Andrew D. Todd
From 2002 to 2011, I posted some hundreds of pages of material
on History News Network, in the form of comments. I found that
the editor, Rick Shenkman, had no objection to comments as long
as articles, so, if I was prepared to dispense with the
symbolism of publication credit, I could post more or less what
I liked without justifying it to anybody.
HNN always had a tendency to vituperation. It was founded in a
time of troubles, by historians, to bring our collective
learning to bear on current events, and to make this available
to the public, so that public affairs might be conducted less
stupidly. This, however, meant admitting the public. We could
not be as cloistered as, say, an American Historical Association
convention. But when simple men are frightened, and angry, they
become vituperative, and even violent. The internet provided a
sufficient firewall against actual violence.
One simply had to grow the skin of a rhinoceros, and to remain
logical and courteous, even under gross insult, if one was to do
any good. One woman historian was very disturbed when someone
accused her of being my mistress. It was simply that we tended
to agree about a lot of scholarly matters. At that time, we had
no idea what the other looked like. This was still the time of
the dial-up internet, 33 Kbps, or 56 Kbps, as the case might be.
One didn't use photographs without a reason, because they took
forever to transmit. The man sensed that we had something in
common, from which he was excluded. On reflection, it was
probably the shared condition of having substantially the
education of a professor, while not being a professor, nor a
community college instructor either. This affinity, if you can
call it that, only existed in the presence of professors, of
course. The accuser had never been to graduate school, and had
no idea what was involved. So the man interpreted it in his own
terms, and reacted as such men usually react. But, as he was
obliged to do so in words, there was no particular harm done, as
far as I was concerned. My female colleague felt differently,
however.
Rick Shenkman recognized that vituperation was simply the price
one had to pay, and exercised tolerance.
However, in 2011, the editors (a committee by this time) became
alarmed by the general level of vituperation prevailing in the
comments (roughly comparable to Twitter at present), and
instituted a mass purge. One editor admitted to me the time that
it was "a cop-out." My reaction was to simply walk away from the
situation, and refuse to work with them any more. With the
substantial end of the wars in the Middle East (or, at least,
American participation), I was not very interested in what they
now wanted to talk about, anyway, I preferred to post on
Techdirt instead, about things which interested me, such as
computers and the internet. Eventually, HNN restored
material from many threads in expurgated form. I came off fairly
well from this process, as I had always observed the decencies
of controversy. There simply was not time or labor sufficient to
do this for all threads, or to do it at an archival level, and a
lot of material remained purged. I had naturally written my
pieces on my computer, rather than online, and therefore
retained copies.
That was pretty much where the matter stood in the summer
of 2018, when I had my heart attack and stroke.
I am too introverted to make a good, or
even an adequate lecturer. This does not particularly
concern me, as I am an engineer as well as a (lapsed)
academic scholar (*) and journalist. Engineer pay starts
approximately where literary-intellectual pay stops, and
I feel nothing but pity for many people with PhD’s and
impossible teaching situations, part-time in three or
four community colleges.
(*) Cultural Anthropology,
particularly Political and Economic Anthropology, wrote
a master’s thesis on Military Honor; military history
and history of technology, passed history comprehensive
exam (conditionally, with a deficiency in
seventeenth-century British ecclesiastical history
(**)); wrote various seminar papers and half a
dissertation on the profession of computer programming
and the academic discipline of computer science.
(**) Don’t ask me to explain the subtle
gradations between episcopalianism and
congregationalism— I’m not reliable on the subject.
Now, as it happens, I am fairly good at
tutoring, or rather, at tutoring bright and hardworking
undergraduates who do not necessarily aspire to be
liberal arts graduate students or professors.
However, I cannot be “Reader of Applied History and
Public Policy Managerial Engineering,“ at St. Wulfstan’s
College, State University of West Franklin (***),
for the obvious good reason that there is no such
post in an American university, American universities
not being organized on the Oxford-Cambridge
system.
(***) A fictional midwestern state, a
fictional university, and obviously a fictional college.
