Getting a job. Preservation issues. Learning Italian. Being back in Ann Arbor. Defending my dissertation proposal. Drinking coffee. GLMS shows. Declining interest in the blogosphere. But I’ve been busy and don’t have internet where I’m living, so this will have to do.

As soon as I heard this on the radio, it struck me as ridiculous. In the Indiana Voter ID case, John Paul Stevens wrote the opinion and drew upon the history of voter fraud that was so egregious and viscerally powerful, he included an excerpt in a footnote.

One infamous example is the New York City elections of 1868. William (Boss) Tweed set about solidifying and consolidating his control of the city. One local tough who worked for Boss Tweed, “Big Tim” Sullivan, insisted that his “repeaters” (individuals paid to vote multiple times) have whiskers:

“‘When you’ve voted ’em with their whiskers on, you take ’em to a barber and scrape off the chin fringe. Then you vote ’em again with the side lilacs and a mustache. Then to a barber again, off comes the sides and you vote ’em a third time with the mustache. If that ain’t enough and the box can stand a few more ballots, clean off the mustache and vote ’em plain face. That makes every one of ’em good for four votes.’ ” A. Callow, The Tweed Ring 210 (1966) (quoting M. Werner, Tammany Hall 439 (1928)).

This is a tremendous misuse of history. Stevens read a book on Tammany Hall forty years ago about elections abuses a hundred and forty years ago and has the gall to cite it in a landmark decision sure to disenfranchise thousands. Well played, old man; well played.

N.B. Anyone looking for a connection to my research won’t have to strain too hard. Stevens grew up in Hyde Park, went to UofC schools, and got his bachelor’s in English at Chicago. During the Ford administration, Edward Levi served as the Attorney General and was briefly considered for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court; when opposition arose, Ford named Stevens.

An improvement in convenience.

CTA riders can now use Google to plan their trips, under a partnership between the Internet search engine company and the CTA.

The service allows customers to enter the start and end points of their trips, and Google will offer ways to get there by bus and train. The transit agency hopes the function will attract more riders.

“Having CTA service information on the universally familiar Google Web site allows CTA to reach a broader audience and introduce them to the convenience of transit at no cost to the agency,” CTA President Ron Huberman said at a news conference.

Whenever we went somewhere new, we had to Google map it and try to figure out where the nearby stations were and best route from there. My tests indicate this will be much easier.

Another product of the MSU student ghetto. Cedar Village is the site of the 1999 incident after a basketball loss.

East Lansing Police Chief Tom Wibert said there was no getting around the use of tear gas early this morning to control a violent crowd at the Cedar Village apartments.

Police are calling the violence that erupted at Cedar Fest overnight a riot, and Wibert said suspects involved in the riot could face expulsion, prison time and fines. Between 3,000 and 4,000 revelers attended the event, according to police estimates.

A couple years ago I was pushing some research on student ghettos and violent incidents like this, but I got no love from the conferences I submitted to. There were two events like this my last year of undergrad at Western Michigan University. WMU had two student ghettos, one somewhat urban — houses and apartment buildings near the center of town, porches, through streets, sidewalks — and the other suburban — no curbs, no through streets, large front yards. Both incidents happened in the suburban area even though the concentration of people and parties was similar in both neighborhoods. Through observation (I was right there for both events and I’ve seen Cedar Village), I’m pretty confident that urban form and planning have a great deal to do with these types of occurrences. They need to run traffic through these streets. 4000 kids can’t and won’t gather in a crowd if cars are driving through at 30 mph. Parking is another issue — while there is some on-”street” parking, in a grid system the line of parked cars forms another barrier between the potential crowds.

talbot_flowers_leaves_stem[1]

Originally uploaded by valeria_jannetti

A terrific exhibit on the history of photography came to the UMMA in 2006, including many of the most significant works of the last 150 years. A few of the earliest images were experiments by William Fox Talbot, who developed the calotype, the first photographic system that could make multiple positive prints from a negative. One of my Talbot favorites is “Scene from a Library.”

Sotheby’s had put up for auction a photographic print of a leaf that was believed to have been done by Talbot. Some of his early work, like the one pictured, essentially consisted of contact printing a leaf or other plant part by setting it on light sensitive paper and exposing it. Now they’ve pulled it from the auction block (where they anticipated a 100-150k selling price) because they think it might have been created even earlier by one of the less renowned Talbot predecessors.

Cities of Knowledge

Originally uploaded by urbanoasis

Colleges and universities are among the most important institutions in post-1945 American society. The federal government, which began offering numerous subsidies as part of the New Deal, intensified its support during World War II and, with the 1944 Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (”GI Bill”), among a host of postwar legislation on higher education, dramatically transformed the nature and role of colleges and universities in postwar America. Enrollment dramatically increased, graduate education expanded and universities’ research agenda intensified.

Universities have long been seen as drivers of the postwar economy and even urban economists have asserted the importance of an educated workforce to the growth and vitality of cities. Despite this enduring prominence in U.S. society, the history of higher education has not been particularly robust. Lectures given more than 40 years ago — Clark Kerr’s Uses of the University — still dominate the interpretation of higher education. Two history books, one on institutional and curricular development in universities, Laurence Veysey’s The Emergence of the American University (1965), and another on development of research capacity, Roger Geiger’s To Advance Knowledge (1986), largely shape the canon of the history of 20th century higher education.

Urban historians have only recently begun to consider universities as agents of urban change, a puzzling circumstance for institutions that have long shaped the lives of individuals and have collectively influenced cities, American culture, and economic development for decades. Margaret Pugh O’Mara’s Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley is one such book that considers the spatial and political consequences of university development over the last 60 years. Cities of Knowledge is a product (or part) of the new suburban history, in which the twentieth century American move of industry and residence from central cities to suburbs is not solely an escape to the suburbs. More than simply white flight, the movement of people, capital, and development had an enduring effect on central cities and these people, resources, and institutions continued to maintain connections back to central cities and between other suburbs throughout the postwar era.

