News from the Front Porch Republic
Greetings from the Porch,
I hope your Christmas celebrations are continuing apace. We've been enjoying many celebrations with family and the excuse to cook and enjoy old and new recipes together. Testaroli, which is perhaps the oldest form of pasta, is quite delicious.
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In this week's Water Dipper I recommend essays on surveillance, hope, and poetry.
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Elizabeth Stice commends the TV show TrueSouth for portraying local culture and directing viewers' gazes back to their own places. The show "reminds us what it means to love a place and how we make the places we live more lovable. Every episode advocates for a way of belonging we can all adopt wherever we are."
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Kenton Sena reflects on what we might learn about inhabiting our places from Sam Gamgee's gardening: "J. R. R. Tolkien imagined a society characterized by people who care for one another and their natural spaces, cultivating human and ecological flourishing in their communities."
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Will Lyon describes the benefits of doctors visiting their patients in their own homes: "The reason I lament the loss of home visits is because in the doctor’s journey to see the patient as a person (which is essential to the therapeutic relationship) the home is a rich environmental shortcut to the core of the person."
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Jesse Russell reviews Hanna Videen recent book on Anglo-Saxon language and culture and considers how these words and values remain discernible in modern English: "In order to reconcile competing and hostile cultures in our current, chaotic milieu, it is necessary to forge a politics of honesty and integrity. As hinted by The Wordhord’s emphasis on daily life, the true and good political life begins with the small things of home life."
In my effort to gradually learn more about the history of western Pennsylvania, I picked up Fred Anderson’s massive Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754-1766. It tells the remarkable story of how a small skirmish in the woods of Pennsylvania (in which a young George Washington failed to lead prudently) sparked a global war. One of the strands that particularly caught my attention narrates how the experience of fighting in this war led many colonial men to meet others from neighboring colonies and gain a sense of solidarity with other colonists whom they otherwise saw as rivals for land and resources. These experiences laid much of the cultural basis for the shifting allegiances of the Revolutionary period:
Provincial solders came from everywhere in North America, and the experience of military service became correspondingly widespread. Whereever provincials served alongside [British] regulars they could no more escape noticing the differences between themselves and their redcoated superiors than they could avoid hearing the “Shrieks and Crys” of the men being “whiped or Piqueted or some other ways punished” in their camps. Moreover, because the great majority of provincial common soldiers were young men, men whose influence on their society would grow more palpable as they acquired property and household-headship in later years, the impact of their wartime experience might be felt for years after their discharge from service. By sheer weight of numbers the war’s greatest long-term impact would be felt in New England, where between 40 and 60 percent of the men in the prime military age range would pass through the provincial forces before peace finally returned. At least in Massachusetts and Connecticut, the war’s ultimate effect would be to create a generation of men from people who had been mere contemporaries.
Thanks for spending some time with us on the Porch,
Jeff Bilbro