In previous posts I encouraged readers to avoid adverbs when possible, and to construct active rather than passive sentences. Today I’ll show you how and why to follow that advice.

A great, or even good, sentence may offer description. A truly great sentence almost always describes something, which means it may layer literary device upon literary device: metaphor, simile, synecdoche, or metonymy. It may offer allusion, poetry, and even lyrical beauty. But other than a sentence that is wholly about a state of being (“It was a fine cry—loud and long—but it had no bottom and it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow.”—Toni Morrison, Sula), certainly for expository writing, most sentences will offer action. And action requires that we attend to our verbs.

I came close to not graduating high school. My sister, my two step-siblings, and I had been cordially invited to leave our house one night in September 1985, my overly-Evangelical father and stepmother declaring the end of their patience over our alleged “rebelliousness.” My sister has movingly told the tale here, so I’ll not recount it in this post. I was a month shy of my eighteenth birthday when I moved out, and about eight months short of graduation.

I lived at the YMCA my senior year, selling Honda motorcycles after school to pay my bills. Because I was now independent of my family, I was allowed to excuse myself from school, a privilege of which I took rather too much advantage. I failed physics and trigonometry, barely passed chemistry, and got through my other classes on a little charm and whatever brain power I could muster. I don’t believe I did any homework that year. Somehow I graduated, my grade point average barely registering a gentleman’s “C.” Most of my friends were off to college. I left the motorcycle shop, took a job as a cook, and registered for some classes at the community college. I failed one of those too.

After a year of such meanderings, I decided to get my act together. I enrolled for night classes at the University of Pittsburgh, trying to realize a years-long dream to return to my hometown. I lived with my Grandmother Katie, took one job at a sports memorabilia shop downtown and another at a local restaurant to pay my expenses, and charted the bus routes to the Cathedral of Learning. About six weeks of that experiment came to an end when the tuition bill came due. I hadn’t really factored tuition into my budget, and all attempts to secure financial aid failed. I had to drop the two classes in which I was enrolled.

With each new discovery, my Daisy Lampkin biography gives me some new cause to celebrate my hometown of Pittsburgh. Now, for the next few days, the whole nation can join in on the love: the National Football League is holding its annual draft this year in the Steel City. I’m not quite the (American) football fan I was growing up in the 1970s, when all the boys on the playground idolized Franco Harris and Terry Bradshaw and Lynn Swann. As Pittsburgh becomes the center of the professional football universe for a few days, there is, I have come to learn, a connection—thin, perhaps, but nevertheless there—between Daisy Lampkin and the Steelers and Pittsburgh and the NFL’s annual player draft.

The second Trump administration has been attempting to bring under tighter ideological control key cultural and intellectual institutions, including major universities, the Kennedy Center, and the Smithsonian Institution. One prominent target is the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), in the administration’s crosshairs for “improper ideology.” Director Kevin Young resigned a year ago under pressure from the administration. A distinguished poet, writer, and scholar, Young was a worthy successor to the NMAAHC’s founding director, Dr. Lonnie Bunch, now the director of the Smithsonian itself (and embattled by the Trump administration for the same political reasons.)
 
I have enjoyed the privilege of visiting NMAAHC four times. It does not portray anything ideologically suspect, though it may present a history with which some Americans are unfamiliar. Indeed, it may be the best museum in America. And one suspects that is why the Trump administration wants to throttle it.

One of the very first pieces of formal writing advice I ever received in college was to avoid use of the infinitive verb “to be” in all its conjugations: is, am, are, were, was, etc. I didn’t quite understand why Professor Lynn banished “to be” from his assignments, so I carried out the orders dutifully. So accustomed was I to “is,” “was,” and “am” in my speech that I struggled to find ways to fix the offending passages. Only later did I come to understand. The problem, I would learn in graduate school, and then pass on to my own students, was with sentence construction that we call “passive.”

Whatever else can be said about the consequences for public health, the Trump administration's dismantling of institutions of scientific discovery such as the Centers for Disease Control or the National Institutes of Health, via executive decree or defunding, represents a clear assault on the civic infrastructure that has been a hallmark of twentieth century US public policy. The attacks on the CDC and the NIH represent but a portion of the administration's larger assault on US institutions of public education, scholarship, and research.

The public backing of knowledge enterprises in this country has a long history, going back at least as far as the land-grant universities of the 1860s. But beginning in the 1930s, the Roosevelt administration began to pour the express energies of the US government into scientific and educational advancement, a policy that enjoyed tremendous boosts during World War II and then the Cold War. In so doing the Roosevelt/Truman administrations made science itself an American public good, with results widely celebrated today.

Beginning next month I'll offer a 6-week online course into the history of the New Deal, paying particular attention to the public goods offered by the program, their benefits to American life, and the philosophy behind them. Check out the course catalog for more information. For now, after the break, a little primer on what public goods mean for American life:

​I’ve been discussing the wide variety of modules I offer on FractalPast. The other day I posted about some of the courses I had taken, as the foundation of my historical knowledge. I’ll be making another post next week about the many courses I taught in my more than twenty-year teaching career. But my research also provides another entrée point for expertise in a wide variety of historical fields and subfields. Though seemingly a narrow topic—US-Netherlands relations in the fifteen or so years after World War II—my book actually required that I familiarize myself with a host of distinct historical fields. Many of these overlap, of course, in some cases barely comprising a subfield. But every one of the following subject areas enjoys a robust literature, and the scrupulous researcher is obligated to engage with all of them:

If you scoot on over to the “Course Catalog” page of this website you can see all the modules I will be offering on rotation in the coming weeks and months. If you click on the “Course Description” button you’ll see a brief synopsis of what the course covers and what you can expect to encounter over the six weeks.
 
You might wonder how I come up with the offerings. Some of the modules may look familiar to you, offering conventional periodization and subject matter. Others may appear unfamiliar or peculiar. I conceive of the modules based on three subjective factors that I believe coalesce into something substantial: