The Historical Society

Boston Globe Coverage on Class Project

2012-01-30T02:08:00.000-05:00

Randall Stephens

Early last month I posted a short piece on a class website project that my students and I did as part of a fall history readings/methods course. We created a resource website for the Moswetuset Hummock, a historic outcropping of land near our college, which played an important role in the first encounters between Indians and English settlers. If nothing else, the effort inspired students to get out of the classroom and do history.

The students and I had no idea that the website would garner the attention of our local Quincy newspaper. And we certainly didn't imagine that the project would draw the attention of the Boston Globe. But . . . it did. And we're thrilled to get that kind of attention!

Jessica Bartlett reports on our efforts and what we hoped to achieve. ("Eastern Nazarene College students create website on Quincy's Moswetuset Hummock," Boston Globe, January 25, 2012.)

Although the small section of Quincy known as Moswetuset Hummock is where Massachusetts derived its name, relatively few know the significance of the small marsh located on Quincy Bay.

Students from Eastern Nazarene College are hoping to change that.

The small, wooded area that separates Quincy Bay from the Neponset River received recent exposure with the help of six ENC students and History Professor Randall Stephens, who created a website dedicated to exploring the significance of the shore and detailing its place in history.

Part class history project, part exploratory jaunt through time, the website includes information on the Indians that lived in the area, to the relations with new settlers, to the diseases that would decimate the tribes by the time Myles Standish meet the tribe leader in 1621. >>> read on

It will be tough to trump this when we take on our next class project!

Chinese History Roundup

2012-01-27T08:00:00.003-05:00

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Roberta Smith, "History Unfolding on a Hand Scroll," New York Times, January 26, 2012

The painter Fu Baoshi was born in China in 1904, seven years before the Chinese Revolution brought 2,100 years of dynastic rule to an end. He died in 1965, months before China’s Communist regime unleashed the Cultural Revolution, which aggressively persecuted the country’s writers, artists and other intelligentsia, sometimes unto death.>>>

"A nation of city slickers.
A first in Chinese history: city-dwellers outnumber the rural population," The Economist, January 21, 2012

FOR a nation whose culture and society have been shaped over millennia by its rice-, millet- and wheat-farming traditions, and whose ruling Communist Party rose to power in 1949 by mobilising a put-upon peasantry and encircling the cities, China has just passed a remarkable milestone. By the end of 2011, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, more than half of China’s 1.35 billion people were living in cities.>>>

Sergey Radchenko, "China's iron grip on past impairs future on world stage," Sydney Morning Herald, January 4, 2012

With China stumping assertively on the world stage, one might think Beijing would be open, even gracious, about the country's past. To the contrary, history remains a sensitive subject, drawing relentless attention from authorities anxious to keep all skeletons safely in closets.>>>

Bethan Jinkinson, "The story behind Chinese war epic The Flowers of War," BBC, January 24, 2012

The film, directed by Zhang Yimou and starring English actor Christian Bale, opened in China on 16 December.

Since then it has been shown on thousands of screens across the country, taking $93m (£60m) gross in its first five weeks, according to entertainment research group EntGroup Consulting.

It was also the highest-grossing Chinese film of 2011.>>>

Just the Facts? Revisions to Our Virginia: Past and Present

2012-01-25T08:56:00.000-05:00

Brendan Wolfe

Today’s guest post comes from Brendan Wolfe, Associate Editor of the Encyclopedia Virginia. Here Wolfe returns to the Our Virginia textbook—which we posted on here and here. He asks if the revisions to the volume, implemented after a the controversial first version, make it a good enough text.

A little more than a year ago, the Washington Post reported that Virginia's fourth-grade history textbook was full of factual errors. The big news were those two battalions of black Confederates supposedly under the command of Stonewall Jackson, but there were other errors, too, and the resulting kerfuffle put Five Ponds Press on the defensive and almost out of business. More importantly, it persuaded the folks there to involve actual historians in the vetting of their books.

Now a new edition of Our Virginia: Past and Present has been released, and as one might expect, those historians have made it a much better book. But is it good enough? I'm not yet convinced.

To be clear, the facts are all largely in order. But as for the narrative constructed from those facts, it's a real mess. Facts only get us so far, after all. Textbook authors still must do the hard work of telling us what they mean, why they matter, and how we can put them together so that they begin to make sense.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about from Our Virginia:

The book tells us that the English colonist John Smith was "obnoxious" while describing his adversary Powhatan as "a ruler of great spiritual, mental, and physical strength." It makes no mention of Powhatan's explicit understanding of power and violence: that he ruled some of his people by force, for example, and that he both helped and fought the English.

Why does this matter? Because on the same page the textbook tells us that without Powhatan and his daughter Pocahontas, "Jamestown might have ended up as another 'Lost Colony.'" How? Why? The book doesn't say. And what it does say about the Lost Colony at Roanoke doesn't help, because the author never even hints at why that colony might have failed or that it might have been because of fighting with the local Indians.

In other words, even though the facts are in order, a reader would still be left with the inability to draw any meaningful conclusions.

The author later tells us that the Starving Time at Jamestown occurred because the English settlers did not save enough food. While this is partly true, it doesn't explain why Powhatan and Pocahontas had helped them earlier but not this time. Nor does it acknowledge that food was short for everyone, and that this very shortage was causing conflict between Englishmen and Indians.

