Memorial Day Posts

Randall Stephens

While I'm at an American Studies conference in Sweden, the blog will be taking a short break.  In the meantime, have a look at this two past posts that deal with Memorial Day:

Heather Cox Richardson, "A Thank You to Our Troops—All of Them—on this Memorial Day," May 30, 2011

Memorial Day came out of the Decoration Days held after the Civil War. This seems like a logical thing for me, a scholar of nineteenth century America, to write about today.

Instead, though, I’d like to talk about a group of soldiers that often gets forgotten when we remember our troops. I mean the WACs, the more than 150,000 women who served in the U.S. Army during World War II.>>>

Randall Stephens, "The History of Memorial Day and the National World War One Museum, Kansas City," May 23, 2009

As Americans cram their faces with hot dogs and swill cheap beer, many will also reflect on the heroic efforts of countless men and women who have served their country over the years. Parades, concerts, and ceremonies across Boston will turn our attention to those who fought and died for their country. The National memorial Day Concert in Washington, D.C., will draw a massive crowd of observers in the capitol and TV viewers.>>>

Size Matters?

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

This chart initiated a round of chest thumping by academic historians. Apparently we historians write the longest dissertations. Now, according to this chart, philosophers and classicists do not write dissertations,

"Length of the average dissertation," from FlowData.

when in fact they do. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume the chart is correct. What does it tell us about historians? Either we do more research than scholars in any other field (unlikely from my interdisciplinary vantage point), or we are less able to articulate our findings in a pithy manner than our colleagues in other departments on campus.

When I made a snide remark about length on Facebook, my historian friends jumped to the defense of 325 page dissertations as the necessary length for a monograph. Other fields publish articles rather than books. Thus, the argument went, they can get away with less. This perplexed me. A doctoral dissertation no matter the field should demonstrate an original contribution to knowledge, right? 

Staying Positive

Craig Gallagher*
 

It's likely that if you have already applied and been accepted to graduate school to study history, you’ve heard it at least once. You’ll hear it plenty more times before you get that masters or Ph.D. in history you’re putting aside a lot of time and/or money to acquire.

In fact, if your decision to continue your education isn’t just about putting off the working world for a few years and is driven by a desire to change direction and start a new career, you’ll hear it so often that it will feel as though everyone thinks you’re running away to join the circus instead of pursuing another professional qualification.

I’m talking, of course, about that constant refrain that hangs over graduate school like a surly cloud at the moment: “There are no jobs!” Now, I don’t wish to debunk this statement with a much rosier picture of the job market than has hitherto been offered, because I can’t do that.

Not when respected publications like the Atlantic and the Chronicle of Higher Education have lined up to inform us that even seeking a degree in the sciences offers little economic advantage anymore in these straitened times, adding as an afterthought that the outlook for those who hold humanities degrees is downright bleak.

What I suggest, however, is that staying positive in the face of such bleak prospects is essential. 
 

The Greatest Migration of All

Eric B. Schultz

Ask an American historian to define the Great Migration and you’ll hear one of several answers.  Most will describe the movement of 6 million African Americans from the rural South who headed north and west, from

A Jack Delano photo of migrants
heading north from Florida, 1940.

World War I through 1970, seeking economic opportunity and relief from Jim Crow laws. This is the story so beautifully told in Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Warmth of Other Suns.

There’s another group of historians who might describe the Great Migration as the 20,000 English men, women, and children who crossed the Atlantic between 1620 and 1640, seeking opportunity and relief in New England. These are the Mayflower names, the families that delight and provide such rich insights for genealogists.  Since 1988 the New England Historic Genealogical Society has sponsored the Great Migration Study Project, scheduled for completion in 2016.

In his monumental What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 Daniel Walker Howe describes “one of the greatest migrations in America,” when Andrew Jackson encouraged white squatters from the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee to move onto 14 million acres expropriated from the Creeks. By 1819 this flood of humanity had established Mississippi and Alabama. “The Alabama fever rages here with great violence,” one North Carolina farmer moaned, “and has carried off vast numbers of our citizens.” Never, Howe remarks, had so large a territory been settled so rapidly—though the peopling of the Old Northwest Territory was not far behind.

Study of Past Sparks Debate about the Future in the UK

Randall Stephens

Readers might find interesting this recent article in the Guardian about history battles.   On the heels of the Niall Ferguson scandal, Labour Education spokesman and historian Tristram Hunt writes: "From curriculum rows to Niall Ferguson's remarks on Keynes, our past is the fuel for debate about th

Read the above at the BBC

e future." ("History is where the great battles of public life are now being fought," Guardian, May 12, 2013).

