Notes on the 20th Century

How does one probe the deepest psychic recesses of a nation so sprawling, so disposable, so seemingly transparent yet coyly evasive of real analysis? Our history is short, but it is incredibly dense, like a white dwarf star that sucks all inquiry into its imploding mass. I’ve studied the history of this country off and on for over two decades, taught it to others, disseminated my research on it in books, journals, reference, works, and on this site. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I suggest that I can likely tell you a few things about it that you don’t already know, some of which might actually be interesting to you. But I’ll be damned if I can figure it out.

My attempts to do so, however, have led to a fascination with the dark, eerie, bizarre side of American history, those little pockets of idiosyncrasy that Griel Marcus called "the old, weird America." They were plentiful during the nation’s infancy; in fact, weirdness was the norm back then. The institutions that had shaped and circumscribed the lives of Europeans for centuries – church, peerage, guilds, law – had always been weak or absent in the British North American colonies. Many of those who came here, from the British Isles and elsewhere, did so to get away from those institutions and the crushing grip they held on the lives of ordinary citizens. They came for a multiplicity of reasons under a variety of circumstances. Some were not free when they arrived here, and many never again tasted freedom. Some got here by being a step or two swifter than the sheriff; some got here by being a step or two slower than a raiding party. Under these circumstances, and across their sprawling and ever-spreading geography, the colonies were a petri dish in which incubated teeming microbes of vulgarity, violence, depravity, humor, and mad genius.

The cultural homogenization responsible for eradicating the old, weird America began with the invention of the telegraph and the development of railroad networks in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. Railroad construction exploded during the postbellum era, opening up new markets for mass-produced goods that competed with the wares of local merchants and artisans. Railroads thus changed the way Americans shopped in the late nineteenth century in a manner similar to how the Internet changed consumer habits in the late twentieth century. Mail order houses, starting with Montgomery Ward in 1878, soon emerged to meet rural demand for finished goods. Railroads were also responsible for dividing the country into four time zones in 1883, eliminating reliance upon local "sun time" and permitting railroad lines to set more accurate travel schedules. The resultant consolidation of hundreds of local times into four distinct zones increased the efficiency with which goods were shipped to market and to individual consumers, helping to fuel the economic boom of the late nineteenth century and setting the stage for the homogenized consumer society of the twentieth. Each technological advancement served to advance this process of homogenization: the telephone; the phonograph; motion pictures; the automobile; the Federal Highway System; radio. The emergence of the suburbs

Robert Palmer, Deep Blues

Skip James, 1930 Recordings

Dock Boggs, Country Blues