Food and conflict. These are two important concepts that are perfectly understandable to fourth-graders but are missing here. To make the point earlier that Powhatan understood power and violence is to be able to make it again now, when it truly bears on the students' understanding of the material. In the meantime, to pay respect to Virginia Indians is to make them actors in this drama. And yet during the Starving Time—this moment when they come so close to expelling the English once and for all—they have completely disappeared!

Last year's textbook controversy focused on fuzzy facts and, to a lesser extent, whether you could find quality information online. But now that many of those facts have been corrected, we are still left with . . . just facts. What do they mean? Why do they matter? Our Virginia is still not up to the task.

Bernice Bobs Her Hair: Back to the Jazz Age

2012-01-24T10:48:00.006-05:00

[Cross-post from Iron as Needed. Full disclosure: this is a post that my sister did at her wonderful blog on clothes making and the history of fashion. Full disclosure part 2: my sister talks a bit about my brother's band. Full disclosure part 3: the post shows pictures of my late granny in flapper gear. Blogging: a family affair? Yes.]

Nicole White

"Let us keep up the rules that flapperism is composed of--bobbed hair, short skirts and low-heeled shoes, giving the body plenty of room to expand itself and that free and easy swing that only a short skirt can afford. What do you say flappers?"

-Excerpt from a letter published in The Flapper magazine (1922) written by a Chicago flapper

Photograph of
my grandma in 1926

Jazz music, dancing, speakeasies, gansters, and, of course, flappers were all part of the twenties underground scene. The flapper emerged as the new, fancy-free woman of the decade with a carefree attitude and flare for style. She didn't care about the societal rules imposed on women and still kept her femininity while keeping up with the men. Flappers became such a sensation that there was even a magazine devoted to them called The Flapper, which embraced the same free spirit outlook as its readers and included the byline, "Not for Old Fogies." When Paris fashion tried to "impose" the long skirt on America in 1922, The Flapper was outraged and included the following at the end of an article titled, "Flappers Protest Dictation From Paris."

Any flapper reader of The Flapper magazine may fill out the following blank and mail it in as a token of her stand on Parisian dictation of styles. No names will be used; our only concern is to arrive at an accurate gauge of flapper opinion. Results of this referendum will be published in the November issue.
.............................................................................................................
The Flapper, 604 Ogden Bldg., Chicago, Ill.
Gentlemen: This is how I stand on continuation of present-day
styles. I am marking my preference with an X.

For Against

Bobbed Hair ____ ____
Rolled Sox ____ ____
Short Skirts ____ ____
Knickers ____ ____
Low-heeled Shoes ____ ____
Corsets ____ ____
Name............................................. Age.............
Street Address............................ City.............

Photograph of
my grandma in the 1920s

By the twenties, women were tired of wearing uncomfortable, stuffy clothing and were ready for a change. The loose fitting, drop-waist dresses became a staple in every flapper's wardrobe. Jeanne Lanvin and Coco Chanel were two influential fashion designers at the time that kept the "new breed" of women happy.

With the Great Gatsby remake to be released in December and Gucci, Marchesa, Ralph Lauren, and Alberta Ferretti, just to name a few, all sending twenties-inspired looks down the runway, this will be the year to celebrate flapper fashion. High-end designer dresses this spring will feature drop-waists, feathers, fringe, pleats, soft silks, and beading. One of the only fashion houses to not partake in this resurgence is Alexander McQueen. When recently asked about the up and coming trend, creative director Sarah Burton commented, "We’re not a house to do a dropped waist."

Fashion designers may be bringing the twenties back to the runway, but the Dave Stephens Band is bringing it to the stage. Kansas City became a famous jazz hub during the Jazz Age and the Dave Stephens Band is keeping it alive today by performing vintage delights such as Alexander's Ragtime Band, Puttin' on the Ritz, and Runnin' Wild. Their energetic, live shows take you back in time to a night in a past decade. The intimate experience feels so authentic that you half expect the police to burst through the doors like a speakeasy raid on the grounds that the crowd is having a little too much fun. The New York Times described Dave Stephens as "a jazz singer and songwriter based in Los Angeles whose perpetual smile, expansive gestures and habit of breaking into song unprovoked make him seem like a Broadway musical character." Cue the curtain!

I made a twenties-inspired dress this week and used a beautiful Marc Jacobs crepe de chine I purchased from Mood. It was my first time to work with a silk/lycra blend and it wasn't easy! It's similar to the dress I made last week . . . just a bit dressier.

Norway Doorway, pt 2: Getting Students Interested in Historical Questions

2012-01-23T00:04:00.006-05:00

Randall Stephens

I'm giving a talk on Wednesday to high school teachers in Trysil, Norway, which happens to be the largest ski destination in the country. Poor me. I'll be focusing in on how we might best engage students in historical, political, and cultural debates. That's always a tough task, especially if students arrive on the first day with absolutely no interest in the topic.

As a guide I plan to use a course I teach on America in the 1960s. (Admittedly, it's a bit easier to generate interest here. Would be more difficult if the class was about Medieval court records or Byzantine statesmanship.) Larger guiding questions, I've found, work well in a class like this. I want students to better understand change over time, the connection of the past to the present, and the debates that rage over American history. Here are some of the questions that help direct the 60s course:

Can we sum up an entire decade? Can we make coherent generalizations about America in the 1960s?

