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Marbury v. Madison

Watch Lecture One:

“Marbury v. Madison: Judicial Review”

Overview

The judiciary is able to maintain its independence from the legislative and executive branches primarily by means of life tenure during good behavior. This independence makes it possible for the judiciary to declare laws unconstitutional. However, the power of judicial review does not make the courts superior to the other branches, which have an equal obligation to interpret and uphold the Constitution. 

Lecture

Hillsdale

About “The U.S. Supreme Court”

Article III of the U.S. Constitution vests the judicial power “in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.” According to Federalist 78, the judicial branch “will always be the least dangerous” to the liberty of the American people. Yet, judicial decisions have done much to advance a Progressive agenda that poses a fundamental threat to liberty. This course will consider several landmark Supreme Court cases in relation to the Founders’ Constitution.

U.S. Supreme Court, 10 Decisions, Hillsdale College

Course Schedule

1. Marbury v. Madison: Judicial Review
   Larry P. Arnn
2. Lochner v. New York: Property Rights
   Paul Moreno
3. NFIB v. Sebelius: Federalism
   Kevin Portteus
4. Roe v. Wade: Privacy and Liberty
   Adam Carrington
5. Texas v. Johnson: Freedom of Speech
   Stephen J. Markman
6. Burwell v. Hobby Lobby: Religious Liberty
   Adam Carrington
7. D.C. v. Heller: Second Amendment
   Stephen J. Markman
8. Brown v. Board of Education: Civil Rights
   Paul Moreno
9. Chevron v. NRDC: Administrative Law
   Ronald J. Pestritto
10. The Supreme Court Today
    Larry P. Arnn