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Preservation Flyer, originally uploaded by urbanoasis.

Time to register for spring classes. I’m teaching a course on historic preservation again (day and time TBD) at Michigan during the May-June semester. Tell your friends.

“Historic preservation has played a significant role in the recent reurbanization of American cities. Now, amid concerns about climate change and energy shocks, preservationists are lauding the energy efficiency of rehabilitating old buildings and reinvigorating compact development patterns. This course will critically examine the history, theory, and practice of the preservation movement while students learn the tools and skills of the field through client-based term projects.”

There’s a great deal about mainstream economic thought that doesn’t sit well with me. Measuring and promoting economic growth. Trade. Dealing with economic inequality.

One major issue I have never understood was the beauty of the new economy, particularly regarding Michigan. Everyone says the state has to regroup for the new economy, must smash the unions who oppose the new economy, and must get more education to compete in the new economy.

I still don’t know what’s wrong with manufacturing. Of course I understand why production centers close and move to Mexico or China, but there seems to be a bias against creating new production centers here as new products are developed. One case in point is hybrid automobiles. Why the hell would we even entertain anything but the idea that Michigan should be the North American design and production center for hybrid automobiles? If Ford and GM had or do get off their asses to create competitive hybrid technology, is there some reason we would not want those production jobs in Michigan? What about the production of train cars, something Detroit used to be a center for?

Indeed, it seems that with all this new economy education we’ve served up, we’re actually better positioned for production since we could create processes that are less wasteful and less polluting. Perhaps this would only be economically feasible if, for example, we imposed a carbon tax, but you take my point, I think. The U.S. and/or Michigan should be able to compete when human costs and environmental externalities are internalized.

Paul Krugman has said for a while that we’re eventually going to have to recreate a good share of our production capacity as the dollar falls in value. Stephen Roach in the Times the other day suggests production and infrastructure would help alleviate our stagnant economy.

A more effective strategy would be to try to tilt the economy away from consumption and toward exports and long-needed investments in infrastructure.

That won’t be easy to achieve. Such a shift in the mix of the economy will require export-friendly measures like a weaker dollar and increased consumption by the rest of the world, which would strengthen demand for American-made goods. Fiscal initiatives should be directed at laying the groundwork for future growth, especially by upgrading the nation’s antiquated highways, bridges and ports.

That’s not to say Washington shouldn’t help the innocent victims of the bubble’s aftermath — especially lower- and middle-income families. But the emphasis should be on providing income support for those who have been blindsided by this credit crisis rather than on rekindling excess spending by overextended consumers.

By focusing on exports and on infrastructure spending, we might be able to limit the recession. Such an approach might also set the stage for a more balanced and sustainable economic upturn in the next cycle. A stimulus package aimed at exports and infrastructure investment would be an important step in that direction.

Consumption has never made sense to me, either on an intuitive, personal level, or on a large, macroeconomic level. Cheap goods do not seem to me to be that great. Moreover, a larger wardrobe or more toys–seemingly the natural consequence of cheap goods–never seemed to aid in quality of life much, either for my middle class self, or the poor that my economist friends always seemed to be (disingenuously) arguing on behalf of. The same with food: the expensive stuff that’s somewhat local and high quality seems to be better for you than the cheap, high-fructose crap that gives the poor all the calories they ever need for a low, low price.

So for my econo-friends: what’s so bad about manufacturing and local production? I’m looking for something better than a facile Ricardo re-hash.

A project I started when I first moved to the Chicago area but let lag was a civic wiki, like Wikipedia but for Chicago. I got some of my students this term to contribute, so the project is back up and running. Why not go ahead and contribute? Interested in serving as a moderator? Leave a comment and I’ll get in touch. Know anything about Apache or getting a domain redirect to work? Same deal.

I saw this film last night, which was just released nationwide. Though unorthodox in its presentation, it was quite forceful and effective in its message. Chicago 10 was not strictly a documentary, though it involved a good deal of archival footage. Using the animated style of Waking Life, and Through a Scanner Darkly, Chicago 10 featured lifelike reconstructions of the Chicago 8/Chicago 7 trial based on trial transcripts, mixed with heavy doses of footage of Chicago in August of 1968 when the Democratic National Convention came to town.

I saw this film with a few international friends who couldn’t believe this had happened in the United States — tear gas, anti-riot vehicles, the police state before the convention. It’s worse, I told them — the scorn and shame is more often than not put on the protestors rather than the Daley administration and the law-and-order forces more generally. What happened to this leftist political wave? asked the Greek, whose country has a national holiday devoted to the student uprising of 1973.

The soundtrack is interesting. Instead of the classic protest and rock songs that have lost their meaning and seem almost celebratory in documentaries, the filmmaker chose sympathetic contemporary music, from Rage Against the Machine to the Beastie Boys to Eminem. The director Morgen notes that it was an intentional choice to appeal to youth sensibilities today (or at least of the last decade). In a few places it doesn’t work (like the opening courtroom scene), but for the most part it is successful.

You should go see this movie. You have probably heard about the Chicago demonstrations and MOBE and the Yippies, but you probably can’t appreciate how insane and violent and frightening the scene was without seeing some of the footage.

Chicagoist has a crappy review here. Here’s a Wired interview with Brett Morgen. A 1994 Charlie Rose interview with William Kunstler, Dave Dellinger, Bobby Seale, and Tom Hayden (from the halfway point).