A Graveyard Smash

Randall Stephens

Forget the Pixie Sticks and Apples. (Like handing out grenades after the candy scares of yesteryear.) Make sure to have plenty of sealed candy bars, gum, blow pops, and the like. Tonight, hungry super-excited kids, with moms and dads in tow, will roam the streets outfitted as dogs, clowns, vampires, Richard Simmonses, zombies, and Abraham Lincoln zombies.

For a little on the history of the celebration. I quote here from a great read, Nicholas Rogers's, Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night (Oxford, 2002.):

"'Samhain and the Celtic Origins of Halloween': Halloween is commonly thought to have pagan origins, even though its etymology is Christian. Halloween is, quite literally, the popular derivative of All Hallow Even, or the eve of All Saints' Day (1 November). Taken together with All Souls' Day, which falls on 2 November, it is a time assigned in the Christian calendar for honoring the saints and the newly departed. . . .

In marking the onset of winter, Samhain was closely associated with darkness and the supernatural. In Celtic lore, winter was the dark time of the year when 'nature is asleep, summer has returned to the underworld, and the earth is desolate and inhospitable. In Cornwall and Brittany, November was known as the dark or black month, the first of winter; in Scotland, it was called 'an Dudlachd' or 'gloom.' Samhain was a time of divine couplings and dark omens, a time when malignant birds emerged from the caves of Crogham to prey upon mankind, led by one monstrous three-headed vulture whose foul breath withered the crops" (Rogers 11, 20).

How we got from that enchanted view of the world and all its seasonal rituals to kids dressed as Mighty Morphin Power Rangers or teens decked out as their favorite character on Jersey Shore, is a fascinating, odd, winding tale of cultural history.

Naming Names and So-and-So the So-and-So

Randall Stephens

James Davidson's essay last month in the London Review of Books got me thinking about names. ("Flat-Nose, Stocky and Beautugly," LRB, 23 September 2010.) He spans over English history, coming away with nuggets like this: "Boys’ names remain less susceptible to fashion – Jack has been number one for many years now, while Olivia has had to contend for top spot with Emily, Jessica and Grace – and there remains a tendency towards the classics. But the classics have been redefined more classically."

The ancients, writes Davidson, had a real flare for descriptive, colorful names: "Ancient Greek names were much closer to those of pre-Conquest than post-Conquest England. Just as we translate Native American names such as Tashunka Witko (‘Crazy Horse’), Tatanka Iyotake (‘Sitting Bull’), Woqini (‘Hook Nose’) and Tashunka Kokipapi (‘Young Man Afraid of His Horses’), and even those of the ancient Maya (King ‘Jaguar Paw II’, ‘Smoking Frog’, now renamed ‘Fire Is Born’), so we could refer to famous Greeks as ‘He Who Loves Horses’ (Philip), ‘Masters (with) Horses’ (Hippocrates), ‘Flat-Nose’ (Simon), ‘Stocky’ (Plato), ‘Famed as Wise’ (Sophocles)."

It reminded me of some of the fun, bizarre, or just downright interesting names I've encountered in the American South. One spring some years back my wife and I were on an Appalachian work trip with our Episcopal church. We heard of a local with the mouth-full name: El Canaan Lonson Tonson Tiny Buster Dobson. I hope he had a nickname. (You can read about the kudzu-like profusion of Billy Bobs, Peggy Sues, and Bobbie Joes in Dixie in The New Encyclopedia of Southern Culture: Volume 5: Language, eds., Michael Montgomery and Ellen Johnson.)

Something as simple as a name can tell historians, linguists, and anthropologists interesting details about a nation, a people, or a family. What do the most popular names of our day say about society? Here are the 2009 winners courtesy of the Social Security Administration: Jacob, Isabella, Ethan, Emma, Michael, Olivia, Alexander, Sophia, William, Ava, Joshua, Emily, Daniel, Madison, Jayden, Abigail, Noah, Chloe, Anthony, Mia. Signs of a neoclassical revival? A renewed interest in history? With the exception of Mia and Jayden, these have the ring of the early-19th century.

Some memorable royal nicknames:

Peter the Great
Julian the Apostate
Sigurd Magnusson the Bad
Edward the Black Prince
Coloman the Bookish
Vlad III the Impaler
Charles VI the Mad
Halfdan of Romerike the Mild
Ethelred II the Unready
Eric VIII the Pagan
Pippin III the Short
Maria II the Good Mother
Ragnar Lodbrok Hairy Breeches
Olav III the Silent
Dmitry of Tver the Terrible Eyes
Arnulf III the Unlucky
Harald Hildetand Wartooth
Afonso II the Fat
Sweyn I Forkbeard
Henry I the Fowler
Fortun I the Monk
Edgar Ætheling the Outlaw

See more: Albert Romer Frey, Sobriquets and Nicknames (Boston, 1887).

History Films Roundup

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Detlef Siebert, "Historical Accuracy in Drama Documentaries," BBC, 15 October 2010

In most factual television programmes, dramatic reconstructions serve as backcloth - or 'wallpaper' in filmmakers' jargon - to illustrate interviews or narration. And some of the drama scenes in the BBC's six-part docu-drama series, 'Auschwitz - The Nazis and the Final Solution', are used in just this way. . . . The drama reconstructions of the BBC, however, had to be as close as possible to the historical reality. Any fictional elements or factual errors in the drama scenes would have compromised the integrity of the entire series. The historical accuracy of set design, cast and dialogue was therefore of greatest importance.>>>

Daniel Person, "New film chronicles history of bison and men," Bozeman Daily, 26 October 2010.

"Facing the Storm," a new documentary about bison being screened tonight at the Emerson Center for Arts and Culture, is nothing if not ambitious. The film sets out to document "the complete history of human relations with the largest land mammal on the continent.">>>

Alex von Tunzelmann, "The Duellists: it takes two to tangle," Guardian, 28 October 2010.

Ridley Scott's film about a pair of French officers who fight 17 head-to-heads in two decades is tense, true and very, very sharp Joseph Conrad's short story The Duel was based on the true story of two French officers, François Louis Fournier and Pierre Dupont. Fournier and Dupont engaged in 17 duels over two decades. In the film, as in Conrad's version, Fournier and Dupont's names are disguised as Feraud and d'Hubert.>>>

Jonathan Melville, "Film Review: Burke and Hare," Edinburgh Evening News, 28 October 2010.

OPENING with the ominous warning that "The events in this film are true, except the bits that are not," director John Landis' take on the story of Edinburgh's most notorious murderers, the eponymous Burke and Hare, arrives in cinemas just in time for Hallowe'en. Determined to assess the film's historical accuracy, I enlisted the help of Burke and Hare Murder Tour guide Stuart Nicoll, the man who took Landis on a trip around Edinburgh's Old Town in late 2009 as he scouted for locations.>>>

Black Confederates, the Internet, and the Teaching of History

Heather Cox Richardson

The recent flap over the Virginia grade school textbook that asserted thousands of African Americans fought for the Confederacy brings up a couple of issues of interest to history teachers (aside from the obvious historical issues of race and the Civil War).

First, it raises the question of why on earth any school system would buy a textbook written by someone without training in the subject and published by a non-academic press, but that’s about politics, not history, so I’ll skip that for now.