Josephus, The Jewish War

BMCR 2017.02.51 on the BMCR blog Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2017.02.51 Steve Mason, A History of the Jewish War, A.D. 66-74.   New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2016.  Pp. xii, 689.  ISBN 9780521853293.  $150.00.    Reviewed by Matthew V. Novenson, University of Edinburgh (matthew.novenson@ed.ac.uk) Preview When I discovered the package containing Steve Mason’s A History of the Jewish War, A.D. 66-74 in my office mailbox, my first response was excitement, since I, like many scholars of Judaism in antiquity, had known about and been anticipating Mason’s summa on the war for some years now. My second response, upon opening the package, was surprise at the book’s title, since one of Mason’s professional calling cards is his insistence upon using “Judaean” rather than “Jew” or “Jewish” for Greek Ἰουδαῖος and Latin  Iudaeus. (I can only guess that the title represents a compromise between author and publisher, since in the pages of the book Mason uses his customary “Judaean” throughout.) My third and lasting response, upon reading the book, was deep appreciation for Mason’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the contexts of the war and his nimble handling of numerous historiographical problems. Mason’s  Jewish War was originally commissioned for Cambridge University Press’s Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity series, a match made in publishing heaven. But whereas the previous entries in that series—Michael Kulikowski’s Rome’s Gothic Wars and Waldemar Heckel’s Conquests of Alexander the Great—weigh in at about 240 pages, Mason’s Jewish War runs to nearly 700. While a series-appropriate 240-page “foundation for undergraduates with no background in ancient history” (as per the series description in the CUP catalogue) on the Jewish War from Mason would be very welcome, the book that he has in fact produced is a far more interesting one. This book undertakes two discrete tasks, corresponding to parts I and II of its table of contents. Part I, “Contexts,” treats several key conceptual and methodological issues over three chapters. Chapter 1, “A Famous and Unknown War,” does some initial de-mystifying of the war, showing how modern perceptions of it, both popular and academic, are unwittingly in thrall to Flavian propaganda and Christian (and latterly also Jewish) mythmaking: “Flavian propagandists conjured up Jews as a foreign enemy with a great army, or as a nation in revolt. Christians portrayed them as the people that had crucified God and so faced eternal punishment. That was all anyone needed to know” (58). Chapter 2, “Understanding Historical Evidence: Josephus’ Judean War in Context,” situates Josephus’s War as a work of Roman literary art, warning against the modern temptation to approach it as a trove of data: “It should now be clear why [Josephus’s] literary effort could never be reliable for us. We might as well ask whether a song or a mountain is reliable… [The modern] longing for safe, unskewed data is not only a mirage but a recipe for misery. A realistic approach to Josephus’ work is far more interesting” (136). Here Mason also briefly but efficiently theorises the concept of history: “I shall use history to mean simply the investigation of the human past” (69). Chapter 3, “Parthian Saviours, Sieges, and Morale: Ancient Warfare in Human Perspective,” explicates a number of unspectacular but nonetheless important factors in the conduct of the war on both sides. Mason writes, “Rome’s legions have acquired the mystique of an unstoppable machine driven by a cool, purely military discipline, whereas Jewish-Judaean rebels appear in film (Ben-Hur, Life of Brian) as motivated by wide-eyed, religious-nationalist fervour. On both sides, we easily forget the human conditions that affected both and their largely shared values” (138), namely: pragmatism regarding loss of life and potential strategic gains, the hope or fear of Parthian intervention, the awarding of military commands to men of high status but no competence, the high rate of infectious disease in military camps, and the psychological appeal of desertion, inter alia. The longer Part II, “Investigations,” effectively comprises Mason’s history of the war as such. It is organised as a series of topical studies rather than a march through the war year by year, but it manages pretty well to cover the waterfront. In chapter 4, “Why Did They Do It? Antecedents, Circumstances, and ‘Causes’ of the Revolt,” Mason roundly rejects the old idea that the Judaeans were uniquely intolerant of Roman rule and so inevitably rose up. He writes, “The beginnings of this war had little to do with long-term antagonism… Judaea’s real, and finally existential threats, were local” (200). And again, “The Judaean War was not the revolt of a ‘province of Judaea’ against Roman rule. Judaea was not a province but the ethnic zone around world-famous Jerusalem. Its people and elite found themselves in the autumn of 66 awaiting Roman retribution because they had recently acted against the local apparatus of administration—Caesarea, its resident prefect, and the auxiliary force” (278). Chapter 5, “Nero’s War I: The Blunder of Cestius Gallus?” analyses the particular event that kindled the war: the expedition of the legate C. Cestius Gallus to Jerusalem in autumn of 66 C.E. Against the received view that Cestius found Judaea already in revolt and went to Jerusalem to crush it, Mason argues, “[It is] unlikely that he ever imagined Jerusalem or Judaeans to be in revolt against him or Rome. Certainly he seems not [to] have known about a province of Judaea or an independent rebel state. Nor could he have intended his reluctant expedition… to culminate in an assault on Jerusalem” (327). Ironically, Mason suggests, Cestius’s expedition to Jerusalem created new enemies of Rome among Judaeans who had not hitherto been thus inclined. Chapter 6, “Nero’s War II: Flavians in Galilee,” poses the question why Vespasian spent the year 67 fighting in Galilee. Against the common view, read off the surface of Josephus, that his Galilean campaign was phase one of a grand plan to crush a nation-wide revolt, Mason argues, “[War book 3] is simply not the story of a ‘Judaean-Roman war in Galilee,’ much less of Vespasian’s scorched- earth destruction en route to Jerusalem. The Roman general has no expectation of fighting after Sepphoris’ pre-emptive submission, which leaves his confident army with only patrols, confidence-building exercises, [and so on]” (377). At any number of points, events could have unfolded very differently than they did. But Josephus, looking back after the war’s end, invests these early episodes in Galilee—especially the ones in which he himself had participated—with world-historical importance. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 of the “Investigations” examine the Romans campaigns at Jerusalem and in the Judaean desert. In chapter 7, “Jerusalem I: Josephus and the Education of Titus,” Mason treats the events recounted in War books 4-6, reconstructing what happened in and around Jerusalem from 68 to 70. Taking a cue from Josephus’s emphasis on intra-Judaean stasis—and noting how Josephus parallels this to the Roman civil war of 69—Mason characterizes the several parties who occupied Jerusalem during the siege: the partisans of Simon bar Giora, those of John of Gischala, priestly Zelotai (“Disciples” in Mason’s rendering), Adiabenians, and Idumeans. As most of these were not native Jerusalemites but wartime refugees, Mason suggests that perhaps “Jerusalem itself would have capitulated, had it not been for the large numbers of desperate men who fled to Jerusalem from elsewhere and who could not surrender” (465). Chapter 8, “Jerusalem II: Coins, Councils, Constructions,” is a companion-piece to chapter 7. It adduces evidence for the siege of Jerusalem from sources other than Josephus, in particular, first, the numerous and diverse wartime coins excavated in Jerusalem and, second, the account of Titus’s council of war related by Sulpicius Severus. An especial burden of the chapter is to account for Titus’s decision to raze the the temple, about which Mason concludes, “There seems no reason to imagine that Titus had a policy concerning the city or temple, any more than Vespasian had one in 68… Titus was happy to exploit what had happened, as part of the myth of Flavian origins. But he could not have planned it” (513). Finally, chapter 9, “A Tale of Two Eleazars: Machaerus and Masada,” treats the sieges of the Judaean desert strongholds, some three years after Titus’s victory in Jerusalem, as related in War book 7. Masada, Mason argues, was not the last stand of the most heroic Judaean rebels, but a refugee camp for families which operated on its own bandit economy and so, from a Roman perspective, needed eventually to be shuttered. Reasoning from Josephus’s account, Mason argues, “Masada’s wartime Judaean inhabitants [were] family men seeking the security of the former royal refuge for their women and children. Fearing the bloody factionalism in Jerusalem… they remove themselves from the fray to this remote, fortified site… [hoping to] ride out the storm in security” (534). He finds corroboration in Ronny Reich’s account of the archaeology of Masada: “From 66 until the final siege, Masada was ‘a camp of displaced persons.’ It was not a ‘Zealot’ stronghold but rather a place for different kinds of refugees” (550). The book ends with 15 or so pages of “Conclusions,” which include a pithy statement of Mason’s realist and “human” account of the war: “The Judaean-Roman conflict broke out… not from anti-Roman ideas or dreams among the uniquely favoured Judaean population, but from the sort of thing that more commonly drives nations to arms: injury, threats of more injury, perceived helplessness, the closure of avenues of redress, and ultimately the concern for survival” (584). Mason’s resolutely realist account of the war is in most respects a triumph. Given the disproportionately elaborate mythology that has grown up around this war (“the greatest not only of the wars of our own time, but well nigh of all that ever broke out between cities or nations” [Josephus, War 1.1]), the task of writing its history requires not only a thorough command of the mass of relevant evidence but also a tough-minded demythologizing programme, both of which Mason amply provides. There is one theme, however, on which, it seems to me, Mason mishandles his own method, namely, the religion of the Judaeans: their god, temple, priests, oracles, and so on. On the Judaean side of the conflict, Mason treats religion as an anomaly: extreme, irrational, and unusual, not to be invoked by way of explanation if simpler, more realist, more human factors (e.g., ambition, self-preservation) are on offer, as they always are. But I would argue that for the Jews, as for ancient peoples generally (though not for us moderns), nothing was more realist or more human than religion. For just this reason, they often expressed other, ostensibly more realist ideas in the language of religion. By their lights, military intervention by the Parthians was not a different, simpler outcome than salvation by a god. The former just was the latter. Interestingly, on the Roman side, Mason does allow for the tremendous importance of gods, priests, and sacrifices as social facts (see 139-155, especially 152-153). But he does not extend this courtesy to the Judaeans, perhaps on the assumption that their god has been given rather too much credit for the war already (see 199). Mason’s History of the Jewish War is, as I have said, a triumph. The physical artefact is a handsome and substantial hardback, well suited for a magisterial volume such as this. The back matter includes an appendix on distance measurements in Josephus’s  Warand thorough indices of modern authors, historical persons, groups, and places, and ancient texts, inscriptions, and papyri. The main text is complemented by some 40 high-quality illustrations (maps, coins, inscriptions, archaeological site plans, landscape photographs, and the like) and four tables. There are a few inconsistences of style, for instance, the occasional “Judean” for “Judaean.” I spotted only a very few typos, including the running page header for chapter 2, which reads “in Contest” for “in Context” throughout. On the whole, however, the Press’s production values live up to contents of the book. This is as it should be, since it seems clear to the present reviewer, at least, that Mason’s Jewish War is now the definitive treatment of the subject.  Read comments on this review or add a comment on the BMCR blog Home Read Latest Archives BMCR Blog About BMCR Review for BMCR Commentaries Support BMCR