To further complicate matters, let us assume that the
college was founded as a monastery by one of the kings
of Wessex, back during the “Heptarchy,” in the eighth
century or thereabouts; that it was located somewhere in
Somerset, maybe at Taunton; that by the tenth century,
it had accumulated significant numbers of lay pupils,
who were taught alongside the novices, but were not
under vows, or destined for monk-hood (typically boys
intended by their families to become house chancellors);
that in the early fifteenth century, it reconstituted
itself as a college, on the model of Winchester; that
being Royalist, it escaped to Tidewater Virginia in
1652, after the Puritan victory at Worcester; that,
being Anti-Slavery, it decamped to the Midwest in 1861;
and that in 1960, driven by financial stringency, it
affiliated with the state university.
I’ve had a very strange teaching situation for the
last few years. In the summer of 2018, I had a heart
attack, followed by a stroke, and when I finally got
home, the nursing agency sent in coeds to look after
me, so I didn’t have to go into a nursing home.
They went with me for long walks, for the
benefit of my health, and we talked as we walked.
And there was the saving grace of the situation. As
it turns out, they were the kind of undergraduate
pupils most professors can only dream of. I could
teach like an Oxford don, circa 1930 (say, C.S. Lewis
or J.R.R. Tolkien), or a New England Prep School
headmaster of about the same date (Louis Auchincloss’s
Rector of Justin, or the real-life Frank Boyden
of Deerfield Academy), but there were a few
conditions. We had to proceed from what they were
interested in, not what i was interested in. I
couldn’t send them to the University Library, but I
could send them to the internet via their iPhones, and
so to Hathitrust.
One of my girls was interested in fashion and
modeling, and the Metropolitan Museum held its latest
Gala on the theme of “camp.” I got asked questions,
and answered them as best I could, and the trail leads
via Susan Sonntag, in the general direction of
nineteenth century German Geisteswissenschaft, and the
whole business of knowledge by feeling, rather than by
intellect. Looking at Sonntag's "Notes on Camp," I
pointed out the sources she cited, notably Aubrey
Beardsley, and said: "Let's look it up." So my
nurse-pupil brought up a collection of Beardsley
etchings on her iPhone.
Anorher nurse-pupil was an eighteen-year-old
freshman nursing student at the local state teachers
college, who was also an Army Combat Engineer, and I
started her off on the works of Ian Hogg, ex-Master
Gunner of the British Army. The master gunner is the
very senior sergeant at Sandhurst who gives future
artillery and engineer officers their military
training, as distinct from their engineering
education, which is carried out at Oxford. In terms of
precedence, it’s roughly equivalent to Sergeant-Major
of the Army. Someone she could take seriously,
in short.
My best pupil, Sydni, was a bio-chemistry major,
who is now in dental school. When we met, just about
the time COVID was breaking loose, she was taking
junior-level Biochemistry. I gathered the professor
was making rather a hash of the transition to internet
teaching. Before COVID started, he had been teaching
the course without a textbook, forcing the students to
rely on accurate note-taking. But now, it was worse.
So I said, “you know about Schaum’s Outlines, don’t
you?” She didn’t, so I pulled one off the shelf.
Schaum’s Outlines are supplementary textbooks in the
STEM subjects which present material almost
exclusively in the form of solved problems. They are
priced like paperback books, not part of the textbook
racket. Sydni looked at Schaum's Organic Chemistry, a
course she had already taken, and agreed that this was
a workable solution. So I went on Amazon, and
got her a used copy of Schaum’s Biochemistry for all
of seven bucks. And then I got her Schaum’s Outlines
for Physical Chemistry, Molecular Biology, and
Analytic Chemistry, approximately a telephone book
worth of material at used paperback prices. I got her
everything she needed to finish her degree, in case
something should happen to me. I asked how she liked
Khan Academy, and she liked it, but at present, Khan
Academy is only up to Sophomore-level Organic
Chemistry.
Thus far, I had been merely dismissive of Donald
Trump, having written him off in 1989, long before he
discovered MAGA. But with COVID, it became apparent
that we were going to have to rely on him in battle.