In what ways was America in 1969 different from America in 1959?

How is America in 2012 different from America in the 1960s?

What explains the degree of activism—anti-war movements, the black freedom struggle, the New Right, liberation movements—of the decade?

How did American politics and culture have a world impact in the 1960s?

How have the debates and key issues of that decade continued to shape American culture? (Hint: culture wars.)

To describe how best to make use of these sorts of questions—and more micro ones as well—I'm going to draw on some material from the National History Education Clearinghouse (NHEC). (This is a stretch for me. I don't typically cotton to endless pedagogy talk.) The NHEC website includes some great material on "Inquiry Lessons," which:

introduce students to the "doing" of history. Through using evidence to investigate historical questions, students are given the opportunity to see that history is not just a collection of facts, but rather a rigorously constructed set of arguments. As students encounter new and in some cases contradictory evidence, they are asked to reconsider their initial views, learning that interpretations of the past can change based on the available historical evidence.

The idea is to choose a historical question that can then be examined in detail with primary and secondary sources. Other questions might follow that will help students think about the sources. How do the documents relate to one another? How can one judge the relative value of one source against another? The evidence can go well beyond written materials. In the case of the 1960s one could use posters, video clips, music, photographs, and more.

I'm looking forward to my first interactive session with teachers. And I'm hoping that we'll have a good discussion about what works best to draw students into the debates. Maybe I'll get some skiing in as well.

iPad for Higher Ed Roundup

2012-01-20T04:47:00.003-05:00

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Steve Kolowich, "Relaunching the iPad: Apple drops new iPad apps for digital textbook creation and distribution," Inside Higher Ed, January 20, 2012

NEW YORK CITY -- Apple made its much-anticipated move on the education technology industry on Thursday, announcing a revamped version of its iTunes U platform that could challenge traditional learning management

systems. It also unveiled new tools for creating and distributing low-cost digital textbooks that could speed the pace of e-text adoption.>>>

Dan Miller, "Analysis: Apple's e-textbook push earns mixed grades," Macworld.com, Jan 19, 2012

Ask people in educational publishing about Apple’s foray into e-textbooks, and you’ll hear a consistent message: It’s good for all of us—and good luck to Apple.

It’s good for e-textbooks in general because “Every time Apple enters a market, that market gets attention,” as Dan Rosensweig, CEO of textbook-rental firm Chegg, puts it. Widespread availability of e-textbooks on the iPad could help alert a lot of students, teachers, and parents who didn’t know otherwise that such things exist.>>>

Adam Satariano and Peter Burrows, "Apple to bolster iPad's educational content," San Francisco Chronicle, January 19, 2012

. . . . Apple also wants to empower "self-publishers" to create new kinds of teaching tools, said the people. Teachers could use it to design materials for that week's lesson. Scientists, historians and other authors could publish professional-looking content without a deal with a publisher.>>>

Jeffrey R. Young, "Apple's New E-Textbook Platform Enters an Already Crowded Field," Chronicle of Higher Ed, January 19, 2012

Apple made a splashy entrance into the digital-textbook market on Thursday at an event here at the Guggenheim Museum, but its new build-your-own-textbook tool is likely to lead to more fragmentation in the market rather than becoming a dominant new model.>>>

Larry Abramson, "Apple Carves Inroads In Educational Publishing," NPR, January 19, 2012

Apple today launched a big initiative to update an old standby, the school textbook. In a splashy announcement, the company released new tools to help publishers create digital content for students. As NPR's Larry Abramson reports, Apple is trying to capitalize on enthusiasm for the iPad in schools and colleges.>>>

Norway Doorway, pt 1

2012-01-18T02:15:00.002-05:00

Randall Stephens

Last week I had the pleasure of teaching several lectures in Stavanger and Bryne, Norway, as part of my work as a Fulbright Roving Scholar here. The students were bright and had, for the most part, high proficiency in English. Some, I figure, have a better grasp of English than do many American college students. (Thanks to all the teachers for being such great hosts!)

I gave a few talks and generated some discussion with students at the Stavanger Katedralskole, an institution that dates back to the early 19th century. The cathedral that looms next to it is Norway's oldest, dating to the 1100s. The beautiful interior of the school looked like something out of a Carl Larsson painting.

The school describes itself with the following on its website.

Stavanger Cathedral School, Royal Farm, is one of the oldest schools and has since 1800 been one of the most prestigious and tradition-rich school in Stavanger. The school is located between the city lake, Cathedral Square and within walking distance to almost everything in the city center. The school has teachers who are deeply committed and have a high professional competence. Stavanger Cathedral School is characterized by high job satisfaction among the approximately 485 students, and as a student here, you will develop friends for life! Student Activities at the school are varied and we have much to offer. Stavanger Cathedral School is a modern school, with well-equipped classrooms and special rooms.

I spoke to the students about American advertising in the postwar era, the 2012 election, and the founding of America. It was interesting to talk with them about the role the US plays in the world and to hear what they had to say about America from the vantage of Norway.