Here's a brief excerpt:

For as [Niall] Ferguson has discovered to his cost, history enjoys a uniquely controversial place within British public life. "There is no part of the national curriculum so likely to prove an ideological battleground for contending armies as history," complained an embattled Michael Gove in a speech last week. "There may, for all I know, be rival Whig and Marxist schools fighting a war of interpretation in chemistry or food technology but their partisans don't tend to command much column space in the broadsheets."

Even if academic historians might not like it, politicians are right to involve themselves in the curriculum debate. The importance of history in the shaping of citizenship, developing national identity and exploring the ties that bind in our increasingly disparate, multicultural society demands a democratic input. The problem is that too many of the progressive partisans we need in this struggle are missing from the field.

How different it all was 50 years ago this summer when EP Thompson published The Making of the English Working Class , his seminal account of British social history during the Industrial Revolution. "I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand loom weaver, the 'utopian' artist ... from the condescension of posterity," he wrote.>>>

Summer Reading: Understanding Historical Theory (Quickly)

Heather Cox Richardson

As the school year winds to a close, incoming graduate students have been asking me what they should read to prepare for the fall. That question has an obvious answer, and the answer brings up what strikes me as an oddity in the way we handle graduate education in history.

Boston Public Library.
Photo by Randall Stephens.

It has always seemed to me bizarre that we treat graduate education as if it has little connection to undergraduate studies. A brilliant undergrad will understand facts, argument, and, with luck, historiography, as well as how to write. But one of the first things that brilliant undergrad will do in graduate school is to take a seminar in historical theory, where s/he’s supposed to converse intelligently about historical theories of which s/he has never heard. First year grad students are lost and frightened. (Except for that One Guy who throws around Foucault's name like they're long-time tennis partners.)

My antidote to that deer-in-the-headlights experience of first-year graduate school in history is Marnie Hughes-Warrington’s book, Fifty Key Thinkers on History. It lays out the major arguments of Tacitus, Natalie Zemon Davis, E P. Thompson, Michel Foucault, Marc Bloch, and so on, in a few pages each. It identifies both the major works of each historian, and how the argument of those works fits into the historiography of their era.

It's not perfect (of course), but it's a godsend for showing students the lay of the land so they can then absorb individual hills. This book lays out major theoretical arguments in history and situates them in their historical moment. It opens up the world of historical theory so students can then examine it in more detail, piece by piece.

This book helps to ease the transition from undergraduate course work to graduate studies. If you are looking for something to give you a leg up in your first year of graduate school, this is your first assignment.

A New Old Look at Mother's Day

The following is a reposting of a May 6, 2011 piece.

Heather Cox Richardson

While I’m as happy as the next mom to get chocolate on Mother’s Day—or on any other day, frankly—I can’t help pointing out that “Mother’s Day,” did not originate as a way to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s empowerment and social reform in the late nineteenth century. Rather than starting in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother, it was an impassioned effort by women in the late nineteenth century to end war forever.

The Civil War years taught naïve Americans what carnage meant in a modern war. Soldiers who had marched jauntily off to war discovered that long-range weapons turned the inaccurate volleys of the past into murderous waves of death. Their romantic notions of brave battle and either a victorious return or a clean end died even before the men did. They saw their friends trampled into blood-soaked mud, piled like cordwood in ditches, turned into emaciated corpses after dysentery had drained their lives away.

A Century of New York City Photographs

Heather Cox Richardson

The New York City Municipal Archives has put on-line more than 800,000 images. This is simply an astonishing collection. A must for anyone who studies New York City and the U.S. in general.

Click here for more

The Chinese Exclusion Act and American Economic Policy

Heather Cox Richardson

On May 6, 1882, President Chester Arthur signed into law theChinese Exclusion Act. This hotly contested law was the first in American history to prevent voluntary immigration to the United States. It was also the formal rejection of one of the founding principles of the Republican Party: that the immigration of workers to the U.S. was fundamental to the country’s strength.

An 1882 cartoon: "THE ONLY ONE BARRED OUT.
Enlightened American Statesman.--"We must
draw the line somewhere, you know."
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

Chinese immigration to America began with the Gold Rush. Its flood tide in 1849 coincided with the economic catastrophe left in China by the Opium Wars, and young Chinese men came to “Gold Mountain” to earn money to feed their families back home. Chinese miners did well financially in California, but quickly came under fire from native-born Americans, who first passed a “Foreign Miners’ Tax” targeting Chinese miners and then tried to prevent Chinese immigrants from testifying in court.

