Materials Previously Posted On History News Network


Andrew D. Todd

 a_d_todd@rowboats-sd-ca.com 

http://rowboats-sd-ca.com/


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, Addendums: March 7, 2024; April 1, 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, 2010:

Reoposted here April 4, 2024



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