We started out our look at the founding by asking what role the government should play in the lives of citizens. "It should guarantee the welfare of all," said some. Others thought that governments should be responsible for securing education and equal opportunities. We had some time to talk about the long anti-government tradition in America and to focus on some of the debates among the founders over less or more government. That theme tied in well with the 2012 election, the Tea Party, and the views that GOP candidates have expressed about President Obama. I used a recent quote from frontrunner Mitt Romney: "President Obama wants to make us a European style welfare state, where instead of being a merit society, we're an entitlement society, where government's role is to take from some and give to others."*

One of the challenges for me will be to try to explain why so many Americans have a low opinion of the government and how that has been critical to the debates that have roiled the public over the decades and centuries.

Now, on to give talks in Porsgrunn and Oslo this week.

Prezi for Historians?

2012-01-16T00:25:00.004-05:00

Chris Beneke

Tired of using PowerPoint in your History teaching? You might consider using Prezi instead. Here are some preliminary thoughts. (Maybe you’ve already seen it used here; for a brief overview, check this out.)

Strengths

If you make extensive use of in-class readings and don’t want to distribute the texts in paper form, Prezi can help. It allows you to easily pull the texts up and zoom on important passages. Ditto for high resolution pictures and maps. You could post an entire reproduction of a U.S. or world map and quickly zoom around it. That’s handy.

With Prezi you can easily create a vivid and infinitely extendable timeline, connecting it to relevant images, videos, and text. As far as I know, there’s no way to do this in PowerPoint or Keynote.

Beyond that, the most immediately apparent virtue of Prezi is the fact that it allows for nonlinear presentations. If you’re like me and mix lecture and discussion flexibly throughout the class, that’s an especially attractive feature. Of course, PowerPoint and Keynote allow you do this as well. Just not as gracefully.

Finally, you could, theoretically, save a cluster of class materials or even an entire semester’s worth of materials in the same Prezi. This would save students the trouble of slogging through twenty-plus PowerPoint presentations ahead of their final exam and might also encourage them (and you, history teacher) to make stronger connections between class topics.

Weaknesses

When it comes to usability, Prezi is often coy, seldom allowing you to predict just what it intends to do. The interface will not feel intuitive to PowerPoint users. Right-clicking gets you nowhere. Formatting options are available, but somewhat mysterious. And as far as I can tell, Prezi places new frames wherever it darn well chooses.

Non-linearity has its advantages, but let’s keep in mind that teachers resort to linear arguments for a reason: they make sense to human beings and are easily recalled. One of the virtues of PowerPoint is that it keeps the digression-prone professor on track. Prezi includes a tool (called “Path”) that allows you to fly from one section to another. By zooming out you can see a riveting overview of your class’s trajectory. This has the aesthetically pleasing effect of launching you up, over, and around the various parts of the presentation. I suspect that this novelty will wear off fast and that Prezi will have to rely on other virtues to retain converts. (Another cute feature—the ability to create tiny hidden text—is likely to make it unnecessarily difficult for students reviewing the presentation to find what they need.)

I’m also worried about preserving Prezis over time. With a subscription, you can download them to your computer. You can also save the entire presentation for static use as a .pdf. I don’t find either option reassuring. Prezi’s novelty and its isolation from an existing office sweet offer additional reasons for pause.

This Prezi on jazz bassists illustrates some of the strengths and weaknesses of the software. Though beautiful and moderately instructive, the gratuitous twisting and zooming is dizzying. You can also see that the presentation includes five or so embedded YouTube videos and that one of them isn’t working.

Overall Evaluation

Prezi should appeal to the teacher who needs the technological structure that presentation software provides but also wants to encourage active learning. The ease with which users can vault from timeline, to text, to image, to video—and back again—is certainly alluring. The capacity to zoom into and out of images, including portraits, photographs and maps, should especially charm historians.

In the end, Prezi’s primary contribution to history instruction may be on the teaching side of the teaching-learning enterprise. It should force us to think more rigorously and creatively about the connections residing within our class materials. For that reason alone, it’s worth a try.

* Here’s a tiny text caveat: I tried Prezi for the first time in a local Teaching American History session this past week. The feedback hasn’t come back to me yet, but I got the distinct impression that the results were mixed. In addition to the usual assortment of images and maps that any PowerPoint might include, I pasted in some very long selections from Lincoln’s 1842 Temperance Address. That was a mistake. I ended up reading aloud for extended periods. Looking back, Prezi’s zoom-function may have been the cure to the this disease of my own making. In sum: While you may be tempted to post a large selection from a speech, article, or book chapter, you should resist the urge. But longer excerpted text selections are definitely possible with Prezi.

Cliopatria's 2011 Awards

2012-01-12T02:44:00.002-05:00

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From our colleagues at Cliopatria, HNN:

In conjunction with the AHA annual meeting in Chicago, here are the seventh annual Cliopatria Awards for History Blogging, including our inaugural awards for Best Twitter Feed and Best Podcast Episode. Thanks to the judges this year: Manan Ahmed, Kelly Baker, Jonathan Dresner, Mary Dudziak, Katrina Gulliver, Andrew Hartman, Brett Holman, Sharon Howard, Shane Landrum, Randall Stephens, Karen Tani, and David Weinfeld. They have done a fine job, making difficult decisions to choose the best work from strong fields. Here are the winners and brief explanations of the judges' rationale for their decisions. See the results here.

