Ken Burns's National Parks and John Muir

Randall Stephens

Ken Burns's new, epic documentary The National Parks runs a whopping 12 hours. Reviews have been largely positive. Hank Stuever weighs in at the Washington Post:

As usual, Burns is best with history and certain feeling for the past. Segments on the creation of the "park ranger" are suffused with nostalgic stoutheartedness -- the invention of a magnetic, enduring icon. Also as usual, Burns is worst at relating the then to the now. "The National Parks" lets its story peter out in the late 20th century, relying on home movies to get across what it's like for tens of millions of present-day visitors. Underneath its wonder, 'The National Parks' is really about how Americans learned (or failed to learn) proper stewardship of nature. Here, the acoustic guitar is really cranked up. Burns does that when he wants to indicate despair, guilt, importance.

John Muir features heavily in the first installment, which aired on Sunday. Muir's eccentric, novel life, and his significant impact on later environmentalists gets the full Burns treatment.

Donald Worster's essay "John Muir and the Religion of Nature" appeared in the the April 2009 issue of Historically Speaking (available on Project Muse here). "Muir did more than find a home in the mountains," writes Worster. "He also found there a new religion: the religion of nature. If he didn’t single-handedly invent it, he, more than anyone else, was responsible for propagating its message far and wide. Like Moses or Buddha, Martin Luther or Mary Baker Eddy, he was a prophet, a creative spiritual leader responding to his times with a vision of ultimate meaning and purpose."

In the same issue Donald Yerxa interviewed Worster on his Muir biography and spoke to Worster about some of the broader historical themes related to this fascinating American naturalist.

Donald A. Yerxa: What drew you to write a biography of John Muir? Donald

Worster: There was a mix of reasons, some personal, some scholarly. The scholarly side is that there has not been a full-blown comprehensive study of the man’s life since the 1940s. There have been a number of books on Muir, but their authors didn’t draw extensively on archives and letters, or they haven’t told the full scope of Muir’s life or tried to put it into the context of his times. For all of us in environmental history, John Muir is such a crucial figure. To know him and understand him better seemed to be an important contribution to that part of our history. On the personal side—and this does get personal—I suppose as one gets older, you start looking back on your life and thinking about where you’ve been and the turns in the road your life has taken and how you got to where you are, for good or bad. In other words, you get into a biographical mood. I had been drawn to a couple of people in recent years, John Wesley Powell and John Muir. Both of them grew up, as I did, in evangelical, Protestant, midwestern American families. Muir was even closer to my roots. I had a Scottish grandmother who was a Campbellite, part of the same religious tradition Muir grew up in. So I’ve always felt an affinity for him, and I wanted to understand his life along with my own life a little better.

New Issue of the Journal of the Historical Society

The September issue of the Journal of the Historical Society has hit the streets/shelves. Copies are available from Wiley. Subscribe to THS and receive four issues/year plus five issues of Historically Speaking. This new issue of the journal includes a forum on Vernon Burton's The Age of Lincoln, along with essays on abolitionism, Christian missions, and the history of medicine.

The Journal of the Historical Society, September 2009
Contents

"Introduction to the Forum on The Age of Lincoln"
Eric Arnesen

"Vernon Burton's The Age of Lincoln: A New Approach to Religion, Reform, and Abolitionism"
Bertram Wyatt-Brown

"'I Always Thought 'Dixie' One of the Best Tunes I Ever Heard': Lincoln's Claims on the South and the South's Claims on Lincoln"
Stephen Berry

"The Southern Abraham?"
David Moltke-Hansen

"Author's Response to the Southern Intellectual History Circle Forum on The Age of Lincoln"
Orville Vernon Burton

"Confronting Abolitionism: Bishop John England, American Catholicism, and Slavery"
Adam L. Tate

"They Twain Shall be One Flesh: The Courtship and Marriage of Thomas Hudson and Mary Aulick, Baptist Missionaries to China in the 1890s"
Keith Harper

"Reticence in Action: The Antisepsis Controversy"
Stewart Justman

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part IX: What is Historiography, Anyway?

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Editor's note: Professor Richardson gave a wonderful lecture at ENC last night. Her talk, "Wounded Knee: Gilded Age Economics and the Road to an American Massacre," opened a window on her forthcoming book--out in 2010 with Basic Books. Heather is a obviously a terrific teacher. (Was nice to see some of her advice about the history classroom shine through in person.) Her lecture led to some great discussion afterward.

What is Historiography, Anyway?

