Indholdsfortegnelse for Autumn 2016 i The American Scholar

“I’m interested in the idea of community and in what people will do to find it—what drives people who are compelled to strike out on their own in search of it, and to leave everything else behind. This photograph was taken on my first trip to the commune. The place is very much structured around the seasons. summer is incredibly hot, and at midday you can’t find anyone; they’re all inside, resting after working on the farm. That had been a really hot day. After dinner I was sitting on the porch of the main building, and they invited me to go swimming with them. some people may see this photograph as a serendipitous moment, but it’s more than that. This community has taught me a lot about consent. Every…

Since the 1930s, Louisiana has lost an amount of land roughly equivalent to the size of Delaware. Today a football field–sized area of wetlands disappears almost every hour. Levees and dams, built over the past century to control floods, have prevented essential sediment from trickling downstream to replenish Mississippi Delta land. The combination of sinking land and rising sea level is causing delta terrain to drown at an alarming rate. This year, a team led by geophysicist Michael Steckler of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Lab drilled three wells in Port Sulphur, Louisiana, about 30 miles south of New Orleans, outfitting them with optical-fiber instruments and GPS to track shifts in the delta. “We are currently recording at 20 samples per second,” Steckler reports. His team also will take a 40-meter-deep core…

MOST EDITORS OF OTHER PEOPLE’S LETTERS, I suspect, are victims of a common obsession: the feeling that they have somehow missed certain significant letters their subjects must have written. I plead no exception to this apprehension. Although I have been systematically collecting the letters and other writings of P. T. Barnum for a good many years, initially for my edition of his letters, then for a biography, several aspects of his life continue to elude me—gray areas that might suddenly take on vivid coloration if only a pertinent letter or other document would spring to light. I wish I knew more about Barnum’s two wives, for instance, who apparently did not think their husband’s letters to them worth keeping. His children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren often did, with the result…

ROBERT IRWIN IS NOT the art-world star that some of his contemporaries from the 1960s have become—think Andy Warhol, Sol LeWitt, Ed Ruscha, Nam June Paik, Vito Acconci—but in most respects he is as important as they were in revolutionizing the very definition of visual art. Before the ’60s, contemporary art consisted primarily of painting, with sculpture a distant second. Afterward, contemporary art seemed to be everything butpainting: performance, installation, body art, earth art, conceptual art, video art, artists’ books, photography, sound, and music. And though painting and sculpture have never truly gone away, today they compete within a carnival of forms and fashions that can seem chaotic to the uninitiated. Critic Lucy Lippard famously explained the shift away from painting and sculpture in the phrase “the dematerialization of art.”…

 TIME TRAVEL: A History If you’re looking for comfort, physicists are definitely the wrong people to ask. We need to construct meaning in the world by taking it as it is. BY JAMES GLEICK Pantheon, 352 pp., $26.95 NOW: The Physics of Time BY RICHARD A. MULLER Norton, 368 pp., $27.95 EARLIER THIS YEAR, I was approached by a woman desperate to send a message back in time. She had made some awful mistake and wanted to know if there was any way at all to undo it. I tried to break the news gently. Even if we could build a time machine, we couldn’t change the past—by definition. And thank goodness. Prevent Hitler’s birth, and you’d clear the way for an even more horrifyingly effective Nazi leader; uninvent nuclear…

A REVOLUTION IN COLOR: The World of John Singleton Copley BY JANE KAMENSKY Norton, 544 pp., $35 NO GREATER COMPLIMENT can go to an artist than when two nations lay claim to him or her. George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) is a famous example. Born in Halle and raised in Hamburg, the composer made such an ineradicable impression on the British that his German origins are usually appended in very tiny writing. Then there is Johann Sebastian Bach’s youngest son, Johann Christian Bach (1735–1782), born in Leipzig but known as the “English Bach,” who was painted by Thomas Gainsborough. Even John Singer Sargent (1856–1925), born in Florence to American parents, was so much at home in London during World War I that he became a British war artist for the Imperial…

How do you reconcile today’s green meadows with the bloody battlefields of a century ago? With an app, of course. After a two-year collaboration among the National Archives, the Smithsonian, the National WWI Museum, and the web platform Historypin, students and history buffs will soon be able to use their smartphones and tablets to view a slew of rarely seen photographs and even black-and-white footage of the Great War. The beta version of the app will be released in classrooms this fall, and the full version is set to be unveiled in 2017, to coincide with the centennial of American involvement in the First World War. “A primary goal of the app is to connect teachers and students to primary sources,” says Pamela Wright, chief innovation officer at the National…

ON THE FRONT WALL of Aida Conroy’s classroom at the Noble Academy in Chicago is a “Get SMART!” poster. It instructs: Sit up properly; Make eye contact; Articulate when you speak; Respect everyone at the table; and Track your classmates when they speak. The high school’s administrators are convinced that how smart students turn out to be depends on how hard they work at developing their minds. The table—an oval consisting of rectangular tables and a semicircular one at each end—is where some of the work gets done. The rules on the wall reflect the school’s approach to learning, an approach called the Harkness method. Noble’s administrators believe Harkness can help its students climb America’s steep ladder of social, cultural, and economic opportunity, starting—as all but a tiny fraction here…