Academic Novels as Therapy

2012-01-11T00:46:00.002-05:00

Randall Stephens

"He was so tired of this: this job search, this whole process emptying him out like a vast, brutal enema again and again," the hapless protagonist thinks to himself in Ian McGuire's raucous, delightfully funny academic novel Incredible Bodies (Bloomsbury, 2006). Morris Gutman, a 37-year-old deadender, waits in his car, in a cold sweat on a typically gloomy English day, before his interview with Coketown University. The school is something like an updated, slightly better off Rummidge from David Lodge's hilarious classic Small World. "How many interviews had he had over the last five years? He added them up - Eccles, Peterborough, Gwent . . . twenty-two. Twenty-two interviews. He needed to bring it to an end one way or another. It had to stop." The book's dark comedy is a great distraction from the toils of academic labor.

Academic novels are surely gazpacho soup for the sick academic soul. Served cold and with a side of schadenfreude, it's still weirdly therapeutic.

Will the wretched job market turn around any time this side of 2112? Maybe, as Audrey Williams June writes in the latest Chronicle. But in the meantime, if you're adrift in the uncertain seas of the market, try reading academic novels for a little help.

Acres of Glitter and Denim: David Bowie's Age of Fracture?

2012-01-09T02:31:00.005-05:00

Randall Stephens

Art rock chameleon David Bowie turned 65 yesterday. The BBC has a slew of programs that it lined up to celebrate the star's reaching that milestone. An original 1973 TV performance of "The Jean Geanie," presumed lost, has been rediscovered and re-aired.

At the Guardian Alexis Petridis reflects on the unlikely longevity of Bowie:

It wasn't just the drugs: there was something about the intensity with which he worked during that decade - the scarcely-believable ten-year creative streak that begins with the 1970s The Man Who Sold The World and ends with the 1980's Scary Monsters And Super-Creeps – that suggests an early demise. Someone that burns that brightly probably isn't going to burn for long.

And the Telegraph reports that fans are clamoring for a tour: "Dozens of music industry celebrities from Boy George to Gary Barlow took to the online social networking site Twitter to congratulate him on a remarkable career."

One of the more interesting historical perspectives on the gender-bending, shape-shifting Bowie comes from Peter Doggett, author of The Man Who Sold the World: David Bowie And The 1970s

(Random House, 2012), who argues that, in hindsight, the Thin White Duke was the most influential rock star of the 1970s. Certainly, when looking at how instrumental Bowie was in creating the rock persona and inspiring so much music in the 1980s, there's a case to be made here.

Writes Doggett in the intro to his book:

Fragmentation was central to Bowie's seventies. He pursued it in artistic terms by applying cut-up techniques to his language, subverting musical expectations, employing noise as a way of augmenting and substituting for melody, using a familiar formula and distorting it into an alarming new shape. He applied the same tools to his identities and images, assembling each different persona from the remnants of the past. Even Ziggy Stardust, the guise in which Bowie left his most enduring mark on the decade, was assembled like a collage from a bewildering variety of sources, despite his appearance of having stepped fully formed from a passing flying saucer. Elements of Ziggy came from pop: from Judy Garland, the Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, the Beatles, Elvis Presley, Little Richard. Strands of pop art were also visible in his disguise, from Richard Hamilton's assimilation of science fact and science fiction to Andy Warhol's obsession with surface and the borrowed sheen of stardom.

Do we have enough perspective on the 1970s to make those kinds of broad claims? The Age of Fracture through David Bowie's career and music?

Roundup: Political Cartoons, Past and Present

2012-01-04T08:36:00.003-05:00

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Double Take 'Toons: 1912 The Issues, NPR, January 4, 2012

In 1912 the expansion of democratic rights was key to most progressives, and women's suffrage was on the ballot in a number of states including Ohio where Donahy celebrated the struggle. Ending the wrongs perpetrated by monopolistic "trusts" was something Democrats Republicans, Socialists and W. A Rogers agreed on. >>>

Kimberly Primicerio, "Southington Historical Society draws up plan for cartoonist," Record Journal, December 29, 2011

SOUTHINGTON - Members of the Southington Historical Society have a large task ahead of them. In the coming months, they'll look through more than 40 years' worth of editorial cartoons that document significant political events and everyday activities in town. >>>

"No justification for blasting Nast," Asbury Park Press, December 19, 2011

Thomas Nast, one of this year’s nominees for the New Jersey Hall of Fame, is widely recognized as the “Father of the American Cartoon.” His editorial drawings in the 1800s exhibited a broad social conscience, with anti-slavery and anti-segregation themes. He championed better treatment of Native Americans and Asian immigrants. His work is even credited with spawning the classic depictions of Santa Claus and Uncle Sam still with us today.

That’s certainly a Hall of Fame-worthy resume. But that hasn’t stopped several legislators from calling for Nast to be removed from consideration because of what they believe to be bigoted representations of Irish and Catholics. >>>

"This Month's Best Political Cartoons," US News and World Report, January 4, 2012 >>>

"Year in Cartoons," Washington Post, December 9, 2011

The Washington Post’s picks for the best editorial cartoons of 2011. >>>

Horrible Histories

2012-01-02T05:02:00.003-05:00

Randall Stephens

Pillaging and plundering. Murder and torture. Soldiers gassed in the trenches. Kings and Queens behaving badly. Those are some of the many things you'll see on the BBC hit TV show Horrible Histories. The program is fittingly hosted by a rat puppet.