Heather Cox Richardson

Historiography is the study of the way historians have written about the past. It is NOT specifically about the particular events of the past, but rather about how historians have interpreted those events. For example: In the expansionist late nineteenth century, American historians tended to see the history of the American West as one of the triumph of civilization over savagery. During the 1930s, a time of depression and environmental disasters, historians saw western life as a product of environmental determinism. By 1970, in the midst of liberation movements, historians argued that Western history was about racism and the destruction of native peoples. During the 1980s—a time when western Republicans were revolting against Washington—historians looking at the American West focused on the role of the federal government there. In all these examples, historians were studying the same place and the same events, but they advanced very different theories about why things played out the way they did.

When I was in college, I found this an impossibly hard concept. It might have been easier if someone had explained to me why anyone bothers to study historiography. There are a number of reasons professional historians concern themselves with this seemingly odd pursuit.

First of all, the way someone interprets the past invariably says a great deal about the concerns of his or her own time. Studying historiography, then, often enables us to understand the past better.

People also study historiography because at different times, historians have advanced quite different theories about how and why things happen. Anyone interested in how human societies work will want to read a number of different theories and evaluate whether or not those theories seem to make sense in the present.

The study of historiography often helps to illuminate the work of other scholars. By understanding that one set of historians is responding to those that came before them, a reader can more clearly figure out what each scholarly group cared most about.

Historiography helps to sharpen critical thinking skills. How have different historians used the same evidence? Which is most convincing? Why? How can you learn from them to make your own arguments?

Generally, there are trends—at least loose ones—among historians of a certain era, making it possible to see “schools” of historical thought. Learning the skeletons of these “schools” can often speed up your work and make it more informed, enabling you to pull a book off the shelf and, by glancing at the author and the year in which it was written, to have a sense of the general theory the author will probably advance, along with the biases s/he will have.

It may be easier to understand the concept of historiography if you put the idea of it into a different context. Think of movie Westerns. Almost invariably, they deal with the Plains West from about 1860 to about 1900. But their interpretations of the events of those years are strikingly different. It’s impossible, for example, to image someone making Brokeback Mountain in 1950, or Stagecoach in the 1980s. Just as those movies tell us a great deal about both the eras in which they were made and the filmmaking theories under which they were filmed, so too can historiography tell us much that we need to know about society.

How Did People Sound?

Randall Stephens

John McWhorter meditates on how people actually spoke roughly 45 years ago in "Mad Men In a Good Place: How Did People Sound in 1963?" The New Republic blog, Sept 1, 2009. Easy, right? Yet . . . If we only took the lavish films of the 1930s, we'd assume that all Kansans in the Dirty Thirties sounded like Ivy League grads, untutored rubes, or cartoonish rakes. Or, if we took FDR's fireside chats as the standard, we'd think that Americans, or at least New Yorkers, spoke like well-healed sophisticates.

I like how McWhorter thinks about this by using Mad Men. "[T]he writers at Mad Men seem to have an idea that in the early sixties, people spoke more 'properly' than they do now. And they did, in formal and public settings. Until the late sixties, there was a sense that language was to be cossetted and dressed up in public in the same way that one wore deodorant. Think of the old gesture of clearing your throat before Making a Speech, the speech having been carefully written out and practiced, as opposed to today when we prefer looser 'talks.'" How individuals presented themselves in public and in private, on stage and off stage, matters here. McWhorter ventures, "Relevant here would be how a similarly minded American aristocrat

spoke in that same year of 1963. In recordings of John F. Kennedy speaking off-the-cuff with Robert McNamara in October of that year, not long after Pete and his wife did that nifty dance routine at that party, we hear someone talking the way, basically, we talk. Listen here."

I've always thought that Robert MacNeil's Story of English documentary captured some of the questions of language recovery extremely well. It's fun to use part of the Story for my American survey classes. Following accents from the English West Country to the American South, and tracing East Anglian dialects to New England gives students an "a-ha" moment. (See the embedded clip here, The Story of English episode 2 - The Mother Tongue - Part 6 / 7, which deals with Chaucer and branches of English.)

There was a story in the national and international news that made the rounds in 2008, which I don't know how I missed. What if we could hear how people spoke even before Thomas Edison invited his amazing phonograph in 1877? Well, we can now, sorta . . . "For more than a century," wrote Jody Rosen in the NYT, "since he captured the spoken words 'Mary had a little lamb' on a sheet of tinfoil, Thomas Edison has been considered the father of recorded sound. But researchers say they have unearthed a recording of the human voice, made by a little-known Frenchman, that predates Edison’s invention of the phonograph by nearly two decades." That other inventor was "Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison." Scott's surprisingly simple phonautogram captured the vibrations of speech with the scratches of a hog's hair onto lamp-blackened paper. But he had no way of playing back what had been recorded. And no one heard these recordings until 2008 and 2009. (They bring new meaning to Lo-Fi. Call it Paleo Lo-Fi.) New computer technology has helped researchers rebuild these antique recordings. You can listen to samples of the Scott's phonautogram experiments on the US News and World Report site.

