. . . [A] great American experiment got underway in a place promising “the luxury of the modern South” with none of the death.
Quarantine Life
‘The Public Health’ (1840)
Via JSTOR Daily, which describes an 1840 pamphlet “[advocating] a four-pronged approach to public healthcare that sounds remarkably like our own.”
To stand in Mann’s study today, with editions of Goethe and Schiller on the shelves, is to feel pride in the country that took him in and shame for the country that drove him out—not two Americas but one. In this room, the erstwhile “Greatest Living Man of Letters” fell prey to the clammy fear of the hunted. Was the year 1933 about to repeat itself? Would he be detained, interrogated, even imprisoned? In 1952, Mann took a final walk through his house and made his exit. He died in Zurich, in 1955—no longer an émigré German but an American in exile.
– Alex Ross, “The Haunted California Idyll of German Writers in Exile,” The New Yorker, March 9, 2020 issue.
Leveling hummocks in dust bowl, thirty miles north of Dalhart, Texas. Farmer: “Every dime I got is tied up right here. If I don’t get it out, I’ve got to drive off and leave it. Where would I go and what would I do? I know what the land did once for me, maybe it will do it again.” Son: “It would be better if the sod had never been broke. My father’s broke plenty of it. Could I get a job in California?”
Dorothea Lange for the Farm Security Administration, June 1938. New York Public Library, 48893db0-8d02-0136-6724-1f99981d5ab5.
“Naomi [who denounces ‘climate alarmism’] said her political activism was sparked a few years ago when she began asking questions in school about Germany’s liberal immigration policies. She said the backlash from teachers and other students hardened her skepticism about mainstream German thinking.”
— Desmond Butler and Juliet Eilperin, “The Anti-Greta: A Conservative Think Tank Takes on the Global Phenomenon.”
Yes, our cognition is bound up in our social existence, as Ludwik Fleck noted in 1935.
“Migrant worker looking through back window of automobile near Prague, Oklahoma. Lincoln County, Oklahoma,” The New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/8bfbd237-2cf8-aed1-e040-e00a1806680b.
The Past in the Present
WPA Federal Art Project in New York City, ca. 1936/37. Source: Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92516051/.
“Trump’s authoritarian style is remaking America” by Ishaan Tharoor at the Washington Post
‘Emigration—Detailing the Progress and Vicissitudes of an Emigrant’ (1833)
Here is a 15-panel satire by C.J. Grant, perhaps meant for working-class Britons. In it, British emigrants could get away from taxes, but expect frightning exotic animals, cannibals, isolation, poverty, and homesickness. Read the panels in high definition at the Library of Congress, and check out Matthew Crowther’s blog post about the artist at Yesterday’s Papers for some publishing context.