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Crusaders vs. Islam

Morton, Nicholas. Encountering Islam on the First Crusade. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xi, 319. $99.99. ISBN: 978-1-107-15689-0.

  Reviewed by Niall Christie
       Langara College
       niallchristie@yahoo.com


The question of the motives and attitudes of the participants in the First Crusade has increasingly engaged scholars in recent decades, and has been addressed in a number of important studies, of which the best known are probably the late lamented Jonathan Riley-Smith's The First Crusaders (1997) and The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (1986). One might be tempted, then, to ask why we need another book on this topic. Nicholas Morton's Encountering Islam on the First Crusade is an outstanding response to this question, demonstrating that there is still much to be discussed and that the evidence of the sources can still be understood in new and fascinating ways. As a result, his book is essential reading for those interested in what the first crusaders thought of their enemies.

In the introduction to the book, Morton lays out the aim of his work: to explore how the first crusaders understood the peoples of the Levant, and how they drew on their own experiences and the resources that were available to them in order to do so. As the discussion proceeds it becomes clear that his primary focus will be on the Franks' relations with the Turks, who had recently established themselves as the ruling powers in much of the Levantine region, and who feature most prominently in the western crusading sources. Morton then goes on to survey previous scholarship on the topic, before laying out his terminology and methodologies. One particularly noteworthy part of the latter is his consideration of how far western European sources' depictions of the east can be trusted; while remaining suitably cautious, Morton suggests that we need to avoid the easy temptation to be over-skeptical of accounts that seem on the surface to be fanciful, when in fact deeper exploration of other sources from the time can reveal kernels of unexpected truths hidden in these accounts.

Five chapters follow. The first, "Predicates," surveys European experiences of Muslims before the crusading period, noting, in particular, that unlike other threats such as the Vikings or Magyars, which eventually receded, the Muslims continued to pose a danger, becoming the "normative' enemy" (41) for Europeans. This state of affairs conditioned Europeans' views of Muslims, as can be seen in both theological works of clerics and the epic and chanson literature that circulated among the knightly class. One particularly interesting point that Morton notes is that European writers of the time drew a distinction between Islam and Muslims, i.e. the religion and its adherents; Muslims were seen as mistakenly following a false religion rather than inherently evil themselves, which meant that they were capable of redemption if only they turned to the true faith. This opened up the possibility for tolerance and co-operation between Franks and Muslims even before the onset of the crusades.

Chapter 2, "The Launch of the First Crusade," begins with the valuable observation that when Urban II launched the First Crusade, he "did the same thing that rulers across the Near East and Southern Asia (whether Islamic, Hindu, or Christian) had been doing for over a century: he launched a campaign against the Turks" (67). Morton then goes on to place the threat that the Turks posed to the Byzantine Empire within the wider context of the various regions into which they ventured, noting that the First Crusade was simply the latest (and possibly most successful) response that was made to their activities. This then leads Morton into an analysis of the motives of both Pope Urban and the crusaders, as it is presented in the various accounts of Pope Urban's sermon at Clermont and other sources. He concludes that the primary motivator for the crusaders seems to have been the desire to reach Jerusalem, with fighting the Turks, about whom the participants' knowledge was clearly sparse, having been a secondary incentive and an objective that was probably more important to the pope than it was to his listeners.

In chapter 3, "The First Crusade and the Conquest of Jerusalem," we accompany the crusaders on their expedition, as Morton leads us through a detailed examination of the impressions that the crusaders had of their enemies now that they were encountering them face-to-face; these include not only military aspects, but also crusader impressions of the Turks' hierarchies, culture and religion. Nor does Morton neglect the Arab Muslims whom the crusaders encountered, and he also offers some interesting thoughts on the wars between the (Sunni) Saljuqs and the (Shi'ite) Fatimids, suggesting that the Frankish sources at least give the impression that the root of the Saljuq-Fatimid conflict may have been ethnic rather than religious; this is an intriguing suggestion that would bear further investigation, especially in the Arabic sources from the period. Morton then goes on to consider how far the Muslims were important to the crusaders, rejecting the binary model of "good" crusaders vs. "bad" Muslims, and instead noting that the Muslims are often presented as instruments of God intended to test the crusaders' faith and punish them for misdeeds. (Interestingly, the crusaders occupy a similar position in some of the Muslim sources from the period.) This allows Morton to establish a new binary, in that the "other" for the crusaders was actually God, as a positive ideal to which they aspired. In the meantime, in the sources we see again the distinction between Islam and Muslims, with the crusaders generally hating Islam but not the Muslims. Thus in the wake of the massacre at Jerusalem (which Morton also discusses), the Franks were able to establish peaceful relations with some of their foes, while we see the establishment of another binary in the sources, those who follow the will of God and those who do not, a definition that transcends the religious boundaries and represents the wider battle of God vs. the Devil.

Chapter 4, "Aftermath," examines the impressions that the writers of the Frankish sources formed of non-Christians in the wake of the conquest of Jerusalem, as part of their wider attempt to understand what had just happened. Since most of the authors were not direct participants in the crusade, or making wide use of accounts by crusaders, we do not witness a sudden improvement in their knowledge of Muslims. Instead, their descriptions of the non-Christian enemy are often filtered through a mixture of Biblical perspectives and Classical sources, leavened with some Byzantine sources and some occasional details that do seem to come from accounts of participants in the crusade, resulting in images that are highly variable and for the most part inaccurate. Meanwhile, their views of the East itself are multifaceted, presenting us with a place that they saw as simultaneously a frontier but also the centre of their faith, both foreign and yet also familiar.