Its so popular with kids and parents that it's spawned a play, "colouring" books, and more. I'm hooked after seeing just a little of it with my god daughter here in the UK. (Watch the Four Georges boy-band sketch here.)

And in addition, the play, TV show, and the books all teach some fun lessons about the past. Jonathan Jones writes in the Guardian:

One sketch in the CBBC series concerns communications in ancient Rome. The Romans send messages by writing them on a tablet and sending them along the Roman roads by a network called Tabellari Messenger. That is, a slave takes the verbal message – complete with the requisite smilies – to its recipient. An adult needs to watch this twice to get all the references to BlackBerry Messenger. Of course, some might point to this system's alleged use in this summer's British riots. Perhaps that was all the fault of Horrible Histories.

But I doubt it: kids addicted to this programme would be more likely to be trying to memorise a song that names all the monarchs of England since William the Conqueror (one that should make the Tories happy there!) or collecting the full series of original books from Savage Stone Age to Blitzed Brits. Although it's impossible to achieve that goal because Deary keeps adding to them, endlessly spinning new variants on a winning formula. Only when he runs out of gruesome "R" words will he be done with the Romans – you can already get both Rotten Romans and Ruthless Romans.

I have wondered if the show's premise and popularity comes from Brits' happy pessimism, there comic dark streak. (Think for a moment of Monty Python or one of England's greatest poets, Philip Larkin, who famously said: "Deprivation is for me what daffodils were for Wordsworth.")

I doubt something like Horrible Histories would fly in the US. Too much celebratory and triumphant history dominates the popular view. But I certainly can see some great episodes based on robber barons, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, anti-communism, Henry Ford, slavery, and more!

The Genesis of Jesus Rock: An Interview with David W. Stowe

2011-12-28T07:12:00.001-05:00

[Crossposted at Religion in American History]

Randall Stephens

David W. Stowe is a professor of American Studies and Religious Studies at Michigan State University. He has written on jazz history, hymns, and rock music. Stowe is the author of a wide range of books and articles, including Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America (Harvard University Press, 1996); How Sweet the Sound: Music in the Spiritual Lives of Americans (Harvard University Press, 2004); and, most recently, No Sympathy for the Devil: Christian Pop Music and the Transformation of American Evangelicalism (Harvard University Press, 2011). Below I interview Stowe about his excellent new book and his insights into Jesus rock and the culture of conservative evangelicalism.

Randall Stephens: What drew you to the topic of the roots of Christian rock?

David W. Stowe: I was intrigued by the historical moment of the early Seventies—1971 to be exact—when it seemed popular music and youth culture were saturated in allusions to Jesus Christ: Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar, several Top 40 songs with Jesus in their titles or verses. Why had the Son of God seemingly taken over U.S. popular culture at just that moment—when the countercultural energies of the Sixties were metamorphosing into something new? And did this music play some role in reshaping American culture during the Age of Reagan and beyond?

These struck me as questions worth trying to answer. There was a personal angle as well. I came of age during the Seventies and have always been fascinated by that decade, which I remember now as if it were some kind of dream. So Christian pop music—of which I was completely oblivious until about 15 years ago—was a lens through which to make sense of that strange interlude between Kent State and the Reagan Revolution.

Stephens: Why did a Christian analogue to rock music develop when and where it did?

Stowe: Like many forms of the Sixties counterculture, Christian rock first emerged in California. More precisely Orange County, the epicenter of what was dubbed the Jesus Movement. It was at Calvary Chapel in Costa Mesa where Chuck Smith famously teamed up with über-Jesus freak Lonnie Frisbee. Larry Norman came out of the Bay Area and had a major impact as well. But it’s important to note that the West Coast didn’t have a monopoly on Jesus music. The Rez Band (still in business) originated in

Milwaukee and made a very successful debut run across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. CCM guitar hero Phil Keaggy did a stint at Love Inn in upstate New York. [Check out the McCartney, Ram-esque Keaggy song in the youtube clip here.] So this Jesus Movement—and the music that went with it—was a national phenomenon.

Stephens: You focus quite a bit of attention on apocalypticism. How did end-times views shape Christian rock and, even, politics?

Stowe: Apocalyptic themes had bounced around in American pop music since early Dylan—“A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall”—and Barry McGuire’s surprise number-one hit of 1965, “Eve of Destruction.” A sense of living in end times tinged the late Sixties counterculture—a certain Cold War fatalism permeated American society for decades--so it made sense that an apocalyptic mindset would filter into the Jesus Movement. Among other things, it makes a catchy theme for a lyric. Witness Larry Norman’s most famous song: “Children died, the days grew cold/A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold/I wish we’d all been ready. . . .” read on>>>

The Classics in Crisis

2011-12-26T06:24:00.004-05:00

Randall Stephens

Over at the NYRB Mary Beard worries that when it comes to the future of the classics "the basic message is a gloomy one." ("Do the Classics Have a Future?" January 12, 2012.) With some horror she writes that "Literally hundreds of books, articles, reviews, and Op-Ed pieces have appeared over the last ten years or so, with titles like 'The Classics in Crisis,' 'Can the Classics Survive?,' 'Who Killed Homer?,' 'Why America Needs the Classical Tradition,' and 'Saving the Classics from Conservatives.'" It all sounds like similar lamentations about the humanities in general, which we have covered here, here, and here.

