Buffalo Light Rail at Fountain Plaza by David Wilson from Oak Park, Illinois, CC BY 2.0
My latest piece is a long essay in the current edition of Comment magazine. It’s called “Storied Cities” and is about the myths, histories, cultures, and rituals that make cities unique. Here is an excerpt:
How is this history, and thus so much of the identity, culture, and economy of a place, understood and communicated? Despite the importance of understanding local history and culture, especially that of the founding generations of cities, it is often little studied and little known. Thus so many cities struggle to even understand who they are. New York is unusual in that so much has been written about its history and culture, perhaps the result of it being the literary and media capital of the country. There are vastly more first-rate writers and journalists living in New York than anywhere else. As a result, there’s a surfeit of great books—along with magazines, movies, and other cultural products—on the city’s history, culture, and places, each mutually shaping and reinforcing its identity.
Journalist Russell Shorto titled his bestselling book The Island at the Center of the World, reflecting a true history but also a self-conscious civic conceit, a civic myth of sorts. This myth was most famously embodied in the famous “View of the World from 9th Avenue” cover of The New Yorker from 1976, in which the world beyond the Hudson river shrivels into near nothingness. This is a stereotype of a mindset to be sure, but also one at some level embraced by the people who live there—and also something of a reality as well. There’s a reason why every New Year’s Eve America tunes in to its televisions to watch a glowing ball drop on Times Square. It’s a ritual acknowledgement that, for Americans at least, New York is the centre of the world. And Shorto’s stress on the unique Dutch founding of New York emphasizes its difference from the rest of the country, telling a story of New York’s identity that today’s residents want very much to believe, as open-minded, multicultural, tolerant, global, and so on. New York’s history as a slaveholding city doesn’t factor in so much in this sort of self-congratulatory analysis.
But unlike New York or Chicago, where bookshelves groan with excellent titles about them, for most cities, there’s not that much written about them. As a researcher and writer who often profiles overlooked cities, I often try to read key local histories or other books about them for background. For most places, the pickings are slim. Not only do most cities have relatively few books written about them, what books do exist are often academic, published by local history enthusiasts on small presses, or official histories of various institutions. They are important works in many cases that have some of the only factual information about places available to people who don’t have endless days to trawl through archives. But they are rarely widely read and seldom capture the real feeling or identity of a place. So that route of civic self-understanding and myth-making is largely foreclosed to them.
Click through to read the whole thing.
The race reflects a two-tier society as historically the case in the more aristocratic South. rather than a cause for resentment in the masses, the Derby’s Millionaire’s Row and other pastimes of the elite are a source of pride, something they see as reflecting well on their entire community, including themselves. As a result, wealthy Louisvillians are free to publicly engage in elite activities without shame.
Maybe a little too free. The Atlantic is running a photo series on each of the Fifty States, and I was really surprised at what they came up with for Kentucky:
https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2020/05/kentucky-photos/611371/
Horses! Golf! A castle with a spa in it! A fox hunt, for crying out loud.
Not pictured: (Hu)man or his works in Appalachia. And it’s not only an elite East Coast selection bias problem; entries for other states in the Midwest and South have a noticeable upper-class tilt but also show more typical representations of ag, industry and working-class culture.
I don’t know how things are going in Louisville specifically, though the police there haven’t exactly covered themselves in glory lately. But I’d say the state as a whole has a gentry problem, and not the kale-and-kombucha kind. Just look at the genteel Senate delegation of a state with one of the most visible poverty problems in the Union.
And as long as I’m annoying everyone with class antagonism:
Despite the glitter of auto racing internationally with Formula 1, the Indianapolis 500 is traditionally a more working-class event, attended by large numbers of locals. Until recently, the celebrities there have long been known more for local traditional appeal than contemporary star power.
I don’t follow auto racing but I’d like to hear some followup on what happened recently, why, and what the locals think about it. Presumably it’s the same thing that’s happening everywhere.