Ten Years After

Randall Stephens

Does decadal history work? Is a ten-year span an arbitrary measurement? Can we learn anything substantial about an "era" by looking at, say, 1880-1890, or 1970-1980? I was asking some of these questions with the students in my America in the 1960s course the other day.

Ian Jack provides some insight on the issue in his LRB review of When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies by Andy Beckett:

The fashion is relatively recent for slicing up history into ten-year periods, each of them crudely flavoured and differently coloured, like a tube of wine gums. Growing up in Britain in the 1950s I never heard the past, however recent, specified by decade. There was ‘the war’ and ‘before the war’, and sometimes, when my parents were burrowing into their childhoods, ‘before the first war’. The 20th century lay stacked in broad layers of time: dark moorland where glistened an occasional white milestone marked with a year and an event. Sometimes the events were large and public. The General Strike happened in 1926 and Germany invaded Poland in 1939. But often they were small and private. In my own family, 1944 wasn’t remembered for D-Day but as ‘the summer we went along the Roman Wall on the tandem’.

When did ‘decade-ism’ – history as wine gums – start? The first decades that took a retrospective grip on the popular imagination were the 1890s and the 1920s. It may not be a coincidence that both have been characterised as fun-loving eras that chucked out staid manners and stale customs, whose social revolutionaries were libertines (Mae West) and gangsters (James Cagney). . . .

If the 1960s had a definable character, why couldn’t the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s?

A couple of years back we ran a forum on Stephen Whitfield's "How the Fifties Became the Sixties" in Historically Speaking. (Caveat lector: I had students in my class read the forum, which, I'm afraid, went way over their heads.) Whitfield walked the line between continuity and change and hashed out some of the major issues very well. Commentators who took part--Alice Echols, Terry Anderson, Paul Lyons, David Farber--made some adjustments to Whitfield's remarks and added other insights. Whitfield began his piece with this observation:

In the United States, the first decade and a half or so after the Second World War seemed to lock into place a certain set of conventions—from the broad acceptance of the New Deal to the older ideal of domesticity, from the virtue of the American way of life to its extension to grateful foreigners, from very moderate progress in race relations to moderate reverence for reverence itself. But with extremely few observers quite imagining—much less predicting—what was about to happen, suddenly the Sixties would blindside what nearly all Americans had taken for granted a decade earlier. At first no reversal in the entire span of American history had seemed more dramatic, no transvaluation of values more obvious. With the possible exception of the shift from the Twenties to the Thirties, no contrast seemed to be more striking. But the economic disaster that had become so exigent by the very end of 1929 makes it easier to explain the transformation from the rambunctious self-indulgence typified by Warren G. Harding’s pleasure in going out into the country to “bloviate” to the angst and collectivist fervor of the Great Depression. No such catastrophe can be summoned to explain how the Fifties became the Sixties. When that decade began, the old order hardly seemed to be undergoing a crisis. . . . (read the rest of the lead essay here along with Terry Anderson's comments.)

Richardson's Rules of Order, Part VIII: Plagiarism: Who Cares?

Heather Cox Richardson

This is not a discussion of what plagiarism is. When you entered your college or university, you most likely signed a document saying you understood plagiarism. If you don’t, there are places listed on the syllabus, the internet, and so on, to explain it. You can also ask us. Make sure you know. The punishments for plagiarism are severe.

This is a brief document about why professors care so much about plagiarism. Students sometimes see it simply as “copying,” a quick way to get through an assignment, and seem surprised that professors get so hot under the collar about it. Here’s why we do.

Ideas and words are how we make our living. You would not steal the plans for a new product from a technology company, or even a new car from a dealership. Stealing our words or ideas is no different than stealing a new product, and it’s much worse than stealing a car, which is simply an object. Our ideas, expressed in words, are the products of our hard work (and if you don’t think research and writing isn’t hard work, you try to write a 350-page book in the spare time that work and life allows you!), and also of our life experiences. Our minds and hearts both are in them, and they are the product we contribute to the world. To have someone steal and claim authorship of them is a profound injury, attacking both an individual author and the entire enterprise to which we’ve devoted our lives.

When you entered college, you indicated that you wanted to take part in the enterprise of scholarship. You are here to learn and to contribute your own ideas and skills to human knowledge. If you cheat, you are undermining that endeavor. You can think of it, perhaps, as a team sport. Everyone on a baseball team, for example, has different skill levels and different perspectives, but the players, coaches, and support staff all share the same goal of creating a successful team and all contribute to it in their own way. If someone is cheating, though, s/he is changing the rules of play and ruining the sport for everyone. In sports, cheating is not tolerated, and it isn’t in academia, either.