Another big question here, though, is the use of the internet for research. Anyone who teaches history today knows that students invariably turn to the web as their main source of information. That’s just what textbook author Joy Masoff—who has no training in history and is best known for her book Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty—said she had done to research the material for her textbook.

Just like Masoff, students have no idea whether what they find on the internet is true or false.

A good tool for teaching students about the perils of relying on internet sources is to show them these two photos, which happen to address the issue of black Confederate soldiers (and which almost certainly played a part in Masoff’s mistake).

In 2005, Jerome S. Handler, a senior scholar at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and Michael L. Tuite, Jr., the former director of the University of Virginia Library Digital Media Lab, examined an image of black Confederate soldiers widespread on the web and popular among neo-Confederates. They published their conclusions on the web as “Retouching History: The Modern Falsification of a Civil War Photograph.”

In their paper, they traced how the real photograph of black Union soldiers pictured above was scanned and digitally manipulated into the fake photograph of the “1st Louisiana Native Guard.” It’s a fascinating story.

I make it a point to talk the students through these photographs early in my Civil War history class, both to show them that they can’t believe everything they find on the internet, and to indicate just how aggressively modern politically-motivated organizations have advanced false information about the Civil War. Invariably, the students like the comparison of the photographs and the discussion of why someone would want to manipulate an image in this way.

And it does seem to have some effect on the degree to which they trust the internet.

So You Want to Go to Graduate School?

Randall Stephens

A big hat tip to Matt Sutton who passed along this hilariously bleak cartoon. It's a conversation between a college student and an English professor. "Humanities is under attack . . . You will begin to question the nature of your own existence."

King George II & III, Colonial News, and a Royal Autopsy

Randall Stephens

On October 25, 1760 George III became King of Great Britain. News traveled slow, of course, and New Englanders didn't know about George II's (b. 1683) death or their new monarch for weeks.

Just how slow did people and information cross the Atlantic? In 1750 the school master and organist Gottlieb Mittelberger made the voyage from England to Philadelphia. He later wrote: "When the ships have for the last time weighed their anchors near the city of Kaupp [Cowes] in Old England, the real misery begins with the long voyage. For from there the ships, unless they have good wind, must often sail 8, 9, 10 to 12 weeks before they reach Philadelphia. But even with the best wind the voyage lasts 7 weeks."* Sailing technology had greatly improved in the 18th century. Still, slow transatlantic journeys and poor roads hindered the speed of information for decades. (See the map showing travel times circa. 1800.)

So, finally, in late December Bostonians read of the King's demise in the Boston Post: "Saturday arrived here Capt Partridge in about 6 weeks from London by whom we have the melancholly News of the Death of the most high, most mighty, and most excellent Monarch, GEORGE the Second, King of Great Britain . . . Defender of the Faith . . . . GEORGE the Third was proclaimed KING. . ." ("Partridge; Weeks; London; News; Death; Monarch; George," Boston Post-Boy, December 29, 1760, 2.)

The British American loyalty to King and Country sometimes gets lost in our popular view of colonials as patriots in the making. But as Brendan McConville writes in his The King's Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688-1776, "British North Americans championed their British king with emotional intensity in print, during public political rites, and in private conversation" (9).

Yet, before Americans pulled out the bunting and uncorked bottles to celebrate their new King, they had a bit of morbid curiosity to satisfy. How did George II die?

Fortunately, newspaper editors, keen to print what the people wanted, had the scoop on the Royal Autopsy. The Boston Post relayed the news from London: "In obedience to the order transmitted to us by the Right Hon. Vice-Chamberlain, We the under-signed have this day opened and examined the body of his Majesty . . ." They found "all parts contained in a natural and healthy state, except only the surface of each kidney there were some hydrides, or watery bladders, which however, we determined could not have been at this time of any material consequence." The regal heart, though, did not look so well. Among other abnormalities, they observed "a rupture in the right venticle." ("London, November 4," Boston Post-Boy, December 29, 1760, 2.) (For what passed as medicine in that day, see the amusing film The Madness of King George. The physicians in the movie are a hoot!)

Certainly, the 18th century is culturally distant from us today. This past is definitely a foreign country. Today, we travel at breakneck speeds and communicate across space and time with ease. Still, reading newspaper accounts like the above, makes the celebrity mongering of today and news as infotainment seem not entirely new.

Developments in World History: A Roundup on Western Dominance, Lactose Tolerance, and Writing

Randall Stephens

Several provocative "big questions" essays recently appeared in full, on-line. These span over world history, east to west, and cover prehistory as well. I wonder how many other historians who read Ian Morris's, "Latitudes not Attitudes: How Geography Explains History," History Today, 20 October 2010, are wondering, as I am: Don't ideas matter?! Anyhow, his essay and these other two got the rusty gears in my head a'turnin'. (Hat tip to Arts & Letters Daily for the great culling work it does. Click image to enlarge this map of Asia in the 15th century.)

Ian Morris, "Latitudes not Attitudes: How Geography Explains History," History Today, 20 October 2010.

Explaining why the West rules calls for a different kind of history than usual, one stepping back from the details to see broader patterns, playing out over millennia on a global scale. . . .

You may have noticed that all the historical examples I have mentioned – Italy, Greece, Israel, India, China – lie in a narrow band of latitudes, roughly 20-35° north, stretching across the Old World. This is no accident.>>>

Matthias Schulz, "How Middle Eastern Milk Drinkers Conquered Europe," Speigel Online, 15 October 2010.

* At around 7000 BC, a mass migration of farmers began from the Middle East to Europe.
* These ancient farmers brought along domesticated cattle and pigs.
* There was no interbreeding between the intruders and the original population.

Mutated for Milk

The new settlers also had something of a miracle food at their disposal. They produced fresh milk, which, as a result of a genetic mutation, they were soon able to drink in large quantities. The result was that the population of farmers grew and grew.>>>

Geraldin Fabrikant, "Hunting for the Dawn of Writing, When Prehistory Became History," New York Times, 19 October 2010.

The new exhibition by the institute, part of the University of Chicago, is the first in the United States in 26 years to focus on comparative writing. It relies on advances in archaeologists’ knowledge to shed new light on the invention of scripted language and its subsequent evolution. . . .

To Christopher E. Woods, associate professor of Sumerology at the University of Chicago and the curator of the show, it was important to include examples from all four cultures because the goal of the exhibition was “to present and describe the four times in history when writing was invented from scratch.”>>>

History of the World in 100 Objects

Randall Stephens

For those who missed it, check out BBC Radio 4's "History of the World in 100 Objects." (The series ends this week.) I read about it in the TLS a few weeks back. The reviewer praised the audio exhibit for its elegant, almost cinematic qualities, something that stretched the radio format in amazing ways. Yesterday, the Guardian lauded host Neil MacGregor, who "wears his knowledge lightly. He manages to both charm and enthuse at the same time, a hard trick that, but at the core of each bite-sized podcastable talk is an ardent and contemporaneous message: civilisations do not so much clash as learn and borrow from each other. One picks up from where the other leaves off."

The program might work well in the classroom. (How often do we listen to audio, rather than watch film, with students? Once in a blue moon, I'll find a segment on NPR that fits into what we are going over, but otherwise, it's rare.) Here are a few bits from the series:

035 Head of Augustus, 21 May 2010, Listen, Duration: 15 mins

Head of Augustus, the first Roman emperor. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, looks at one of the world’s most famous rulers, whose powerful, God-like status is brilliantly enshrined in a 2000-year-old bronze head with striking eyes. He explores how Augustus dramatically enlarged the Roman Empire, establishing his image as one of its most familiar objects. The historian Susan Walker and the Mayor of London, Boris Johnson, help explain the power and methodology of Augustus.