Very well, this was not the first time I had coped
with such a situation. These were my main
conclusions:
http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/adtodd1a/what_to_do_about_corona_virus.html
So, on my first walk with Sydni, I said: “I give you
fair warning— follow me, and you will be known as one of
‘Todd’s Witches!” She took that as a promise. I asked
her questions about the situation at the Chemistry
Department, and eventually got her to write the answers
up as a paper. And then I made her rewrite it. In due
course, I sent it in to the Chemistry Department, with
my endorsement (to force them to take it seriously). It
eventually went in her graduate school application
package as well.
As I resumed comparatively normal
functioning, I found that many of my on-line friends had
migrated to Twitter. I therefore got myself a Twitter
account. The Russian invasion of the Ukraine reopened a
lot of what I had considered closed business.
Repeatedly, I found that what I wanted to say was what I
had already said-- in 2005!
However, much of this material had been deleted from History
News Network. I therefore exercise my right to republish it.
Where possible, I have supplied links to the material I was
commenting on. This is not possible in all cases, as HNN used an
idiosyncratic system of URL's, which The Wayback Machine did not
know how to traverse.
However, I have some additional materials, not previously
published, which I was not able to complete within HNN's
two-week window for responding to articles. Again, this runs to
hundreds of pages. I shall attach bits and pieces of this as
appropriate. One can perhaps describe the resulting product as a
"re-blog."
I shall add additional materials as they become relevant.
1. Responses to:
Jonathan Coopersmith, HNN articles on Space, 2004, 2010, 2011,
Reposted here, May 23, 2023, cleaned up, expansed, July 17, 2023
2. My comments on
Jim Cullen,view of Timothy R. Pauketat's "Cahokia, July, 2010
Reposted here, May 23, 2023, cleaned up, July 13, 2023
3.
Conversations With Brett Holman, 2006-2010
Reposted here, May 23, 2023, cleaned up, July 13,
2023
4. Comment on:
Jonathan Dresner, Deepwater Horizon, before June 9, 2010
Reposted here, June 2, 2023
5. My
Comments on Chris Bray's HNN Posts about National Heath
Insurance, Feb 1 and Feb 3, 2011
Reposted here, June 2, 2023
6. My Comments on:
Chris Bray, Cash and Carry , Apr 16, 2009
Reposted here, June 2, 2023
7. My Comments on:
Chris Bray, Unwarranted, Feb 20, 2011
Reposted here, June 2, 2023
8. My Comments on: Chris
Bray, Boundaries , Mar 26, 2011
Reposted here, June 2, 2023
9. My Comments on:
Chris Bray, Posts on Comparative Military Policy, Nov 23,
2007, Nov 13, 2008, Nov 17, 2008
Reposted here, June 2, 2023
10. Comments on Chris
Bray, The Vast Majesty of Naval Warfare and Stuff, Apr 28,
2009
Repostd here, August 6, 2923
11. My
Comments on: Chris Bray, The Historian as Soldier: Shadows and
Fog (1) , Jan 14, 2006
Reposted here, June 2, 2023
12. My
Comments on: Chris Bray, Wide Berth on the Sidewalk, Apr 4,
2011
Reposted here, June 2, 2023
13. My
Comments on: Jonathan Jarrett, UK HE Suicide Pact: Cambridge
first, Feb 26, 2011
Reposted here, June 5, 2023
14.
My Comments on Keith Halderman, Alternative Fuel Decision, May
13, 2010:
Reposted here, June 7, 2023
15. My
Comments on: Lawrence A. Peskin's HNN articles about piracy,
April-May 2009:
Reposted here, June 7, 2023
16. My
Comments on: Jonathan Dresner, Grade Inflation ... Why It's a
Nightmare, Oct 1-2, 2004:
Reposted here, June 7, 2023
17. My Comments on:
Judith Apter Klinghoffer, What Obama is Doing Wrong, Early
January, 2010:
Reposted here, June 12, 2023
18. My
Comments on: Judith Apter Klinghoffer Dark Ages Redux?, Early
July, 2007
Reposted here, June 12, 2023
19.
My Comments on: Judith Apter Klinghoffer, GLOBALIZATION OF
INTERNET CENSORSHIP? HNN, Sept. 29, 2005:
Reposted here, July 11, 2023
20.