Aside from the larger implications of plagiarism, professors find it insulting on two levels. First of all, a student who engages in it is essentially saying: “Even though you’ve spent years and years studying this material in all its complexity, you’re still so stupid that you won’t notice if I, who have spent only half a semester on this topic, copy directly from Wikipedia or recycle someone else’s paper. Even if you should happen to notice, you’re too dumb to use the internet the same way I do, or to recognize an old paper, so you’ll never catch me.” Think about it. Would you play a tape of Eric Clapton to Derek Trucks and try to pass the guitar work off as your own? And if you did, how do you think Trucks would respond?

Plagiarism also insults our skills as teachers. The way a student talks, thinks, and writes is unique. We notice when a poor writer suddenly writes at a professional level, or when a student who has not been able to make sense of the material suddenly writes an A+ exam. Even worse, in some ways, are obvious instances of plagiarism like cut-and-pasted articles from the internet that are printed in different fonts. Once again, this shrieks that the student believes the teacher to be an absolute fool.

Finally, we hate plagiarism because resolving it steals large blocks of time from our good students and hands it to bad ones. It takes a good deal of time and mental energy to deal with a plagiarism case, time that could be going to writing letters of recommendation, editing chapters for thesis students, or helping an enthusiastic “C” student learn how to be an “A” student. Most of us are in this profession to teach, and we are quite willing to give our time, energy, and expertise to any student trying to learn. But to throw time away on someone who cares so little about a class that s/he is actually willing to cheat drives us crazy. That time calculation should matter to students as well as teachers. Plagiarism cases and the need for letters of recommendation often coincide at the end of a semester, and the strict timelines for pursuing plagiarism cases mean that plagiarism comes first. So, yes, it is possible that your recommender missed the deadline for your letter of recommendation because s/he was busy with a plagiarism case.

In my experience, most plagiarism comes either from panic or laziness. If you’re panicked, deal with it not by compounding the problem, but by approaching your teacher honestly, admitting you can’t complete the work by the assigned deadline, and asking to brainstorm about options. Occasionally, yes, you will get hammered by an unsympathetic professor who berates you and says there’s nothing s/he can do to help. But this is unusual. If you’ve been a decent student in the class, the chances are good s/he will work with you to get you through the assignment. And if the professor is unsympathetic, wouldn’t you rather deal with that reaction BEFORE s/he’s caught you for plagiarism? Plagiarism is unlikely to make him or her more reasonable to deal with, and it’s unlikely anyone else will help you out, either, once you have plagiarized. You will be in much worse trouble than you were when you panicked in the first place.

Laziness is also a poor excuse. Being too lazy to do the basic work for a class indicates that you think the class is a waste of time, which brings me back to the issue of appropriate behavior in a college classroom. You don’t have to care about the class, but don’t insult those who do. And if it’s such a waste of your time, why spend your not-insignificant college tuition on it? Take something else you DO like.

Know Your Archives: The Congregational Library

Randall Stephens

[Cross posted at Religion in American History.]

Henry Ward Beecher, America’s most well-known 19th-century preacher, was into books and libraries. “A library is not a luxury but one of the necessities of life,” he famously remarked. Fortunately for historians and all those interested in America’s past, Beecher’s Congregational denomination was also into books and libraries.

Last week I paid a visit to the impressive Congregational Library, located right next to the State House

on Beacon Hill in Boston. The Library has an extraordinary collection of historic documents, books, maps, and a range of material related to the congregational church, world cultures, and America. Established in 1853, with a modest 56 books, the Library now holds 225,000 items that chronicle the history of one of America’s oldest denominations.

The Library ranks with some of the more beautiful archives in the states. Its interior reminds me of a miniature version of the grand Jefferson reading room at the Library of Congress, with arched ceilings, paintings, and historic furnishings.

I spoke to Peggy Bendroth, executive director of the Library, about the work being done with the collection, the kinds of material housed there, and the role of the Library. (Bendroth’s publications on evangelicalism and her intimate knowledge of American Protestantism benefits those researchers who work at the Library.) I post here the video I made of my visit. Call it “Religion in American History Television.” (Real original title, I know.)

The Congregational Library has much to recommend it. I’ve been to plenty of cramped, denominational archives nestled in southern and midwestern industrial sections of suburbs. Most have hung ceilings, florescent lights, and church-like, indoor/outdoor carpet. So what, I’ve figured. I’m here to do research, not meditate on interior design. Yet, a nicely lit, pleasant environment does add something to the experience. (It’s the Boston Public Library appeal.)

Beyond that, there’s the issue of scope/time frame. The Congregational Library spans the ages as few other denominational archives or research libraries do. And since it’s been around for eons, it’s collected an avalanche of material. It all makes for a great experience for the casual visitor or the dedicated researcher.