057 Hedwig glass beaker, 22 Jun 2010, Listen, Duration: 15 mins

Glass beaker from central Europe probably made by a Muslim craftsman. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, examines a glass beaker made in Syria or Egypt at a time when Christians were warring with Muslims in the crusades. The glass became associated with the miracles of a Christian saint, Hedwig, who turned water into wine when it touched her lips. But how did Islamic glass reach Christian Europe during the Crusades?

088 North American buckskin map, 6 Oct 2010, Listen, Duration: 14 mins

Map of the area between the Mississippi and Ohio rivers. Neil MacGregor, Director of the British Museum, explores the differing attitudes towards land and living of Europeans and Native Americans in the 18th century. He looks at a buckskin map drawn up by a Native American as the British negotiated for land between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi. With contributions by cartographer Martin Lewis and historian David Edmunds.

Religious History at the American Academy of Religion Meeting, Atlanta, Oct 30-Nov 1, 2010

Randall Stephens

I paste below some of the history-related sessions at the 2010 AAR meeting. There are quite a few others, but this gives an idea of how history plays out at the meeting. The program is searchable here.

Saturday 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Location: Marriott Marquis - L405-406
Missionary Innovation: African-American Religion and the New South

Presiding
* Josef Sorett, Columbia University

Presenters
* Lerone Martin, Emory University
Selling to the Souls of Black Folk: Atlanta, the Phonograph, and the Transformation of American Religion and Culture, 1920–1941

* Elizabeth Jemison, Harvard University
Writing and Righting Race: Women’s Interracial Cooperation in the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church and Methodist Episcopal Church, South

* Brandi Hughes, University of Michigan
(En)Gendering the Trans-Nation: The Missionary Sojourns of Black Womanhood from Atlanta through Monrovia

* Brandon Winstead, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary
“We are Responsible to God”: Black Nazarene Women’s Theology of Evangelistic Responsibility and Its Relationship to Their Contributions to the Church of the Nazarene’s Gulf Central District, 1953–1969

Responding
* Paul Harvey, University of Colorado

Saturday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover E
Author Meets Critics: Thomas A. Tweed’s Crossing and Dwelling (Harvard University Press, 2008)

Presiding
* Daniel Ramírez, University of Michigan

Panelists
* Richard Callahan, University of Missouri
* Marie Marquardt, Agnes Scott College
* Grant Wacker, Duke University

Responding
* Thomas A. Tweed, University of Texas

Saturday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover FG
Defining Religious Freedom: Reading Tisa Wenger’s We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom (University of North Carolina Press, 2009)

Presiding
* Ines M. Talamantez, University of California, Santa Barbara

Panelists
* Quincy Newell, University of Wyoming
* Greg Johnson, University of Colorado
* Kenneth Mello, Southwestern University

Responding
* Tisa Wenger, Yale University

Saturday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover C
The Lutheran Tradition: New Theological and Global Perspectives
Presiding
* Kirsi Irmeli Stjerna, Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg

Presenters
* Farisani Elelwani, University of South Africa
The Challenges Facing Lutherans in South Africa

* John Reynolds, Union Theological Seminary
The Heart in Sixteenth Century Physiology and the Role of Luther’s Theology in the Life of the Believer

* Hans Schwarz, University of Regensburg
Martin Luther’s Reception in Korea

* Cecilia Nahnfeldt, Karlstad University, Sweden
Lutheran Vocation and Gender Relations

Saturday 4:00 PM to 6:30 PM
Location: Marriott Marquis - L507
Seminar on Religion in the American West

Presiding
* Jane Naomi Iwamura, University of Southern California

Presenters
* Travis Ross, University of Nevada, Reno
Sectionalism in California’s Religious Periodicals: Place in Religious Rhetoric

* Jonathan William Olson, Florida State University
“Not Merely Asiatic but Pagan”: Religion, Chinese Exclusion, and the American West

* Barry Joyce, University of Delaware
Creating an Axis Mundi in the American Southwest: Religion, Science, and the Sacred at the Chaco Culture National Historical Park

* Brett Hendrickson, Arizona State University
Mexican-American Religious Healing and the American Spiritual Marketplace

Responding
* Tisa Wenger, Yale University


Sunday 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM
Location: Hyatt Regency - Hanover AB
Keywords in the Study of North American Religion: Anthropomorphism, Agency, and Vernacular

Presiding
* Gary M. Laderman, Emory University

Presenters
* W. Clark Gilpin, University of Chicago
Anthropomorphism: Human Connection to a Universal Society

* Elizabeth Jemison, Harvard University
Writing Agency: Reconsidering Agency in the Study of American Religion

* Rachel Lindsey, Princeton University
The Light of the World: Vernacular Photography and American Religion, 1839–1910

Monday 9:00 AM to 11:30 AM
Location: Marriott Marquis - M101
The Future of Southern Religious History

Presiding
* Paul Harvey, University of Colorado

Panelists
* Alison Greene, Yale University
* Michael Pasquier, Louisiana State University
* Randall Stephens, Eastern Nazarene College
* Curtis Evans, University of Chicago
* Ted Ownby, University of Mississippi

Responding
* Lauren Winner, Duke University

Monday 1:00 PM to 3:30 PM
Location: Marriott Marquis - M103-104
How Has Orsi’s Madonna of 115th Street Affected the Way We Think about Religion?

Presiding
* David Harrington Watt, Temple University

Panelists
* Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University
* Stephen J. Stein, Indiana University
* Kathryn Lofton, Yale University
* Leigh E. Schmidt, Harvard University

Responding
* Robert Orsi, Northwestern University

Creating an Online Exhibit: History for the General Public

Morgan Hubbard

This guest post comes to us from Morgan Hubbard, a talented masters student in Public History at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Hubbard reflects on his creation of an on-line exhibit, which he launched “to explain the explosion of science fiction on the American literary scene in the first two decades of the cold war era.” He describes some of the challenges of doing history on the web and explains what worked best.

Presenting history can be as hard as all the research that comes before it. This seems to be especially true for web exhibits. How do we give readers enough structure so they won't get lost, but not so much that we overpower the web's ability to render history vividly and dynamically?

I recently did some research on American science fiction readers from 1945-1965, for a class Heather Cox Richardson taught last semester at UMass-Amherst called “Writing History for Popular Audiences.” The research was a breeze. The hard part, it turns out, was trying to present my findings in a web exhibit aimed at a non-specialist audience. The result is Uncertain Futures: Americans and Science Fiction in the Early Cold War Era; you can judge its worth for yourself. But I thought it would be worthwhile to write briefly about some of the ways I think we, as historians, can put the web to good use.

First, a web exhibit allows for layered content—think footnotes, but better. Text can link to other sites, or it can serve as a kind of inline footnote for extra content. I tried both with this exhibit. Good use of images, too, can give an exhibit a layered feel—I think the images in Uncertain Futures are crucial to the story, so I used a script to activate an optional slideshow of each page's images when a reader clicks on one of them. And, finally, sound makes history dramatic. I conducted an interview, a sort of oral history, with the founder of the UMass Science Fiction Society; that interview is embedded in the “Fans and Fandom” page, with a simple player.

