Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2019 i The American Scholar

Long before the “forgotten” people of America became the focus of postelection media coverage, Louisiana-based photographer Debbie Fleming Caffery was documenting former boomtowns that had lost their economic base and their population. Caffery is best known for her intimate black-and-white photographs of African-American men and women in the South. Her work has also taken her to brothels in Mexico and post–Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. In 2017, Atlanta’s High Museum commissioned Caffery for its ongoing Picturing the South series, allowing her to return to areas in rural Mississippi and Louisiana that she has visited and documented off and on for 30 years. —NAOMI SHAVIN “I started exploring these two areas—northern Louisiana and Mississippi in the Delta—in 1988. I took some photographs, but it wasn’t until 2011 that I really got into…

Two years ago, a diver accidentally discovered a 7,000-year-old burial site 21 feet underwater, in what was once a peat bog off the coast of Manasota Beach, Florida. Archaeologists were delighted, but not surprised. They knew that Florida’s western coastline had extended about 100 miles seaward from its current location when the last ice age peaked 14,000 years ago. As sea levels rose, valuable prehistoric sites were covered by water. Finding the Manasota site may have been a lucky break, but researchers aren’t leaving their next big discovery to chance. Archaeologists say that “drowned sites” could improve our understanding of how Homo sapiens reached the Western Hemisphere, and they’re adapting high-tech tools to make that happen. The Manasota site dates to the Middle Archaic period, 8000 to 6000 BC, when…

AMERICA, NAMED FOR an explorer and ripe with visionaries from Johnny Appleseed to Thomas Edison, is a nimble word, as limber as its prairies and its plains. Greed and conquest have vied, however, during its checkered history, with melting generosities, from Ellis Island to Carl Sandburg and his master, Walt Whitman. Indeed, Herman Melville staffed his whaling ship with representatives of every race on earth. Queequeg, Tashtego, Daggoo. And the greatness of his book resides in all its bulk and blubber. We’ve got, here, big-shouldered Chicago and wide-chested Texas. Bayoued Louisiana and sequoiaed California. Flyways, highways, byways, a rhapsody of opportunity. I once drove a Model A Ford from coast to coast on Route 66, sleeping days because the car overheated except at night. Three thousand miles on four cylinders,…

IN THE FAMOUS “Seven Ages of Man” speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Jaques, the misanthropic philosopher of the play, expounds on the individual life cycle. He begins with the unsavory aspects of babyhood—“the infant, / Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms”—and ends with the bleakest rendering of old age: Last scene of all, That ends this strange eventful history, Is second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. I have been thinking about this trajectory lately—the last scene in human life, in particular—as I seriously confront my own old age and eventual death. When I turned 60, five years ago, with only a decade left to my allotted three score and 10, I began to ruminate on these things. I can honestly…

IF WE ARE TO BELIEVE Deborah Mitford, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, her father, Lord Redesdale, read only one book in his life and that was White Fang. “He loved it so much he never read another. … ‘Dangerous good book,’ he used to say, ‘no point in trying any more.’ ” I also loved White Fang, but instead of desisting from books, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on more of them. Of course, I was barely a teenager at the time, and since then I’ve come across a few novels even better than White Fang—and some worse. Nonetheless, Lord Redesdale, father of the notorious Mitford sisters, whose daughter Nancy wrote novels that he presumably opened, had a point. Reading ought to be pleasurable, so why waste time on…

BETWEEN TWO MILLSTONES: Book I, Sketches of Exile, 1974–1978 BY ALEKSANDR SOLZHENITSYN TRANSLATED BY PETER CONSTANTINE University of Notre Dame Press, 480 pp., $35 IN FEBRUARY 1974, the Soviet Union stripped its best-known writer, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, of his citizenship and exiled him to the West. Solzhenitsyn, taking up temporary residence in Switzerland, was confident he knew two things: what the West was like and how his planned novels about the Russian Revolution would unfold. As this first volume of his memoirs demonstrates, he turned out to be wrong about both. An enemy of the Soviet regime, he soon discovered that the culture of the West was also alien to his sensibility. He was caught “between two millstones.” Another exiled Russian writer, Anatoly Kuznetsov, cautioned Solzhenitsyn against becoming involved in public…

Erin Hanson has, for her landscape paintings, observed the colored cliffs of Utah and Nevada, hiked through Zion National Park and Monument Valley, and studied the diversity of the Anza-Borrego Desert and Joshua Tree National Park. The work shown here, Montana Sky (oil on canvas, 30” × 20”), is typical of her so-called Open Impressionistic technique, which involves the application of impasto brushstrokes, the paint premixed and unblended on the canvas—resulting in mosaics of texture and luminous color.…