My Responses to: Judith Apter Klinghoffer, What If America Had
Elected Walter Mondale in 1984?, before Oct 18, 2004:,
Reposted here June 12, 2023, expanded July 17, 2023
21.
My Comments on: Judith Apter Klinghoffer, Palestinians Have
Another Chance, Thanks to President Bush, HNN, before April
19, 2004
Reposted here, June 12, 2023, Addendum, March 7, 2024
22.
HNN post, Mark A. LeVine, Yes to a Truce, but Not with bin
Laden, January 19, 2006
Reposted here, June 12, 2023
23.
My Comments on: Judith Apter Klinghoffer Why Tom Friedman Is
Wrong on Russia and Wrong on Energy, HNN, before Aug. 25,
2008:
Reposted here, June 12, 2023
24.
My Comments on: Tyler Priest, If the Great Debate Over
Offshore Drilling Sounds Vaguely Familiar, it Should--But It's
Time for a Happier Ending, HNN , before Sept. 15, 2008:
Reposted here, June 12, 2023
25.
My Comments on: Raymond Callahan, Why Do We Always Forget How
to Wage Wars We Successfully Fought in the Past? , HNN, before
Jan. 8, 2008
Reposted Here, June 19, 2023, supplemented July 16, 2023
26. My Comments on:
Roderick T. Long, Army Dreamers, HNN Liberty and Power
[pseudonym], Apr. 17, 2008:
Reposted here, June 19, 2023
27. My Comments on:
Robert Higgs, Attack Canada! HNN , Jul 27, 2008:
Reposted here, June 19, 2023
28. My Comments
on: Mark Brady, The Writings of F. William Engdahl , HNN , Oct
8, 2007:
Reposted here, June 19, 2023
29. My
Comments on: David T. Beito?, Mall Rats, HNN , Dec 28, 2010
and The False Dichotomy of the Status Quo and “Privatizing”
the TSA , Nov 27, 2010:
Reposted here, June 27, 2023
30.
My Comments on: Deepak Tripathi, The Meaning of the Egyptian
People’s Revolution HNN, before Feb. 11, 2011:
Reposted here, June 27, 2023
31. My Comments
on: Sudha Shenoy, At Least Organic Farming Is A Good Thing --
Isn't It? HNN, May 1, 2008:
Reposted here, June 27, 2023
32. My Comments
on: Sudha Shenoy, A World-Class Thug, HNN, Apr 18, 2007:
Reposted here, June 27, 2023
33. My Comments
on: Sudha Shenoy, Euro-Parasites In the Cheese, HNN, Jun 10,
2007:
Reposted here, June 27, 2023
34. My
Comments on: Sudha Shenoy , Everyone Watches
Soccer/Cricket/Rugby Union, Except (Of Course) the Americans:
Some Reflections, HNN, Jul 12, 2006:
Reposted here, June 27, 2023
35. My Comments
on: Sharon Howard, Digital history and the archives: loss or
gain? , HNN, Mar 11, 2007:
Reposted here, June 27, 2023
36.
My Comments on: Sudha Shenoy ‘Is America Living Beyond its
Means?’ -- Is That the Right Question? HNN, Oct 8, 2006:
Reposted here ,July 4, 2023
37. My
Comments on: Sudha Shenoy , Why Ron Paul Must Run Third Party,
HNN, Feb 8, 2008:
Reposted here, July 4, 2023
38. My
Comments on: Jason Kuznicki, Twenty Questions on Mises, HNN,
Nov. 23, 2006--Jan. 11, 2007:
Reposted here, July 4, 2023
39. My Comments on: Mark
Brady, An Ode to Ayn Rand, HNN, Mar 24, 2011:
Reposted here, July 4, 2023
40. My Comments
on: Ronald Radosh and Don Kates , Articles on the Prospective
Invasion of Iraq, HNN, before Sept 16, 2002:
Reposted here, July 7 , 2023
41. My Comments on:
David T. Beito, Nevil Shute (1899-1960) HNN,:
Reposted here, July 4, 2023
42. My Comments
on: Kenneth R. Gregg, February 22, 1770--"...and a little
child shall lead them," HNN, Feb. 27, 2007:
Reposted here, July 11, 2023
43.