It used to be that Jim Nabors sang Back Home Again in Indiana every year. Florence Henderson used to sing all the time too. Both have passed away in recent years.
With the switch to NBC, the network tried to cross promote with various film and TV ventures, meaning having people who are actually performing in things show up at the track. I don’t think there’s been any conscious strategy around it nor do I think the average person thinks much about it.
That’s about what I expected. Thanks for the reply!
It’s great to see a discussion of culture in American society. Culture is the foundation of any society. It literally makes the functioning of societies possible. It is a unifying force that structures everything else..including politics, economics, social identities, institutions, and human geography. It’s not the icing on the cake, but the cake itself that we can’t see hidden behind the icing of public and formal political and economic activity. Aaron is really referring to American regional cultures and the ways in which they structure American society. Through both form and function, these cultures structure the experience of markets, politics, government, and popular entertainment, among other things. Looking at culture this way is deeply unfashionable now. Post-modernism has led to simplistic theories of everything that seek to undermine such nuanced and historical understandings of America. David Hacket-Fischer’s Albion’s Seed is one of the foundational works of history looking at regional culture. Published way back in 1989, Hackett-Fischer shows that region is not a variation of a common American culture, but that profoundly different regional cultures have separate histories and distinct geographies and that they are only held together in a formal and superficial way in America. As Aaron points out, southerners have no problem with displays of social hierarchy. Their entire society is organized on the concept of social hierarchy. They don’t have any reason to restrain their expression of hierarchical values. Similarly, Midwesterners have no problem enforcing a homogenized conformity on their society. The social goals of peace and order, if not the deeper social unity of New England and its diaspora across the northern U.S., are the foundations of their entire society. They’re ‘invested’ in these societal models in a thousand different ways.
One interesting implication of regional cultural perspectives is what happens on the borders of these regions. Such places find themselves torn between cultural models. These bordering cultures may even be in conflict with each other. Their mutually-exclusive nature is what has kept them distinct in the first place. Baltimore, St. Louis, and The City That Shall Not Be Named are examples of border towns, but so is Austin, TX. These cities show that being between two cultures can create irreconcilable divisions but that it can also create new synergies by connecting two regions. Without a unified local culture such places can dissolve into intense internecine battles. It’s why public interactions are often so contentious and mean-spirited and why local politics is so absurd and cut-throat in these cities. It’s as if two different groups are trying to play two different team sports on the same field at the same time; only no one seems to realize this and thinks that half the players on the field are just being jerks. They respond by forming clans based on interpersonal loyalty instead of on the basis of any larger principles. Ironically, this same lack of a share culture can create space in which to create. This explains Austin, Texas’ recent explosive growth. It was founded with an eye to regional cultures as an Anglo-cultural capital placed on the fringes of Mexican America.I even see Indy and Columbus as cultural border towns between Cultural Appalachia to their south and the true ‘Midwest” to their north. Having a foot in both camps can be very advantageous, but it can also be much riskier than inhabiting a society built on one clear common cultural model. Regional cultures don’t cause success or failures. They are more powerful and persistent than the particular economic forces of a certain time and places. They cause BOTH success AND failure so powerful and persistent is their force. Thanks for introducing this to the discussion here, Aaron.
The southeastern and far eastern Columbus, Ohio exurbs and hinterlands are Appalachian counties by legal definition; the MSA includes two Appalachian counties and the CSA more still.
However, there is a distinct difference between Northern (heavily German-American influenced) and Southern Appalachia. The Appalachian parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania are quite different from the (Scots-Irish-English and Native American cultures of) Appalachia south of the Mason Dixon line. For one thing, German-American culture has always valued literacy and education pretty highly (the Amish are a notable exception).