The attempts to create a legal caste system bothered budding Republicans like William Henry Seward and Abraham Lincoln. The idea that men were not equal in America, but rather could be divided by legal status, echoed the beliefs of the southern Democrats that Republicans opposed. When Republicans took over the national government, they stood firm against that theory. They not only ended slavery, but also promoted immigration. Immigrants, their 1864 platform declared: had “added so much to the wealth, development of resources and increase of power to the nation, the asylum of the oppressed of all nations,” that immigration “should be fostered and encouraged by a liberal and just policy.” Immigrants worked hard, made products that created value, and helped to fuel a rising spiral of economic prosperity. Republicans believed that the more immigrants a country attracted, the more its economy would expand.

Apologia pro Common Core

Steven Cromack

The 1983 report A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform stunned Americans. Schools across the country scrambled to design content standards and implement assessments.

Thirty-years later, history seems to be repeating itself. In an effort to improve K-12 education, forty-five states, the District of Columbia, and four territories have adopted and implemented the Common Core State Standards. As of 2013, Texas, Alaska, Virginia, Minnesota, and Nebraska are the five holdouts. Members of the academy and secondary school history teachers should be euphoric about the Common Core, which mandates that middle and high school students actually do the work of historians. This includes, but is not limited to, reading and analyzing primary and secondary sources, as well as synthesizing such information coherently in written assignments. The crux of the Common Core is 21st-century readiness, i.e., putting a verb in a sentence correctly, and being able to read not “good,” but well. 

The standards themselves are not revolutionary. In fact, they simply mandate that teachers actually teach reading and writing. The best teachers have always done this. But at least with the Standards, teachers will be held accountable if they choose to use PowerPoint and the textbook as their sole methods of instruction. 

Jamestown Cannibalism Roundup

Joseph Stromberg, "Starving Settlers in Jamestown Colony Resorted to Cannibalism New archaeological evidence and forensic analysis reveals that a 14-year-old girl was cannibalized in desperation," Smithsonian, May 1, 2013

The harsh winter of 1609 in Virginia’s Jamestown Colony forced residents to do the unthinkable. A recent excavation at the historic site discovered the carcasses of dogs, cats and horses consumed during the season commonly called the “Starving Time.” But a few other newly discovered bones in particular, though, tell a far more gruesome story: the dismemberment and cannibalization of a 14-year-old English girl.>>>

"Study reveals cannibalism in first US colony," AlJazeeraEnglish, May 1, 2013

 

 raherrmann, "Digging Out My Cannibal Girl Hat," The Junto blog, May 2, 2013

. . . . So, funny story. When I first submitted my article on cannibalism and the Starving Time at Jamestown to the William and Mary Quarterly, the piece strongly argued against any occurrence of cannibalism. When I got my readers’ reports back, Editor Chris Grasso pointed out that I didn’t really have the evidence to convincingly make that claim. He said that he’d accept the article only if I agreed to temper the argument—which was really fine with me because the main point of the essay was to ask why the stories of cannibalism mattered, not to argue for or against the existence of cannibalism in colonial Virginia.>>>

Jane O'Brien, "'Proof' Jamestown settlers turned to cannibalism," BBC News, May 1, 2013

Newly discovered human bones prove the first permanent English settlers in North America turned to cannibalism over the cruel winter of 1609-10, US researchers have said.

Scientists found unusual cuts consistent with butchering for meat on human bones dumped in a rubbish pit.>>>

"Starving Jamestown settlers turned to cannibalism," Telegraph, May 2, 2013

Scientists in the US have found the first solid archaeological evidence that some of the earliest colonists at Jamestown, Virginia, survived harsh conditions by resorting to cannibalism.

The Role of Money and Timing in Culture: The CIA and Abstract Expressionism

Heather Cox Richardson

I have heard talk of the exportation of modern American art during the Cold War as a means of proselytizing, but I’d never considered the mechanics of that propaganda. It seemed to me a wing of art theory, and while that’s a subject that always entertains me, it’s something for which I have very little brain space during the school year.

From Life magazine, August 8, 1949.

A recent article by Frances Stonor Saunders in The Independent explains exactly how the CIA promoted American abstract expressionism worldwide in the 1950s and 1960s. Their goal was to highlight the openness and experimentation possible in America’s capitalist system, contrasting it with the rigid conformity of state-censored socialist realism (some of which, to my Philistinic eye, seems worth looking at even if Soviet state officials thought so, too.) At first, the CIA tried to promote work by Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko at home. Quickly, though, abstract expressionism ran into the conformism of the 1950s. Even President Truman announced: “If that’s art, then I’m a Hottentot.”

So CIA operatives set up the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which salted art magazines praising abstract expressionism and sponsored exhibitions that toured European cities. They worked closely with Nelson Rockefeller, president of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (which his mother had founded), to showcase “free enterprise painting.” When museums eager to show the new art could not afford the cost of exhibitions, the CIA tapped American millionaires as ostensible sponsors, then provided the necessary money from government coffers. After World War II, abstract expressionism became the symbol of modern America.