MM #66: My 1876

Mabel puts her obsession with 1876 to bed

My mother recently pointed out to me that I’ll turn 80 the year that the United States of America turns 300. I’ve seen people post on Instagram that most empires have a life span of 250 years, so the likelihood that our country makes it to its next big birthday seems slim. Let’s just hope I can personally weather whatever storms are bound to be unleashed in the next five decades, even if the US cannot.

Perhaps it comes as no surprise that I’ve been preoccupied with the Centennial of 1876 during this Semiquincentennial of 2026. Would I be a Mandylion girl worth her weight in collectible quarters if I wasn’t? Certainly not, but it’s also not really been a choice. 1876 has had a weird way of following me around.

First, after Madeline and I had already decided that I would tackle 1876, and she 1776, for our podcast 1-800-1800, I received a book in the mail from my father: Centennial by Fergus M. Bordewich, fresh off the press. I asked him if he knew I was doing 1876—I must have told him, right? Nope. It was fate.

I started reading Bordewich’s book, which meant doing something I don’t love doing: reading two books at once. My other book? Daniel Deronda by George Eliot. Year of publication? 1876. I had picked up Eliot’s last novel at random months earlier. It had been staring at me for years, sitting on my shelf, enormous and unread. Her last novel is concerned with an interwoven cast of characters connected by their preoccupation with Jewishness, Jewish people, or the question of whether they might be Jewish. That it happened to have been published the year of the centennial was both happy accident and powerful omen.