Nostalgia for the American Logger?

Nostalgia is a beat of Trump’s heart. From the fears from the displacement of white to the rise of the so -called “trading wives” who want to repeat what they see as traditional ideas about motherhood under patriarchal households, nostalgia, as if the lost past causes most of Trump’s appeal. A considerable part of the working class, angry that his historical right to hard, male work has disappeared, also accepted the Nostalgia of Trump. Decades of industrial job losses and lack of answers for the displaced workers about the future turned the county of the blue collar that made up the core of the “new deal” coalition into Trump Haveli. The media was largely focused on urban cities in the States of the Swing, but its influence in the counties of natural resources was also transformation.

Trump – this is not a stated target of the beautiful Will Hamit Brown Lords from the forest: courage, myth and American forestBut I couldn’t read it without processing it through our present moment. Stories of the past shift to serve as the interest of powerful memory creators. Brown notes how quickly the stories about the media about Trump’s coup had changed on January 6 to the Republican Party’s interests. Its thematic study on the cutting in the late 19th century in the Great Lakes demonstrates a clear understanding of how nostalgia erases the truth and creates pleasant visions of the past, which allow modern people to forget about difficulties and exploitation, arranging the vision of the past, which seems simpler than today’s difficulties. By erasing the history of the working class, environmental degradation and colonialism, the official tourist industry Northwoods talks about the story that fits directly into the corpse narrative about what America used to be, and what it could be when doing great again.

Although Brown deeply loves her Northwoods House, she does not pull on what she has built her modern iteration. The timber industry relies on the land assignment of Menominee and Anishinaab, which is part of a major colonialist project. After the civil war, it exploded, built on the unchanged and uncontrolled destruction of the environment and operation. Post -Chivil War in America had insatiable demand for wood, and Northwoods provided most of it to almost complete felling for two decades. Neither large capital, employer nor workers saw any value in the forest itself, and they saw its elimination as a sign of progress. The irresponsible forestry led to mass fires that devastated many of these communities in the early 20th century.

Lackets lived a cruel, cruel existence. Dangerous work has led to serious injuries and death. Even the survivors can rarely work in this area for over 20 years. Important nature of work meant that many loggers did not get married and did not live the life of restrained courage, so revered by the Victorian era commentators. Instead, they created male work and social cultures that revered their own hierarchy, often based on violence. Violence became a way to provide security from unprepared grains that threatened veterans through their ignorance. Violence also applied a racial hierarchy, both against the Scandinavian immigrants and against the workers of the Indians. Men who are on the distant edges of the rough system of unregulated capitalism have considered that they needed violence to protect themselves, create a community and earn life.

With the reputation as cruel, wandering people, doctors are unlikely to welcome the locals when they arrived in the city. In the section reminiscent of how people talk about the crisis of homelessness, Brown studies how “respectable” residents of Northwood pathologized the life of loggers, seeing them a threat to the family and wanting to endure them as soon as possible. Labor historians would like to see the stories of the organization here, but besides a brief attempt at industrial workers in the world to organize these workers in 1916, they showed little coordinated political activity. Their resistance forms consisted of being out of work or released their disappointment by quarrels. Recently, work historians have begun to pay more attention to workers who do not organize and can explain a lot about the work class through these studies; Brown greatly adds to this conversation.

Meanwhile, lumber, such as Frederick Weyerhauser, became rich on the backs of these workers. They built palace houses in cities such as St. Paul. When the wood began in the late 19th century, most doctors were lucky. But Weerhauser just moved with operations to the huge Pacific forests in the northwest, after he bought 900,000 hectares of Virgin Southern Washington, from his capitalist Minnesota, railway baron James James. Hill.

Brown shows as much interest in how memory is created, and how we talk about the past, as well as the workers themselves. Paul Bunyan’s character was the creation of corporate leaders, which allowed the story of the history of erase the tragedy of the environment and the cruelty caused by the employees. Growing up in Northwoods, she noted how business and political leaders created historical fairy tales about reliable men who have won the desert, completely producing convenient half -factory for generations of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. Moreover, this memory recreates a courageous lifestyle for modern consumers, as well as a cowboy – it may be, but filled with adventures, violent but moral centers based on restraint.

Teaching the laborers of past works made the working class compare what they hear with their current work. With the work in the timber industry, the fact that they were half a century ago, it is unlikely that workers will take a story about making America again through hard work. I grew up in the forest of Oregon and Washington instead of Minnesota and Wisconsin, but Brown stories are heavily with what I saw in the northwest, where the forest county threatened to leave Oregon to create “great Ida” to avoid liberals in Portland and Eugene, who seeks to return to the era.

Nostalgia sells people in the past that never existed, the one that seems so simpler than the present. But will historians be in the future to give stories that Americans have to hear? Brown does not work as a professor. At the very moment when the Americans need these stories, the Neoliberal University System has reduced the funding of humanitarian departments. Working for the post in this area collapsed after a great recession. It is just as in the Blue States as in the Red States, as well as corporate donors who run universities, seeking our higher education system into nothing more than a work training program, and administrators are happy to perform.

Will Hamit Brown, and her important book, demonstrates why we need to require universities that require history. We need more stories from her and hundreds of other unemployed and non -working historians who urge us to discard nostalgia and fight the inheritance of work, environmental degradation, colonialism of settlers and stories that cover all this.