I am sorry to hear that long-time Cornell history professor Michael Kammen passed away this weekend. He greatly influenced my understanding of American constitutional thought and Americans' obsession with our constitutional culture. Though I never had the pleasure of meeting him, I have been reading his work for decades, going back to A Machine That Would Go of Itself -- which is about the Constitution in popular thought. I first read this back in the constitution's bicentennial in 1987 as I was starting law school. And I have to say that while I enjoyed it I was more interested in doctrine than in what I saw as the more fuzzy thoughts of people outside of the judiciary. I have changed dramatically in my appreciation of the constitutional culture because I now see that so much of constitutional discussion took place outside of the judiciary -- and in many instances ideas first floated outside of the judiciary have became formal constitutional law. That is, as I matured I gained a real appreciation for Kammen's capcious understanding of the Constitution. It is a document and an idea, too, and the idea is in many ways as powerful as what is in writing. Of course over the past fifteen years the academy has taken a much deeper interest in constitutional ideas outside the Supreme Court.
And as I've grown older I've become much, much more interested in the importance of historical thought in popular culture (and legal culture), so I'm a huge fan of Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture. The cemetery scholar in me of course loves Digging Up the Dead: A History of Notable American Reburials. And then there is Kammen's lesser-known, outstanding Meadows of Memory: Images of Time and Tradition in American Art and Culture. I don't know as we will see another scholar of his breadth of vision and depth of knowledge in the culture of constitutionalism again for a very long time. I think we owe a big debt to Kammen for calling attention to the centrality of constitutional thought to American culture and for providing a model of how to talk about the it.
The image is of the grave of James Monroe at Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery. Monroe was reburied there in the antebellum era.
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