Wayward

It’s hard to imagine, now, how it was that I took up with that boy in South Carolina, but facts are facts. William Buchanan Redmond was lawless and drawling, full of sideways glances and outrageous proposals. He went by Cannon. One night on Hilton Head Island, where I was staying with a friend’s family (thanks to private school I had friends with houses on Nantucket, etcetera, though I lived in a modest house with my mother and sister that we were renovating to resell), he approached me at an outdoor concert. A guitarist was playing a sing-along rendition of “Take Me Home, Country Road” in the piazza down by the harbor, hired by the resort to entertain visitors while they strolled and ate ice cream. Cannon sat down next to me on a brick wall. I thought he was cute. I’d say something more intelligent, except my teenage diaries reveal a definite simplicity of thought: he was cute. He was cool. He was dealing drugs out of a purple van in the parking lot. [excerpt

In Transit

There is the birthplace and there is the deathplace. We are in the deathplace. The deathplace is Bad Aibling, in southern Germany, just north of the Austrian border. To get here, we have driven through the Tyrol, the Italian-Austrian-German alpine region in which gingerbread houses stack up on the green slopes of valleys. Bad Aibling sounds fitting for a deathplace, a bad place, though in fact “bad” means “bath.” As we drive on a two-lane road, we see cars parked in bunches on the grassy shoulder, and it seems people might be bathing, dipping their feet in the country creeks the way it’s done in Tuscany, where each creek is known for its particular qualities of minerals and temperature. I might bother to find out about creek-bathing if I were a tourist, but I am not. We simply glide in suspension, the place of death acquiring properties as we approach. Bad Aibling is a spa town and, seemingly as an extension of the warm baths, clinics have arisen here. We are looking for the Schloss-Prantseck Klinik, at which patients receive hyperthermia, a superheating of the waters. [excerpt

[Review of] Vernon Williams, Jr., Rethinking Race: Franz Boas and His Contemporaries

The term Jim Crow II is frequently used by African Americans to describe contemporary American race relations, by which they mean that just as legal segregation, lynching and voting restrictions followed emancipation, so has a period of racist reaction followed the successes of the Civil Rights movement. Williams sees parallels between the two periods: I have attempted to describe and analyze the ideas of persons who provided, in a time comparable to our own, the bases of sophisticated discussion of race and race relations. Williams is too good a historian to settle for merely demonstrating parallels; he also traces the continuing conflict between American social science which, with some notable exceptions, has been aggressively anti-racist since the 1930s, and America\u27s deeply ingrained racism

Stewart v. McIntosh, 4 H. & J. 233 (1816)

Stewart v. M’Intosh was argued during the time period of the Jay Treaty, the Quasi-War, the Haitian Revolution, and the War of 1812. The facts begin at the end of the 18th century and extend into the early 19th century. The arguments and ruling were based on trade restrictions between United States citizens and territories under French control. The plaintiffs focused their arguments on the specific language of the Congressional acts, which outlawed trade with French territories but did not directly mention the regions at issue, while the defendants looked at the implications of the acts and the context of the struggles between the United States and France to shape their arguments. Though the case only includes the notes and final verdict, a close examination of the intricacies of the arguments and historical context that shaped the world during this time help explain the mindset and political agenda of the justices of the Court of Appeals. The defendants were successful in showing that the plaintiffs attempted to circumvent Congressional acts by trading with territories specifically outlawed by legislation in order to profit, as they donned Danish flags to fly above their ships in order to disguise themselves and engage in forbidden trade. The political influences of the justices sitting on the Court of Appeals, though, may explain how this controversial decision was reached

Our So-Called Illustrious Past

I went to London not to see the queen, but to find the Dutch baronet from whom we were all descended. I went as my father and forefathers and foremothers had done, to turn the crackling pages of a parish register and put my finger on our name. I went with an image of Gualter de Raedt, a young Dutchman in 1660, boarding a ship to accompany Charles the Second back to England, where monarchy would be restored. The fleet of thirteen ships sailed from Schevinengen on a flat gray sea as fifty thousand people stood on the beach to watch. Our man, our first identifiable forefather, our target of international inquiry, entered London with Charles on a Tuesday in May, the streets lined with observers, the horses plumed with French feathers, and was created (and here our family springs into being) Baronet the very next day. Charles owed rather a lot of favors, having raised an army which he could not pay, an ill-disciplined hungry army of 2,500 men, and so when he triumphally entered London, with a detailed contract for his employ ment as king, called elegantly the Declaration of Breda, and having ordered such household necessities as a velvet bed, he felt the urgency of dispens ing honors, in some cases instead of money, and so our man became Sir Gualter de Raedt, of the Hague. Sir Walter, the family bible-keepers called him, anglicizing his name, Sir Walter Rhett. We come down from Sir Walter Rhett, who was Dutch, wrote a family historian, who was (and this part is underlined) of the oldest and purest nobility that Europe can boast. Thus my introduction to the fantasies of genealogists. [excerpt

Souvenir

A collection of autobiographical essays Souvenir, a collection of autobiographical essays rooted in the present, investigates travel, staying put, and how it is that our experience of being here right now includes so much of being elsewhere at another time. Rhett reconciles present to past in serious encounters with birth and death, alongside lighter observations. In a world that makes no sense except the sense we make of it, Souvenir plays with the dynamics of home and away to represent the fullness of daily life. [From the publisher]https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1068/thumbnail.jp

Conception: A Personal History

November 19 is Remembrance Day in Gettysburg, the day that Lincoln dedicated part of the battlefield as a cemetery for the Civil War dead in 1863. That year in July the dead lay on the battlefield, on the farmers’ fields planted with crops and in the summer-green woods where they had taken positions behind boulders and tree trunks. Some lay covered with dirt, and others just lay bare to the weather. When land for a cemetery was set aside, the townspeople moved the dead to proper graves. As a citizen of Gettysburg more than a century later, I carry no responsibilities as burdensome as moving thousands of dead bodies for burial. My children and I climb the steep trail of Round Top, scaling the hill’s crowning boulders and dropping down behind them, pushing leaves off of low plaques to learn which soldiers fought where. We acquaint ourselves with the town’s history—I was impressed to hear that the main building on the Gettysburg College campus had been a Civil War hospital. Later I realized that nearly every building standing in 1863 had been, of necessity, a hospital, too. A colleague who commuted here from Maryland once asked, “How can you live in that town? You’re living on the most blood-soaked piece of ground in America.” But this place doesn’t feel blood-soaked. The former hospital buildings are bed-and-breakfasts, or dormitories, or offices. The battlefields roll out like velvet, their hems bordered with silent cannons and marble monuments. Although there was so much death, to my mind it’s safely tucked into the past. [excerpt

Sanguine

Health care in America: even my doctor lines up for the community multiphasic blood screening, rather than going to the regular lab. It costs thirty-two dollars for the usual screen, plus ten dollars for thyroid, or PSA or B-12. The blood-drawing used to be held at the local rec park building. Now it’s at the county emergency services building, outside of town on a brand-new winding country road. They could just as well hold it at the public library, or firehouse, or agricultural center—any large room usable for voting, or the traveling reptile show, could be set up for phlebotomy. [excerpt

Adapting Human Rights

Governmental leaders, scholars, and activists have advocated for human rights to food, water, education, health care, and energy. Such rights, also called positive rights, place an affirmative duty upon the state to provide a minimum quantity and quality of these goods and services to all citizens. But food, education, water, and health care are so different–in how they are produced, consumed, and financed–that the implementation of a positive right must be adapted to the distinctive characteristics of the good or service it guarantees. The primary aims of this adaptive implementation are transparency, enforceability and sustainability in the provision of positive rights. Only by adapting a positive right to its policy environment can such a right function as a viable means of protecting disadvantaged members of society. This article uses the example of positive rights to public utilities, such as water and energy, to illustrate adaptive implementation of positive rights. In doing so, this article explains why and how a positive right must be adapted to the unique policy environment of a given public utility