With chapter 5, "The Impact of the Crusade," Morton considers the question of whether or not the First Crusade let to a worsening of relations between the Muslim world and Christian Europe. He examines a variety of sources, especially those written away from the immediate frontiers between Muslims and Christians; this includes taking a new approach drawn from historians of the modern period, quantifying references to Muslims (effectively "column inches") in (mostly ecclesiastical) letter collections. On the basis of his sources he concludes that while the First Crusade created a short period of interest among the western writers in Muslims and the events in the East, soon after they returned to their own, more locally-focused concerns, and interest was only taken again on those occasions when the Muslims posed an immediate threat to Christian control of Jerusalem. Probably the greatest impact the First Crusade had was on chanson literature, which saw a popularization of the theme of wars between Muslims and Christians. However, it did not lead to a wider escalation of tensions between Christian Europe and the Muslim states of the eastern Mediterranean.

In his conclusion, Morton sums up what his evidence reveals, noting that the main conflict in western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean was not seen as being between Muslims and Christians, but rather between God and the Devil, a struggle in which the Muslims were sometimes minor participants. Instead, the greatest enemy that Christians in general and the crusaders in particular faced was themselves, with the fate of their souls being the issue at stake. In the process, Morton refutes the Huntingtonian "clash of civilizations" paradigm, showing that the attitudes of the crusaders to their Muslim enemies were in fact extremely complex, leaving scope for not only conflict but also tolerance and even co-operation. Thus any view of the First Crusade as initiating a clash of civilizations reflects the views and agendas of those writing about the period, rather than the realities of the period itself.

In this book Morton's approach to his research is methodical and meticulous, making careful and comprehensive use of the sources, but without being unadventurous or plodding. At times his writing includes positively entertaining turns of phrase ("Thus, the chansons resemble works of theology in the same way that a sledge hammer resembles a surgical laser" [59]), and he employs new and innovative approaches to his source material. The result is a thorough, wide-ranging, incisive study that opens up new lines of research, poses thought-provoking challenges to conventional wisdom, and offers novel and convincing interpretations of the source material. I recommend it highly to students and scholars of the crusades, as well as interested laypersons.
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Learning from Mistakes

Learning

Short History of NATO

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Dylan Cash Sessions

Studio Outtakes

One Too Many Mornings

Big River

When the young Dylan arrived on the scene in 1962, Cash was impressed.

“I was deeply into folk music in the early 1960s,” he wrote in Cash: The Autobiography, “both the authentic songs from various periods and areas of American life and the new ‘folk revival’ songs of the time, so I took note of Bob Dylan as soon as the Bob Dylan album came out in early ’62 and listened almost constantly to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan in ’63. I had a portable record player I’d take along on the road, and I’d put on Freewheelin’ backstage, then go out and do my show, then listen again as soon as I came off.”

Cash wrote the young Dylan a fan letter, and they began corresponding. When they met at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, Cash gave Dylan his guitar as a gesture of respect and admiration. Five years later, when Dylan was in Nashville recording his ninth studio album, Cash was recording in the studio next door. He decided to drop in. On February 17 and 18, 1969, Cash and Dylan recorded more than a dozen duets. Only one of them, a version of Dylan’s “Girl From the North Country,” made it onto the album, Nashville Skyline. The others were never officially released, but have long been circulating as bootlegs. In the video above, Dylan and Cash work on one of two versions they made of “One Too Many Mornings,” a song originally recorded by Dylan in 1964 for The Times They Are a-Changin’. The outtakes Dylan and Cash recorded together are all scattered around Youtube. One Youtuber posted a compilation back in 2013.

A few weeks after the release of Nashville Skyline, Dylan and Cash performed “Girl From the North Country” on The Johnny Cash Show. It was taped on May 1, 1969 at the Ryman Auditorium in downtown Nashville. A rough video clip (around the 30 minute mark) captures the moment. Despite Dylan’s reported nervousness, the performance was well-received. “I didn’t feel anything about it,” Cash said later. “But everybody said it was the most magnetic, powerful thing they ever heard in their life. They were just raving about electricity and magnetism. And all I did was just sit there hitting G chords.”

Hillsdale: China & Hong Kong

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