Second, and more importantly, it seems intuitive that readers will interact differently—maybe in a nonlinear fashion—with web exhibits than with the traditional media of historical scholarship. Books have introductions, arguments that build sequentially, and tie-it-all-together conclusions . . . but the chances seem vanishingly small that readers of my exhibit will start at the beginning and then work methodically to the end. How to deal with this? I tried to provide as many “signposts” as I could, in the form of chapter subtitles. At the time I was going for cleverness, but in retrospect I should have made these subtitles much clearer. Ideally, subtitles—and the navigation panes at the top of every page—can provide readers with a map of the exhibit's narrative arc, from intro to conclusion, visible from anywhere in the exhibit.

There are some great resources available for researchers thinking about how to present history online. George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media has a suite of tools and publishing platforms, available for free. And the University of Maryland’s Public History Resource Center has some good criteria for evaluating history websites, and a lot of helpful website reviews. These are only two—there are plenty more. Whether the web will change traditional historical scholarship remains to be seen, but it seems clear that public history has already been altered—and for the better!—by the online world.

What Do Undergrads Know about History?

Randall Stephens

Some years back I taught an American history survey, 1877-present, at a Florida community college. In an exam one of the students wrote an essay in which he/she placed the American Civil War in the early 20th century. I was shocked. Was I that bad of a teacher? Did incoming students not know the basic chronology of American history? Was this student just particularly thick? Was the state of historical thinking worse than in previous generations?

Several years ago my colleague Joe Lucas interviewed Sam Wineburg in Historically Speaking. Wineburg, author of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past (Temple University Press, 2001), had been studying history education for some time. Has knowledge about the past declined among high school and college students? asked Lucas. "There is something almost comical about a group of adults wringing their hands, yearning for a time that never was," replied Wineburg about the supposed declension.

Regardless of whether students understand less about the past now than, say, they did in 1963, history professors are faced with a problem of figuring out just what a student does or does not know. (I've been thinking about organizing a Historically Speaking forum based around the question: "What Do Undergraduates Know about History?")

History professors enter the classroom every fall and spring, often wondering what they can assume their students know or don't know about history. Will the typical freshman have any knowledge of the basic chronology of western or American history? Do they have any ideas about what made the Roman Empire important? Would they know, approximately, when Rome thrived? (Perhaps they carry with them some general Sunday School knowledge about that or have seen Gladiator.)

What about American history? Would the typical student know who fought the U.S. in the war of 1812? What about the reasons for that war? Could an incoming major or non-major describe what was happening in the U.S. between 1877 and 1917? Could they say anything about what transpired in the American colonies between 1690 and 1740?

I've come to the conclusion that I should assume that most students know little upon entering the class on the first day. But, there are variables here. Depending on where one teaches, the students will know more or less. Perhaps those who scored higher on SATs and ACTs will also come pre-equipped with basic historical knowledge. Students who had good high school history experiences probably also fare better.

It helps to pause and think about this now and then. It's always wise to stop and meditate on your pupils' historical perspective before launching into that intricate lecture on the roots of 18th-century republicanism.

The It Gets Better Project

Heather Cox Richardson

I am fascinated by the It Gets Better Project, a video project started by Seattle writer Dan Savage, who decided to take a stand to stop the frightening rate of suicide by gay teenagers. Desperate to do something to save these endangered kids, he and his husband made a film assuring desperate teenagers that no matter how bad high school seemed with its taunts and

hatred, “it gets better.” They asked others to tell their own stories, also on video, to let students know they were not alone.

That first video has been followed by hundreds of others and has gotten widespread national attention, although the project itself is only weeks old.

The videos are touching and smart, and, I hope, comforting. The people who have made them assure LGBT high schoolers that their lives will get better. Eventually, the films promise, they can hope to have the wonderful lives the videographers enjoy.

But for a historian, the videos are also culturally fascinating. The ones I have watched—and this includes all those selected by Mr. Savage himself to be highlighted on his blog—have a very clear message aside from reassuring youngsters about their ability to survive the jungles of high school, although the second message appears to be an unconscious one.

The life the IGBP promises to young viewers is strikingly conventional. The videos promise college, and an excellent college experience at that. They promise fulfilling careers in a field in which the student excels. They promise supportive friends. And they promise marriage and children. Far from being the call to riot and revolution that opponents of gay rights might expect, these are calls to conventional middle-class respectability.

Those filming the IGBP videos reinforce their verbal message. They are uniformly articulate and smart—who else would record a video?—wealthy enough to have laptops with webcams, and technologically savvy enough to know how to use them and how to cut a clean video. They are also widely enough read to know of the IGBP.

The IGBP is designed to reassure LGBT children that they are valued and have a future, but it also seems to have within it an unconscious call to mold upwardly-mobile, family-oriented professionals. (A parodist has caught this with his own “It Gets Worse” video, purporting to be the story of an uneducated, single, poor, lonely assistant night manager of a Ladies Foot Locker who longs for the days of junior high school when he could make himself feel good by abusing gay students.)

This raises fascinating questions about social change. What effect it will have on a specific population to have such attractive role models calling its members to a wonderful life of education, professional jobs, stable marriages, and children? Would such calls work with different populations who perceive themselves as out of the mainstream of American society? To what extent are these sorts of videos capable of changing the lives of young LGBT people who view them? How will they change the attitudes of straight viewers? (The reaction of the Fort Worth City Councilors to the IGBP video of Joel Burns suggests that observers find the personal appeals in the IGBP profoundly moving in a way they may not find abstract questions of gay rights.)

There is much concern over videos that recruit terrorists. But if it is also possible to use the internet to move individuals for other ends, that also has the potential to change the world.

This revolution is indeed being televised . . . or at least podcast. How it plays out is of great interest to scholars of social movements, as well as to American society.

"Kids, what's the Matter with Kids Today"

Randall Stephens

A fruitful discussion this past week in the NYT's "Room for the Debate" section. The topic: "Have College Freshmen Changed?" The introduction to the forum asks: "Are social, academic and financial pressures on freshmen becoming more intense? Have freshmen changed? Does the fact that many students are used to 'helicopter' parents monitoring and guiding all of their activities affect the transition to college?"

Participants note that less academic work is expected of current college students than it was a generation or two ago. Students now spend less time on homework. (Hours and hours on Call of Duty.) They also, according to some observers, have more difficulties with failure and tend to lack "perspective." The assessments are bleak, for the most part. Take Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State: "[Freshmen] also always heard they were special, and told to single-mindedly pursue their goals. 'Generation Me' is higher in narcissism and lower in empathy than previous generations." Or, Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, former president of George Washington University, "Leaving home and coming of age has always been hard. With the democratization of higher education, with an increasing percentage of American young people enrolled in post-secondary institutions, do we need more vigorous programs to help students adjust to the changes as they mature into adults?"

I suppose every history professor has stories of students who come up to them after a midterm, despondent, asking, "Why did I do so poorly on the test?" The professor asks: Did you spend time going over the study guide? Did you attend the TA's study group? Did you write out a few outlines for the essay questions? To which the student replies: No. And then asks again, "But why did I do so poorly on the test?" (Reminds me of the "Brawndo has electrolytes" scene in Idiocracy.) My favorite excuse a student gave for poor performance--this was back in my University of Florida days--was that she figured she was allergic to something in the classroom. This, she told me at the end of the semester . . . and in upspeak, nonetheless.