Beard turns turns questions about decline back on themselves. "What drives us so insistently to examine the 'state' of the classics," she wonders, "and to buy books that lament their decline?" In Beard's view, notes about decline tell us as much about what people think about the classics and what they think about their own era. Reports "on the decline of the classics are not commentaries upon it, they are debates within it: they are in part the expressions of the loss and longing and the nostalgia that have always tinged classical studies." We see our own predicament and the direction of history in the study of the ancients.

In the end, she offers a good defense for the humanities by way of the classics. (Her argument is not unlike those made by Anthony Grafton and others in the NYRB.) "The important cultural point is that some people should have read Virgil and Dante," concludes Beard. "To put it another way, the overall strength of the classics is not to be measured by exactly how many young people know Latin and Greek from high school or university. It is better measured by asking how many believe that there should be people in the world who do know Latin and Greek, how many people think that there is an expertise in that worth taking seriously—and ultimately paying for."

End-of-Semester Hiatus: Holiday Edition

2011-12-12T04:17:00.005-05:00

Randall Stephens

I'm flying over to Norway today to begin my Fulbright. I hope to post occasional dispatches from the land of the 9:30am sunrise. (I've stocked up on vitamin D.) So, we'll be back up and running as soon as things are settled across the water.

But in the meantime, check out these HS posts and others on Christmas, holidays, and general festivus.

"The Worst Christmas Music," The Onion, AV Staff, December 2, 2011

Historiann, “White Christmas” and A Christmas Story, December 11, 2011

"Yuletide Roundup," December 24, 2010, HS blog

Randall Stephens, "December 31st, 1759: Guinness Inceptum," December 31, 2010, HS blog

Paul Harvey, "Jewish Consumer Rites: Tracing Hanukkah's Roots to Cincinnati and Charleston," December 5, 2010, Religion in American History blog

Randall Stephens, "A Trippy, Merry Christmas" December 24, 2010, Religion in American History blog

"Hannah's Yorkshire Christmas Pie," December 22, 2009, Georgian London

Presidential History Roundup

2011-12-09T07:53:00.004-05:00

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Ari Berman, "In Osawatomie, Obama Embraces New Populist Moment," The Nation, December 6, 2011

. . . . Obama’s pivot away from austerity orthodoxy and toward public investment began with his jobs speech in September, but he’s subsequently sharpened his language and focus in recent months in response to pressure from Occupy Wall Street. He’s now tackling issues of basic fairness and attacking the GOP’s brand of “your-on-your-own economics” in a much more direct way. His nod to Teddy Roosevelt, who delivered his “New Nationalism” speech in Osawatomie in 1910, could not have come at a more appropriate time.>>>

Adam Hochschild, "What Gingrich Didn’t Learn in Congo," New York Times, December 4, 2011

. . . . Mr. Gingrich would be our first president with a Ph.D. since Woodrow Wilson. Does his work as a historian tell us anything about him? Or, for that matter, anything about why, despite certain events in 1776, he considers “anticolonial” an epithet? To address these questions, a good place to start is his 1971 Tulane doctoral dissertation: “Belgian Education Policy in the Congo 1945-1960.”>>>

Lolly Bowean, "Piece of history rescued from time: Restorers give new life to 146-year-old copy of 13th Amendment," Chicago Tribune, December 7, 2011

In the moments after a hand-printed copy of the congressional resolution approving a 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution signed by Abraham Lincoln arrived at a South Loop graphic conservation firm, six staff members stood in silence, staring at the historic document.

Even with its wrinkles and creases, the 146-year-old artifact with faint, cursive writing that abolished slavery in the United States carried an emotional intensity.>>>

Kevin Opsahl, "USU lecturers talk about LDS presidential hopefuls in U.S. history," the Herald Journal, December 3, 2011

Two academics who spoke at Utah State University this week said they believe the "Mormon question" confronting voters in the 2012 Republican primary race is still present but not as strong as it was in 2008, when Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney failed in his quest for the GOP nomination.

The comments came Thursday when USU's Religious Studies program hosted a discussion between Newell Bringhurst, a retired professor of history and political science at College of the Sequoias and a liberal Democrat, and Craig Foster, a research specialist in the LDS Church's Family History Library and a conservative Republican.>>>

"Dec. 6, 1923: Calvin Coolidge Delivers First Presidential Address on Radio," December 6, 2011, New York Times Blog

On Dec. 6, 1923, the first presidential address was broadcast on the radio. President Calvin Coolidge delivered what is now known as the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress.

The New York Times anticipated Coolidge’s address in its Dec. 5 edition: “The voice of President Coolidge, addressing Congress tomorrow, will be carried over a greater portion of the United States and will be heard by more people than the voice of any man in history.”>>>

Class Project Part 2: Moswetuset Hummock

2011-12-08T10:08:00.009-05:00

Randall Stephens

About a year and a half ago I worked with students in my Critical Reading in History Class to create a history resource website for the Josiah Quincy House (a beautiful, well-preserved home, built in 1770 and just about a block from our main campus.) The work paid off. I blogged about it here and here. The local paper, the Patriot Ledger, even ran a full-page color story on it, interviewing me and the students. What's even better . . . that story in the paper, and our website, greatly boosted attendance at the historic home the summer after the semester ended.