That said about Columbus, the story in Indianapolis is somewhat different. Indianapolis is physically a little further than Columbus from the “hills and hollers” of the unglaciated Ohio Valley, and no part of Indiana has ever been declared Appalachian…except the immediate south/southeast side of Indianapolis proper. City plans from the 50s and 60s came as close to calling swaths of Indy “hillbilly country” as is possible. I think they used the term “Appalachian roots” and discussed “social problems” with that population and the need for social services. It’s not unlike the culture described by JD Vance in SW Ohio, made up of work-seeking migrants from Tennessee and Kentucky 1930-60.
We use appalachian culture to describe the development of Scots and Scots-Irish immigrant settlement in what is southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia today starting in the middle of the 18th century. It’s not a creation of the mountain environment but of the rural, contentious, pre-modern culture they brought from the northern British Isles and that flourished in rural locations unclaimed by others in British America. From there this culture moved southwest reaching the plains of Oklahoma and north Texas by the beginning of the 20th century.
But, Appalchia doesn’t have any more culture than anyone else. Everyone everywhere, with the possible exceptions of hermits, exists within one or more cultural systems. Everyone everywhere has the same AMOUNT of culture. It’s just a matter of WHICH cultural models they experience and respond to. Appalachian culture isn’t any more ‘authentic’ than any other cultural expression or experience. No culture is. The financiers of Manhattan and the tech moguls of the Bay Area are every bit as much affected by their cultural understandings and experiences as Loretta Lynn was in Butcher Holler. Modern Americans like to think that they have ‘transcended’ such things and that they are cool rational people calculating their individual self-interest with a perspective unavailable to the benighted inhabitants of other times and places. This is just hubris. Human beings are inherently cultural beings. We HAVE to have it. Aaron’s post reminds us that story telling may vary greatly from one city to the next, but storytelling is still a universal human activity. It’s just a matter of which stories you tell….or don’t tell….and to whom you tell them. This very forum is each of us telling stories that we think best represent the world we live in.
“Culture does not determine one’s actions, but it may limit the possibilities.”
This.
Some cities tell many versions of their stories to anyone who’ll listen. They’re relentless like Nashville and Austin. Some will tell a well-established story of their city’s lost golden age. This is cities like Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh. Some cities won’t tell their stories at all, seeing them as a treasured private secret that binds them to each other as residents of that city. Their city and its stories are for them and them alone. They are the chosen people and their stories are all they have to sustain their special bond. The idea of ‘selling’ their city by telling it’s stories seems unholy..a desecration of sacred ground. They resent the very idea that they should even have to tell their city’s story to ungrateful outsiders who could not possibly share their reverence for their city and will only ‘use’ the stories instead of venerating them. This is the City That Shall Not Be Named.
This was a rather interesting discussion that focuses on the differences within the State of Ohio, which the author describes as being “really FIVE Ohios”. The City that Shall Not Be Named comes across as basically a historic bastion of Southern culture and economics.
https://beltmag.com/ohio-confederate-flag-apologists-history/
American regional cultures are at work across the country in every aspect of life. npr.org/2013/11/11/244527860/forget-the-50-states-u-s-is-really-11-nations-says-author
And, of course, there is the classic “Albion’s Seed”, which may overstate things but is interesting nonetheless.
A review here: https://dneiwert.blogspot.com/2007/09/albions-seed-four-british-folkways-in.html
What does Hackett-Fischer overstate? Regional cultures are older than the U.S., some are much older.
That article is a hit piece – it overturned every rock in a 100×100 mile area and over a time span of 100 years to construct a “1800s Cincinnati was THE PLANTATION SOUTH” narrative. Sorry, but the plantation south hardly existed in Kentucky, and the Northern Kentucky counties are to this day dotted with “Fort” neighborhoods – named after the more than dozen fortifications built by Union forces to turn away Confederate troops. Fort Mitchell, Fort Thomas, Fort Wright, etc. Canon were mounted on several Cincinnati hills overlooking the river and they remained there for 50 years until they were melted down for the WWI effort.