I think that making generalizations about a generation is dicy business. I never wore plaid or listened to bad reraw grunge while I was in college in the early 1990s. My parents did not have flashbacks. The music from The Big Chill was not the soundtrack for their life. They lived in Purdy, Missouri, during the Swinging 60s.

Still, the NYT forum deserves a close read. All professors could benefit from thinking about the challenges a new generation might pose to teaching and learning.

The Usefulness of "Prehistory"?

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The following guest post come from Randall Foote. This is part of an exchange he had with the eminent historian John Lukacs about the usefulness of the idea of "prehistory." See Foote's earlier post on a related topic here. Foote is retired from his business and now teaches as an adjunct instructor at Roxbury Community College.

Dear Professor Lukacs,

As to your question:

“. . . . Because of your thoughts about the genesis of mankind: do you agree with Barfield (and myself) that, strictly speaking or, rather, thinking, there was no such thing as ‘prehistoric’ man?”

Yes, that goes to the heart of one subject I am working on.

In brief: no, the idea of “prehistoric man” makes no sense to me, in either of the two ways in which it is understood. The sense of “pre-history” as that which comes before written history is very odd, as if the discovery and use of writing were some particular defining moment in human evolution, rather than merely one means by which we understand the present and the past: Man’s past defined solely by our own current means of comprehending it. This concept leads, for example, to a belief that the early Romans were a “historic civilization”, while their neighbors the Celts were a “prehistoric” archaeological Culture-type, who only entered into “History” when Caesar wrote about them in his Commentaries? All that changed was the historical tools by which we can learn about them. It is not difficult to trace these newly “historicized” Celts back to the Hallstatt culture of Central Europe, it merely requires different tools than reading primary sources. And these are similar to the tools that we might use to understand the daily lives of non-literate peasants of medieval Europe – the “testimony of the spade” (pace Bibby).

The broader sense of “prehistoric” is as that time before, for example, the Neolithic Revolution – which actually was a type of defining moment in certain parts of the human world. I would instead use the term “Archaic Man” for this. For me, and I believe for you and for Barfield, there is only one defining moment in the History of Man: which is when human consciousness and human language began, when the Word took human form in some mysterious manner. This may have happened in an instant or it may have been something that occurred over a few generations, but this essential change is not something that “evolved” over a million years in some Darwinian process from hominoids and hominids.

There was time and a place when human history truly began: perhaps 100,000 years ago in the northeast of Africa. A spark went into a physical body that then became Man. God breathed a soul into Adam’s nostrils. Spirit became matter, brain became mind, as consciousness and language were born for the first time. The mechanism for this change in consciousness is not understood yet. Perhaps it is an unknowable Act of God, as the cosmological Big Bang will ever be unknowable, the first moment of Creation.

But just as physics can trace the path back to almost the first moment of the Big Bang, so too can linguistics, genetics and anthropology point roughly to the conception of Man as a conscious being. Language families (and macro-families) converge at some point in the past, pointing to one original language; there still exist traces in the most unrelated of languages of common words for the simplest of things (finger, one, two, eye). In addition, unique elements of human genetic material also converge back in time, circa 100,000 years ago. Further, a modern physical form of Man emerged out of Africa into the Middle East about 80,000 years ago. With this new human (“anatomically modern homo sapiens” in anthropology) is found evidence of burial, symbolic expression (“art”), and apparently unnecessary and changing elements of design in tools and clothing (“fashion”), among other differences from earlier hominids (Neandertal, Erectus, etc.). And the other, older hominids soon vanished before the newcomer, for whatever reason. Human history began as man became fruitful and multiplied, out of Africa and across the earth.

I am only able to understand this and other evidence as pointing to the inception of human language and human consciousness, which define Man (in the image of God). In the beginning was the Word. There does not seem to be any gradual Darwinian “evolution” leading up to this beginning of human culture, of humanity itself (as opposed to the evolution of the hominid body), nor any radical change since that time.

Of course, human culture has evolved over the millennia, just as the understanding of God has evolved, but human Language (as distinct from all the supposed animal “languages”) either is or it is not, across the races of man as well as in the growth of a child. There are no “primitive” or unformed or partial languages. The fact that any human infant can learn any human language fluently argues convincingly for the monogenesis of language, with no significant/essential changes having occurred since that genesis. Evolution of language (as in Barfield) is cultural refinement, not essential change, as is “the evolution of consciousness, which is probably the only evolution there is” (End of an Age). (vide Lincoln: “The only progress is of the human heart”). Human consciousness begins with language, and since that point “evolution” might be refinement and growth, but not a change-of-state.

Perhaps much as you found correspondences to your own historical thinking in Heisenberg’s writings, I have been working to connect science and linguistics (not a science) to my own historical sense of human beginnings. This sense, this human story, is not Darwinian or “scientific”, nor in a strict sense religious--but human, historical, including and larger than science and religion. Currently, science and religion are each devolving into their own forms of fundamentalism, and the time is past when either can alone provide the needed understanding of man’s “evolution” (or of the universe for that matter). I see this “historical Genesis” as the opening chapter of the new kind of history, as that you call for, a history for a new era, following upon a “conscious historical recognition of the opening of a new phase in the evolution of our consciousness.” ( JL, Confessions of an Original Sinner.)

Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference

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A notice from Andrew Hartman, organizer of the Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference. The schedule looks tremendous. Well worth a visit to the Big Apple.

The Third Annual U.S. Intellectual History Conference be held on October 21-22, 2010 in New York City. The Conference is being organized by the editors of the U.S. Intellectual History (USIH) blog in coordination with the City University of New York's Center for the Humanities (The Graduate Center). This year’s theme is “Intellectuals and Their Publics.”

Beyond dozens of exciting and relevant sessions, I would especially like to call attention to our keynote speaker and our two evening plenary sessions.

The keynote will be given by Harvard University Professor James Kloppenberg on Friday (Oct. 22) afternoon. Kloppenberg will be presenting from his book, "Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition," forthcoming from Princeton University Press.

The first plenary session, on Thursday (Oct. 21) evening, is on "Renewing Black Intellectual History," featuring Adolph Reed, Jr., Kenneth Warren, Dean Robinson, and Touré Reed. Based on an anthology of same title, this plenary seeks to map the changing conditions of black political practice and experience from Emancipation to Obama.

The second plenary session, on Friday (Oct. 22) evening, is titled, "Intellectual History for What?" It includes George Cotkin, Rochelle Gurstein, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Wilfred McClay, David Steigerwald, and Casey Nelson Blake, who will raise a number of questions involving the relationship between intellectual history and less specialized audiences and genres of expression, including: intellectual history and social/cultural criticism; intellectual history as a resource for moral reflection and edification; writing for, teaching, and speaking to generalist audiences; and the ambiguous position of intellectual history within the research university.

Other notable participants include, in no particular order: Jackson Lears, Jennifer Burns, Kim Phillips-Fein, James Livingston, Bruce Kuklick, Leo Ribuffo, Robert Westbrook, Joan Shelly Rubin, Andrew Jewett, Jonathan Scott Holloway, Martin Burke, Eugene McCarraher, Daniel Borus, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, J. David Hoeveler, Jennifer Delton, Philip Gorski, Nancy Sinkoff, Neil Jumonville, and Jeffrey Perry.