Ever since Francis Collins and Craig Venter first sequenced the human genome in 2000, people who want to know more about their ancestry or their genetic predisposition toward certain diseases have had access to a powerful tool. Not surprisingly, companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe have flourished. But it may be that newborns have the most to gain from gene sequencing. “This is vital information for families,” says Pankaj Agrawal, a neonatologist at Boston Children’s Hospital. The earlier we understand a person’s genetic risk for diseases, the greater the opportunity to minimize those risks. Agrawal, a researcher who studies the genetic basis of rare diseases, is part of an ambitious new project called BabySeq. From 2015 to 2018, BabySeq enrolled more than 300 families—the majority with healthy newborns, a quarter caring…

THE T. DON HUTTO Residential Center is a 512-bed institution that has operated in Taylor, Texas, since the mid-1990s. The word “residential” in its name and the bright pink walls inside suggest a hospitable, domestic space. The layers of chainlink fence, heavy steel doors, and slim window slits suggest something far more sinister. Although the Hutto Center has little of the mystique of America’s more infamous prisons, like Alcatraz or Rikers Island, today it is at the center of an archipelago of private prison and detention facilities run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA). “Hospitable” is not a word detainees have used to describe the Hutto Center. Consider the case of three-year-old Antony Nartatez and his mother, who were kept in prisonlike conditions at Hutto, even though U.S. officials…

THE BRITISH IN INDIA: A Social History of the Raj BY DAVID GILMOUR Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 640 pp., $35 AMONG HIS MANY vanities, Lord Louis Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India, imagined that he had forged an entirely new relationship with Indians by decreeing upon his arrival in 1947 that they would henceforth make up half the guests at any viceregal soirée. One doubts that his forebear David Ochterlony, the early-19th-century British resident in Delhi, would have been much impressed. As David Gilmour informs readers in his authoritative new study of three and a half centuries of British life and rule in India, Ochterlony shared his home with 13 Indian wives, each of whom had her own elephant with which to accompany him on his evening rides. The British…

ARISTOTLE’S WAY: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life BY EDITH HALL Penguin Press, 231 pp., $27 WHO KNEW THAT Melania Trump’s “Be Best” campaign was Aristotelian? As Edith Hall, a distinguished classicist at King’s College London, explains, “becoming the Best Possible You” is a core tenet of Aristotle’s “Project Happiness,” the pursuit of which is the subject of her new book, Aristotle’s Way. Intended as a practical guide to living well, as opposed to an academic treatise, the book belongs more in the genre of self-help manuals with titles like The Power of Habit and The Road Back to You, than, say, “The Meaning of Prohairesis in Aristotle’s Ethics.” Aristotle himself was born in 384 B.C., in the small city-state of Stageira, set in the wooded, mountainous peninsula overlooking…

Will the nation’s identity continue to be pastoral, or will its urbanites create a hip young image of environmental awareness? THE FIRST MEAT PIE I had in New Zealand was a mince-and-cheese from the Coffeepot Café along State Highway 1 in Kaiwaka, a rest stop on the InterCity bus route from beachy Paihia to Auckland, the largest city in the country. On the way to Paihia, I had not partaken of the pies because I was suspicious of their quality. The Coffeepot Café seemed to exist only to cater to bus passengers: German, Chinese, and Canadian flags fluttered along the edge of the parking lot. Food designed to be eaten in places where people have no other options is never good, and the pies in the Coffeepot Café looked particularly…

Ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft are flourishing around the country. In Washington, D.C., for example, this market has more than quadrupled since 2015. The sudden ubiquity of Uber and Lyft left Katie Wells, a geographer and postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, wondering about their effects not only on public transit but also on the lives of the drivers themselves. Since May 2016, Wells and her fellow researchers have been interviewing Uber drivers living in the D.C. area. Often, Wells finds, the financial benefits of driving for a ride-hailing service are elusive. Drivers can become entrenched in what she calls a “debt-to-work pipeline,” in which the costs of driving outweigh the actual profits. Rideshare drivers who don’t own their own cars are asked to lease vehicles at high interest…

ON MARCH 5, 1770, at a little after nine o’clock in the evening, men in uniform shot and killed an unarmed black man named Crispus Attucks. They got away with it. This may seem like a radical way to introduce the Boston Massacre, that seminal episode in American history in which British soldiers fired on a mob, killing five men. But it is not far from how John Adams described the events to jurors while defending those soldiers at trial. The future president would later say that winning their acquittal was “one of the most gallant, generous, manly, and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered my country.” He engaged in some excellent lawyering, no doubt about it. The trial…

EVEN THOUGH MORE THAN half a century has passed, Captain Yiannis Tsaganis remembers his worst storm clearly. He had embarked on the Greek merchant vessel Cormorant as a seaman in 1964. The ship’s five holds had been filled with lumber in Vancouver, and because lumber is a light cargo, beams had been strapped with ropes to the hatch covers as well, allowing the ship to reach its maximum capacity of 10,000 tonnes. The Cormorant’s destination was the port of Yokohama—a distance of more than 4,000 nautical miles across the treacherous North Pacific. Normally the trip lasted about 15 days, but on this occasion the ship began to list. The lid of the ship’s aft ballast tank had cracked and was seeping water into the cargo holds. Then, a typhoon hit,…