Howe. May give the Bailyn a shot, in paperback.
(Really wish the Oxford history of U.S. would spit up a volume on the Gilded Age.)