Program and registration information.

Leigh Eric Schmidt on Ida C. Craddock and Late-Victorian America

(Cross-post from Religion in American History)
Randall Stephens

On October 18, 1902, the New York Times ran this curious obituary. Readers must have done a morning coffee spit-take:

"Chose Death Before Prison. Ida C. Craddock 'High Priestess,' Was to Have Been Sentenced for Circulating Improper Books"

Ida C. Craddock, 'High Priestess of the

Church of Yoga' in Chicago, and an exponent also of Spiritualism, Theosophy, and other creeds, committed suicide in her room, on the top floor of 134 West Twenty-third Street, yesterday, by inhaling illuminating gas and slashing her wrist. It was the day upon which she was to be sentenced again, as she had been several times before, for circulating books and pamphlets explaining her peculiar beliefs, built up from a conglomeration of Oriental religions. . . . Miss or Mrs. Craddock was forty-five years old. She was rather handsome, and was usually well gowned. She was born in Philadelphia, her parents being Quakers.

Leigh Eric Schmidt takes up Craddock's strange, fascinating story in his forthcoming Heaven's Bride: The Unprintable Life of Ida C. Craddock, American Mystic, Scholar, Sexologist, Martyr, and Madwoman (Basic Books). Much of it is startling, to say the least. In an era of buttoned down formality and Protestant prudery Craddock broke more rules than one could shake a ruler at. She dabbled in all manner of fringe-ish religion. The one-time Methodist moved with some ease into Quaker circles, Spiritualism, Free Thought, Eastern Mysticism, amateur biblical studies, Sexology . . . .

For some time she lectured as a self-proclaimed expert on phallic cults. Not a typical Chautauqua circuit subject.

Schmidt, with narrative skill and analytical insight, draws on Craddock's life to tell a broader tale of American religion in this age as well. (It's made me wonder about what we can learn about the whole from unusual subjects.) Says Schmidt: "The retrieval of Craddock's life from the vaults of vice suppression offers an entryway into major social and political issues of her day--and, often enough, of our own as well" (xi). She tested the country's Christian identity and it's moral certainty. In small ways, her exotic religious and secular outlook foreshadowed later developments: religious seeking, experimentation, new age dabbling, secular crusading. ". . . Craddoock floats only occasionally into view as a feminist," precursor, Schmidt observes, "a tragic free-speech martyr, a steamy occultist, or a sexologist ahead of her time. The diaphanous quality of those memories should not dissolve the grainy roughness of her life, the audacity and disrepute of it" (273-74).

In the interviews embedded here, I ask Schmidt about Craddock's career and her higgledy-piggledy path from Methodist to sexologist. Schmidt reflects on the larger meaning of religious dissent in these years and discusses the shape of American religion in the late-Victorian age. In part two of the interview he also comments on a couple of his current projects.

Area Historian

Randall Stephens

Heather sends along this amusing satire of historians "making it all up" from the Onion. I knew there was something fishy about the Golden Age of Greece. Especially the 5th century. Just too much fascinating intellectual development for one century. And so long ago!

"Historians Admit To Inventing Ancient Greeks," The Onion, October 7, 2010.

WASHINGTON—A group of leading historians held a press conference Monday at the National Geographic Society to announce they had "entirely fabricated" ancient Greece, a culture long thought to be the intellectual basis of Western civilization.

The group acknowledged that the idea of a sophisticated, flourishing society existing in Greece more than two millennia ago was a complete fiction created by a team of some two dozen historians, anthropologists, and classicists who worked nonstop between 1971 and 1974 to forge "Greek" documents and artifacts.>>>

See more absurdest takes on history from the Onion. Some favorites:

"Second-Grade Class Has No Questions For Visiting Local Historian"

"Historian Has Big News For Grover Cleveland Fans"

"San Francisco Historians Condemn 1906 Earthquake Deniers"

"U.S. Dept. Of Retro Warns: 'We May Be Running Out Of Past'"

Bad Company

Heather Cox Richardson

Like Randall, I’ve been keeping bad company lately.

My unsavory companion has been South Carolina’s James Henry Hammond, a leading figure before the American Civil War, who served as a US Senator from 1857 to 1860. Hammond was one of the South’s wealthiest planters, owner of hundreds of slaves, a member of the South’s elite. He was also arrogant, clueless, and a sexual predator.

On March 4, 1858, Hammond stood up in the Senate and delivered a speech that most people know for its famous line: "Cotton is king."

Historians tend to point to this speech for its misguided conviction that, if the tensions between the sections came to war, the South would win handily. In his speech, Hammond pointed out that the South encompassed 850,000 square miles—more territory than Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia, and Spain—with a population more than four times what the colonies had had when they successfully revolted against England. The South had fine soil and good harbors, and it grew the crop on which industrial societies depended: cotton. If the South withheld its cotton from market for a year, entire countries would fall to their knees, Hammond declared. Cotton was king, indeed, according to Hammond.

As notable as this speech was for its assertion of Southern power, it was even more astonishing for its view of human society. It was here that Senator Hammond outlined what Abraham Lincoln later called the "mudsill" version of life. According to Hammond, all societies were made up of two classes. On the bottom were the "mudsills": drudges who were lazy, stupid, loyal, and happy with their lot. On this class rested civilization: the wealthy, educated, cultured men who advanced society—men like Hammond. This class should always lead society, for only its members knew what was best for a nation. If the mudsills ever got power, they would demand wealth redistribution, and human progress would halt.

This was, of course, the same era that saw extraordinary upward mobility in the United States. Immigrants were pouring into the North, beginning their climb to economic security or even prosperity. Young men and women were moving west, pushing Indians out of the way to improve their own lot, as well. At a time when wage workers were actually moving upward at an extraordinary rate, Hammond dismissed them as dimwits, condemned to drudgery to support the lifestyle of people like him.

Hammond’s vision was troubling enough, but his arrogant elitism was worse. When Hammond spoke, the nation was convulsed over a civil war in Kansas. Events there were very complicated, but by 1858 it was clear to everyone that the machinations of a pro-slavery legislature had enabled a rigged convention to draft a state constitution that the vast majority of settlers in Kansas loathed. This presented a legal conundrum, but while different sides argued, people died, in particularly brutal ways. Kansas was the issue of the day, and had been for almost four years.

What did sitting Senator Hammond, one of those to whom society should be trusted, say about this horror?

"The whole history of Kansas is a disgusting one, from the beginning to the end. I have avoided reading it as much as I could. Had I been a Senator before, I should have felt it my duty, perhaps, to have done so; but not expecting to be one, I am ignorant, fortunately, in a great measure, of details; and I was glad to hear [Senator Stephen Douglas's speech], since it excuses me from the duty of examining them."*

Why should he have bothered to learn anything about the major issue of the day? He already knew how a successful society should work. He didn’t have to bother about facts.

Reviews for Historians in Conversation Volumes

Randall Stephens

The October 2010 issue of History and Theory includes short reviews of Recent Themes in the History of Science and Religion, ed. Donald A. Yerxa; and Recent Themes in American Religious History, ed. Randall J. Stephens. Both are part of the University of South Carolina Press's Historians in Conversation series, which draws on essays that have appeared in Historically Speaking over the last few years. Each of the eight volumes includes an introduction that contextualizes the subfield and offers some insight into new directions.