MANY LANGUAGES USE SOME FORM of the word mother to refer to a person’s first language—la lengua materna, la langue maternelle, Muttersprache—and rightly so. The first language we learn is generally the one our mothers speak. This may not be so obvious in monolingual families, in which both parents use the same language, but if each parent speaks a different one, the children in most cases will first speak the mother’s. The words mother tongue suggest that the relationship we have with the first language mirrors the mysterious alchemy of our maternal relationships. Just as the mother is our entry into the world and our first love, the person from whom we learn first meanings, the beacon and the guide, so is the language with which we first make sense…

 WHEN I TURNED ON the Tony Awards about a year ago, I thought I knew Fun Home. I had read the book on which the musical was based, cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, and several friends had given detailed, glowing reports of its sold-out run at New York City’s Public Theater. The show had moved on to Broadway, but I felt no particular urgency to see it. For one thing, I couldn’t imagine how Bechdel’s book, depicting her coming of age as a lesbian and her tormented relationship with her father—using a combination of captions, speech bubbles, and drawings to convey multiple levels of information and meaning—would translate to the stage. But when the cast performed a scene during the Tony Awards broadcast, I realized with excitement what I had…

EYES ON THE STREET: The Life of Jane Jacobs BY ROBERT KANIGEL Knopf, 512 pp., $35 JANE JACOBS WAS ONE OF the great urbanists of the 20th century. Her 1961 masterpiece, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which combined extraordinary insight into city streets with a biting indictment of urban renewal, remains a seminal text for would-be urban planners. But Jacobs’s career was larger than a single book, and thanks to Robert Kanigel’s Eyes on the Street, we come to appreciate her intellectual development and professional achievements in all their fullness. Jacobs’s wisdom was learned on the ground, not in the classroom, which is sobering for those of us who teach for a living. But she began her literary career in high school, publishing poetry, reviews, and interviews…

 LEOPOLDINA JOANA GUTERRES, better known to locals as “Mana Leo,” waits for us on the side of a pitted dirt street in Baguia, a hamlet in a mountainous region of East Timor. We’ve been traveling for seven hours in a rented Land Cruiser over horrendous narrow roads with blind curves and dizzying drop-offs when we see her, a Timorese woman standing alone in the darkness, wearing a black-and-white skirt and a wide smile. She leads us downhill to her house, a modest concrete structure that is home to more than 20 people—Leo’s kids, in-laws, nieces, and nephews, as well as a few students from remote villages who have come to Baguia to study. Leo herself is a principal who oversees half a dozen schools in the area, each of which…

MY ANCESTORS WERE ecological refugees long before the term was invented. They were from what is now Bangladesh, and their village was on the shore of the Padma River, one of the mightiest waterways in the land. The story, as my father told it, was this: one day in the mid-1850s, the great river suddenly changed course, drowning the village; only a few of the inhabitants managed to escape to higher ground. Our forebears were among them. In the wake of this catastrophe, they began to move westward and did not stop until the year 1856, when they settled once again on the banks of a river, the Ganges, in the state of Bihar. I first heard this story on a nostalgic family trip, as we were journeying down the…

FIVE MONTHS AFTER THE September 11 hijackers completed their flight training in Florida, I was on my first solo flight. Three quick jaunts around the pattern and with three good landings, I’d be done. Classic California flying weather: clear blue sky, light onshore breeze, no turbulence, and a gray wall of fog shrouding the Pacific in the distance. Alone in a ’75 Piper Cherokee—basically a VW bug with a propeller, tail, and wings—on final approach to runway 30 at Santa Maria Airport, I steered toward the fat white center line and worked the throttle, trim, and flaps to stay on glide slope. As I descended from 1,000 feet, my eyes scanned the instruments—air speed, altitude, vertical velocity—and the runway. Everything seemed fine. Four square lights on the left side of…

THE EARTH IS WEEPING: The Epic Story of the Indian Wars for the American West BY PETER COZZENS Knopf, 576 pp., $35 IN 1970, AN UNKNOWN (but surprisingly prolific) librarian at the University of Illinois named Dee Brown published Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, a sweeping and passionate retelling of the 19th-century U.S. conquest of the West from the perspective of Native peoples. Brown’s book has electrified readers ever since, approaching three dozen printings and serving as the basis for a 2007 HBO film of the same name. By his own admission, Brown was not concerned with writing a disinterested account; rather, he sought to cast Indians as the victims of unrelenting settler avarice and aggression. But if Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee endures as a moving indictment…

BELLEVUE: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America’s Most Storied Hospital BY DAVID OSHINSKY Doubleday, 400 pp., $30 AS A COLUMBIA MEDICAL STUDENT, my father spent time at New York’s Bellevue Hospital in the 1960s. I grew up hearing stories of sick patients strapped to gurneys and left in the hallway because there was no space on the ward; of a rough emergency room filled with gunshot victims on the weekends; of a tubercular man in an iron lung, the metal device breathing in and out for him as he lay inside smoking. Public hospitals such as Bellevue—the nation’s oldest, founded in 1736—are indeed unique social worlds. Funded primarily by tax dollars, they are required to accept patients other facilities might reject, and they are often overcrowded and grim,…