My Comments on: David T. Beito and Kenneth W. Mack, and their
failure to address the technological components of the Civil
Rights Movement, 2007, 2010, also, Technology, Climate, and
the end of Slavery, 2004:
Reposted here, July 11, 2023, updated April 4, 2024
44.
My Comments on: Joseph Yannielli Should the Children of
Undocumented Immigrants Pay More to Go to College? HNN, before
Jul. 16, 2007:
Reposted here, July 11, 2023
45. My Comments on:
Ralph E. Luker's link to Andrew Bacevich, Sept. 11, 2008:
Reposted here, July 11, 2023
46. My Comments
on: Daniel Burnstein Seattle Bag Law Not a Threat to Freedom,
HNN, Aug 15, 2008:
Reposted here, July 11, 2023
47. My
Comments on: A. Jay Cristol, Why You Shouldn't Pay Attention
to the Claims that Israel Attacked the USS Liberty
Deliberately, HNN, before June 11, 2007
Reposted here, July 11, 2023
48. My Comments on: Mark
LeVine, 4 Ways Falluja Can End , HNN, before Nov. 12, 2004
Reposted here, July 11, 2023
49. My
Comments on: David T. Beito, Refuting "Truther" Nonsense, HNN,
June 8, 2008
Reposted here, July 11, 2023
50. My
Comments on: Lawrence S. Wittner, Compulsory Television, HNN,
before Dec. 10, 2007
Reposted here, July 11, 2023
51. My Comments
on: Lawrence S. Wittner When "Public Options" Serve the
Public—and When They Don't, HNN, before Aug. 31, 2009:
Reposted here, July 11, 2023
52. My Comments
on: Alun Salt, various articles HNN Revise and Dissent
Reposted here, July 11, 2023
53. My Comments on:
Bill Heuisler's comments about computers and
telecommunications in response to William C. Kashatus, HNN ,
circa Dec. 31,2005- Jan 8, 2006:
Reposted here, July 11, 2023
54. My
Comments on: William F. Shughart II, Oil and 9-11: The
Connection, HNN , Sept. 24, 2002:
Reposted here, July 12, 2023
55. My
Comments on: Neve Gordon, Bush Hasn't Really Tried a
Democratic Approach in the Middle East ... Kerry Should (If He
Gets the Chance), HNN before Sept 13, 2004:
Reposted here, July 12, 2023
56. My Comments
on: "HNN Staff" (pseudonym), Blackout 2003: The Debate We
Won't Be Having This Time, HNN, before Aug. 15, 2003:
Reposted here, July 12, 2023
57. My
Comments on: Jonathan Dresner, Attempting Analogy: Japanese
Manchuria and Occupied Iraq, HNN , before May 30, 2004:
Reposted here, July 12, 2023
58.
My Comments on: Hal Hellman, The Easy Way to Avoid Power
Blackouts this Summer, HNN, before July 15, 2004:
Reposted here, July 12, 2023
59. My
Comments on: David T. Beito, Why did Cops Stop Covering Their
Guns? HNN, Aug 25, 2008:
Reposted here, July 13, 2023
60.
My Comments on: David T. Beito, Drawing the Wrong Lessons from
the Minneapolis Bridge Collapse, HNN, Aug 11, 2007:
Reposted here, July 13, 2023
61. My
Comments on: David T. Beito, An Important Victory for Academic
Freedom (UNC-Wilmington), HNN], Apr 7, 2011:
Reposted here, July 13, 2023
62. Art and Technology
2009-2012
Reposted here March 7, 2024
63.
Miscellaneous Energy
Reposted here March 7, 2024
64, Evolution and
Religion
Reposted here March 7, 2024
65. My
comments on: Diane Purkiss, Why the British Don't Remember
Their Civil War and Americans Do Remember Theirs, before
August 14, 2006:
Reposted here March 7, 2024
66.
My comments on: Matthew Dennis, The Seneca Nation's Cigarette
Fight With Congress, March 19, 3020:
Reoposted here April 4, 2024
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