"[T]he contributors to" the Science and Religion volume, writes the reviewer, "seek to broach the big questions at stake in ongoing efforts to fathom the historical interface of science and religion—two of the most important ways of knowing our world—to better our understanding of how both have shaped the course of history and the direction of modern thinking. Designed as a supplemental reader for students of scientific and religious history, this volume will appeal as well to general readers with avid interests in history."

Recent Themes in American Religious, says a reviewer, contains a "collection of essays and interviews from Historically Speaking address several subjects central to religious history in the Unites States. . . . Recent Themes in American Religious History will appeal to students, scholars, and general readers of American history, American studies, and religious studies."

With a minimum of a $50 donation to the Historical Society you can choose two volumes of the eight to receive for free.

Mark Smith on Sense History

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Heather passes on Mark Smith's new essay on sensory history. An excerpt here and a link to the larger piece. Smith is professor of history at the University of South Carolina and current president of the Historical Society.

Mark M. Smith, "The explosion of sensory history," The Psychologist (October 2010)

Can we really understand how people in the past perceived their world in sensory terms? Can we ever reach an understanding of what, say, 18th-century Australia sounded like? What smells meant to 18th-century Parisians? How touch functioned in 19th-century America? Or can we ever uncover the meanings of taste in a pre-refrigerator age? A growing number of historians, myself included, believe they can. And their arguments are indebted, in no small part, to some of their historically minded colleagues in psychology.

Albeit in tongue-in-cheek fashion, I’d like to take issue with the very title of this section of The Psychologist. Put simply: I wonder whether just looking back – that is, trying to understand the past through the eyes – is really enough to uncover the full sensory texture of history. Is it even up to the task of explaining why certain things happened and when? Many historians – and, I might add, psychologists – would answer that no, ‘looking back’ is not sufficient to explain either the past or behaviour in the present. Just looking – without touching, tasting, smelling and hearing – impoverishes our understanding of the past generally and denies us access to all sorts of culturally and historically specific understandings of what the past meant to particular people and constituencies at specific points in time.>>>

More on Deep History and Prehistory

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This guest post comes from Randall Foote, who emailed me last week regarding an earlier post on Deep History. Foote has graciously allowed me to post his note. Retired from business, Foote is now an adjunct history professor at Roxbury Community College. (In the coming days I'll also post Foote's letter to historian John Lukacs on prehistory and history.)

"But is it History? III"
Randall Foote

I read with interest your post of 9/16 on the Historical Society blog regarding Deep History, and I felt I should comment on the question you asked:

“. . . . But, as Heather asked earlier on a different topic, is it history? How can we understand preliterate humans and societies in a historical sense? Can historians add to our understanding of prehistoric humans in ways that anthropologists and archeologists cannot? Historians inside and outside of the guild will have to figure those questions out for themselves.”

How we understand history is constantly changing. It was not very long ago – say, 200 years – when Sumer, Egypt, Troy, Babylon et al were seen as either mythical and/or biblical. Europeans saw two threads of history: the Classical, which began with Herodotus, and the Biblical, which began with Moses. Other cultures had even less historical horizon. No culture had a truly global historical sense before the modern Western European. It was archaeology that opened the doors to a larger view. Yes, writings were discovered, but the larger picture – which is still very much evolving – came from “the testimony of the spade."

Historians follow upon archaeologists to form a larger picture, with broad interconnections. Absolutely there is a place – indeed a necessity -- for applying historical sense every step of the way. After all, History is in essence the science and art of humanity. Certainly, there are now many more "non-historical" tools to gather information for historical understanding of pre-literate cultures, including genetics, linguistics and highly developed archaeological techniques. We should use them all as a part of developing a broader (and deeper) History. An interesting first step of applying the genetic point of view to “deep history” was L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s History and Geography of Human Genes. Cavalli-Sforza is a geneticist who is more adventurous and ambitious than are most historians. There is much history yet to be written.

I think future historians will view the European Aurignacian and Magdalenian (similarly the Australian Dream-time, Archaic Native American, Chinese Yang Shao and others) as every bit historical as we now view Troy and Sumer. It was not long ago (indeed, in my own school years) that the Ancient/Medieval/Modern triptych was the basic academic framework. I think that the Prehistoric/Historic dichotomy is as limited a mindset as both that one and the Biblical chronology.

Relegating preliterate man to the backwater of “Prehistory” is to miss out on some of the most interesting and creative elements of human history. After all, what is more fascinating than beginnings – our own beginnings.

Historians, like scientists, need to maintain a certain humility about how much we still do not know, but that is really most of all a great challenge and opportunity. There is always so much more to be discovered. In this time of increasing specialization and insularity in academic history departments, what we really need is more history with the long view, even when there is so much uncertainty and likelihood for contradiction as new discoveries are made. The rapid change in understanding prehistory and man's origins is a real case in point: when I was young it was a given that the Five Races evolved separately on their own continents (with the Caucasian Race being of course the most highly evolved). Seems like an eon ago.

Kaiser Wilhelm: Out of the Spotlight

Randall Stephens

What happened to Kaiser Wilhelm (1859-1941) after Germany lost World War I in 1918?

I'd never given that a thought until I read a witty, sprawling chapter in Ian Buruma's Anglomania: A European Love Affair. (A great read. Highly recommended.) Would the Kaiser fall on his sword? Attempt one last suicidal advance? March on Berlin to crush the revolution? Start a mustache grooming college?

No. "Instead," says Buruma, "the kaiser and his entourage, twelve military officers and thirty servants, including his barber, his chambermaids, his butler, his cooks, his doctor, his equerry, and his old cloakroom attendant, 'Father' Schulz, crossed the Dutch border, bound for the hospitality of Count Godard Bentinck's castle at Amerongen. The kaiser's first request, upon his arrival, was to have 'a cup of real good English tea.' He got his tea, served with English scones."

The fallen Prussian leader did more than work on his Rococo mustache, which, upturned, always looked like it was ready to take flight. He liked to dress up in various uniforms. He spent a great deal of time felling trees, a sort of compulsive hobby of his called "hackeritis." And he railed against the Jews and the English. Sometimes, he imagined them as one in the same. The kaiser was a comic, tragic, repulsive figure.

He kept a very tightly organized schedule. He spent the remainder of his life with his crew, venting, storming, and musing on current events and the future of the Aryan race. His was a toxic brew of race hatred and paranoia. (In Buruma's telling, the kaiser carried a bundle of grudges, fears, and troubles. Not least of those, his arm, paralyzed from birth, gave him a sense of physical inadequacy that he never quite overcame.)

Buruma zeros in on Wilhelm's tortured relationship with the English, and especially his English mother, "Vicky," and his grandmother, Queen Victoria. He vacillated between Anglophile and Anglophobe. Wilhelm was drawn to and repelled by the English and Englishness. In Buruma's estimation, he suffered from a Freudian sense of inferiority. Wilhelm built up the German navy to best his rival across the channel. He thundered against the effete English aristocracy and it's liberal shopkeepers. They were no match for the proud, uniformed, manly, Prussian military man.

Powerless, the kaiser could only dream about teutonic Wagnerian glory from his Dutch exile. His ravings became more maniacal with the passing years. (Surely someone has written a novel, a play, or a short story about his Dutch years? Exile on Kaiserstraße?)

The whole account would be far more comic if the kaiser's bizarre, super-charged bigotry wasn't shared by so many others in the years before his death. Reading Buruma's chapter gave me a new appreciation for Hannah Arendt's coinage "the banality of evil."

Blogging in the Academy

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Thanks to Ed Blum (History, San Diego State Univ.) for letting us cross-post his comments on blogging. Blum points out some concerns he and others share about writing for a popular audience in a non-peer review context. The post originally appeared at Religion in American History.

"Academic Blogging: Some Reservations and Lessons"
by Edward J. Blum

Last summer, I was chatting with a collection of amazingly talented graduate students and newly minted PhDs in American religious history about the role of blogging. They all agreed that blogging was a godsend for those new to the profession, for it let them “be known.” Blogging offered an instant opportunity to present ideas, critique other works, and sound off publicly on any number of issues. Time and again, these brilliant scholars expressed their belief in the blogosphere: that it was the place to gain recognition.

I was worried. I wondered if the perils outweighed the possibilities. Paul Harvey’s American Religious History blog was created after I was finished with graduate school and had two monographs published. I was just at that moment becoming an associate professor and so “making a name for myself” had less immediate importance. I saw his blog and others as a place to promote and to play – not a place to stake a reputation.

I’ve been thinking long and hard about the academic turn to the blog, and my gravest concern is for junior scholars – knowing full well that by avoiding blogs, junior scholars may be missing out on many important opportunities. But here are my reservations and lessons:

1) Why would you give away for free the primary commodity you create? Your ideas are your intellectual property; when you publish them in a book, you and the press own them. You can make money off of them (sure, not a lot, but sometimes a nice chunk of change). You can receive credentials from them that include a job, promotion, and tenure. Just as much as publishers may benefit from a blog-inspired recognition, they may also not want to print concepts that can be found already on websites. I haven’t asked, but I wonder.

2) Peer review matters. Academic disciplines will lose all credibility without peer review; it is essential to what we do – as protection for the author and publisher, and as a way to get the best out of your work. When the five or ten or twenty reviewers (I can’t remember) for the Journal of American History sounded off on one of my dissertation chapters, I was shell-shocked. I could never have imagined there were so many problems with my essay. But those criticisms made it a better chapter, and my dissertation a stronger book. The JAH didn’t publish my essay, but the reviews transformed my approach to the topic. After graduate school, the number of people available to read your work may shrink. My experience is that there are fewer and fewer people who have the time to read my ramblings. Peer review allows the geniuses in our fields to challenge us, push us to new sources, and help with our prose. I’m grateful to have friends like Katie Lofton, who will read my essays and tell me what’s wrong with them – but it’s hard to make friends that brilliant and as the years pass on, we all seem to have less time for it. Blogs do not, as of yet, offer such a system of peer review and hence do not aid in that capacity in our development as scholars.

3) Post-publication review matters. Blog posts don’t get reviewed in the Journal of American History or the Journal of Southern History – books do. They are reviewed there and in other journals as another stage of peer review. It’s where we sound off – not just to say that this or that book “makes a significant contribution to” … whatever topic the book is on. It’s a place where real debates and real problems can be addressed. Comment sections in blogs aren’t the same, and they probably can’t go in your tenure file. Professional book reviews can and do.

4) Blog posts could hurt your reputation just as much (if not more) than help it. Fascinating blog posts probably won’t get you an interview or a job, although they may make your name noteworthy enough so the committee looks at your application (although I doubt this for most positions). Articles will, solid dissertations will, fantastic conference papers will. Blog posts are far more likely to hurt you in any number of ways: perhaps you write something that is too outlandish; perhaps you come off as too political (guess what, not all academics vote Democrat – some are more leftist, some are to the right – I learned this when one colleague of mine explained to me that even though I study and teach African American history, he hoped I didn’t vote as “they” did – an odd thing to say to a new colleague, but whatever). I’ve written a number of posts that I wish I could take back (usually the ones praising Matt Sutton’s work – and this, right here, is a joke, that could backfire if I didn’t point out it was a joke. And by this point, the joke is dead because I had to explain it so no one is even grinning). More honestly, I have in blog posts been rough and curt with some essential and important works (namely Barbara Dianne Savage’s very interesting Your Spirits Walk Beside Us), and I was wrong. I should have been more careful and thoughtful. Could that hurt me professionally – you betcha!

5) Blogs often function like the current American media: extreme, partisan, and amnesiac. Jon Stewart recently told Bill O’Reilly that all the messianic love for President Obama in 2008 set Americans up for heartache. Guess who said this in a Religion Dispatches blog essay in 2008? I did. Guess who remembers? Only me. As I see it, the current media is in the business of producing ideas each and every minute and there can be no regard for past claims, words, or interests. Stories and sound bites must be made new constantly. This is not how the scholarly world has functioned or should. We must take the time to think ideas through, to hash them out, to consider alternatives, and to weigh various other texts. Reacting to every new media story is not the path of most scholarly work; it’s the domain of the journalist.

6) Finally, and this is most apropos for our blog – this is a blog about religion and religions, the most powerful ideas, rituals, concepts, and communities that exist. As I understand the spiritual, it is the deepest core of people, ideas, organizations, and communities. Writing about it flippantly or without review or without consideration can be extremely damaging. I have done my fair share of rough handling with religion in these blogs, and I wonder at what cost. More and more, I think Robert Orsi is right when he calls us to be worry about our presentations of religion, especially of how those presentations get into the mass media. We’re observant to religious damages of the past, and certainly do not want to perpetuate them in the present and future (at least I do not).

So those are my concerns. I recognize the incredible work that blogs have done in American religious history. The Juvenile Instructor gang is amazing. The essays here are fantastic. Religion Dispatches is entertaining, insightful, and provocative. It’s not that we shouldn’t keep taking blog and technological leaps: it’s that, I think, we should look first.

From the “Yet Another Good Reason Not To Throw Anything Away” Department

Heather Cox Richardson

When President Warren G. Harding died suddenly of a heart attack on a goodwill tour of the country, his vice-president Calvin Coolidge was visiting his family homestead in Plymouth Notch, Vermont. Early in the morning of the next day, August 3, 1923, Coolidge’s father, a notary public, administered the oath of office to his son, making him the nation’s 30th president. (This is the only time, incidentally, that a father has administered the presidential oath to his child.)

This dramatic scene caught the popular imagination. In an era of glitz and glamor, graft and corruption, the vision of Coolidge taking the oath of office beside his aged father in the glow of a kerosene lamp seemed to embody Yankee simplicity and old-fashioned values.

The family home, where this dramatic scene took place, is now a museum. The curators there have just made a startling discovery:

“Historians at the President Calvin Coolidge State Historic Site in Plymouth Notch, Vt., which houses the president’s collection, are trumpeting the discovery of the tablecloth that was used during Silent Cal's makeshift swearing-in ceremony, site officials announced Wednesday . . .”

For years, the brown-and-white cloth tucked at the end of a daybed was thought to be a shawl, and an embroidered green cloth dressing the table was believed to be the original table covering. . . .”

When a historian recently opened the cloth to catalog it, a note fell out. Over the initials G. C. (probably Coolidge’s wife, Grace), the note read:

“‘Cover which was on the mahogany-topped table in the sitting room of father Coolidge’s house in Plymouth, Vermont on the night of August 3rd, 1923.’

That cloth ‘had always been there, but it was never really unfolded and carefully looked at,’ [the site administrator] said.”