This fall, with a new crop of students in the same class, we mulled over ideas for a similar project. We considered doing a website resource for a couple sites that no longer exist (the Quincy National Sailors Home and the Quincy Family Mansion, which used to grace our campus.) We also thought about doing a project on another old house in town (the Dorothy Quincy Homestead.)

In the end they chose to do their project on the Moswetuset Hummock, a patch of land/outcropping on a hill north of Wollaston beach. "Moswetuset," writes junior Austin Steelman, who took a lead on the project, means "'shaped like an arrowhead,' was the name of the Moswetuset or Massachusett Native American tribe from which the Commonwealth of Massachuesetts derives its name. The thickly-wooded hill was the summer seat of the tribe’s Sachem Chickatabot because of its view of the surrounding area and proximity to the bay, salt marshes, and the Blue Hills. It was here that Chickatabot met with Myles Standish of the Plymouth Colony in 1621 as the colonists began their early trade with the Indians."

This was quite a different project from the website we created for the Josiah Quincy House. Materials on the Hummock were much more spare. It was more challenging for them to find materials through Google Books, JSTOR, or just on the shelves of our library. Yet the students were certainly up to the challenge. They took photos and videos of the site. They collected maps, prints, and put together an extensive bibliography. Alex Foran, a journalism major, interviewed James Cameron, an emeritus professor of history here who has written extensively on local history and has done some work on the Moswetuset Hummock. A couple of the students made a pilgrimage to the Quincy Historical Society to gather maps and prints and to ask some good questions. While there they discovered a manuscript on the hummock that was written by none other than prof Cameron! With Cameron's blessing that MS is now on the site as a pdf.

Once again, this class effort was well worth it. I'm glad I got over my initial skepticism about group projects. Students seem to learn a great deal about research, hunting down evidence, and how best to present that to the broader public.

Spotting Anachronisms and the Development of Historical Consciousness

2011-12-07T09:15:00.005-05:00

Randall Stephens

In the forthcoming January 2012 issue of Historically Speaking Donald Yerxa interviews Zachary S. Schiffman. In Schiffman's new book, The Birth of the Past (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), he looks at how the past emerged in the West—a past that was more than just before the present, but different from the present.

The interview and Schiffman's accompanying essay remind me of David Lowenthal's The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985). "Historical insight has indeed progressed," wrote Lowenthal in his now-classic text. "Awareness of the past as a web of contingent events subject to unceasing re-evaluation supplant notions of a predestined unfolding or moral chronicle. Antiquity no longer automatically confers power or prestige, nor do primordial origins seem the sole key to destiny's secrets. The old exemplary use of the past 'has been undermined, battered and exploded by the growth of history itself'"(364). Moderns are attuned to anachronisms in ways that premoderns were not. That cell phone, fax machine, Prius, or electric guitar does not belong in that 16th-century woodcut print. (I include one of my 19th-century Star Wars pics I created recently to have fun with this idea. [I saw another photoshopper do something similar.] It's not so far off from how things operate at a Renaissance Fair, where a friend told me he recently spotted some dudes decked out in Star Wars gear.)

Yerxa asks Schiffman to explain some of the outlines of historical thinking in the interview.

Yerxa: Would you distinguish among several notions that often get sloshed together in our thinking and writing: the past, anachronism, historical consciousness, and historicism?

Schiffman: “The past” is a very tricky term, largely because it is so commonplace. On this account, I find it useful to distinguish between “the past” as the time before the present, and “the past” as a time different from the

present. Priority in time does not automatically entail difference, and it is the sense of difference that constitutes “the past” as a conceptual entity. . . .

The distinction between past and present calls to mind the idea of anachronism, another tricky term. An anachronism is, purely and simply, something taken out of historical context—think of the “Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch,” a plot device in the faux-medieval comedy, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. An idea of anachronism is an awareness of things taken out of context—hence the hand-grenade scene in Monty Python strikes us as “funny,” in every sense of the word. And this scene also demonstrates that the idea of anachronism can manifest itself in many different ways, not simply by the scrupulous avoidance anachronisms but also by the wanton indulgence in them. That the indulgence in anachronisms need not be funny—in any sense of the word—is demonstrated by the Renaissance idea of the “living past,” which at one and the same time accepts and transcends the distinction between past and present. For the humanists, this distinction evoked a gap—what Barkan calls the “sparking distance”—that inspired a dynamic interaction with the classical tradition.

The idea of anachronism brings us to a consideration of “historicism,” a term that has occasioned many disputes and much misunderstanding because it weaves together diverse strands of thought, each with its own long, complicated history. On this account, I find Friedrich Meinecke’s definition of historicism as the nexus of the ideas of individuality and development to be the most simple and elegant, for it precludes having to trace historicism’s many strands back to their beginnings. Meinecke located this nexus in the late 18th century, but some scholars have challenged this interpretation, claiming that there was a Renaissance historicism born of the idea of anachronism, which engendered an acute sense of historical and cultural relativism. However, as I realized many years ago in my dissertation, an idea of anachronism simply constitutes an awareness of individuality, which does not necessarily entail one of development. Ironically, Meinecke’s definition of historicism has led me to a conclusion that would have caused him to roll over in his grave, namely that a sustained sense of the difference between past and present was born of Cartesian relational thinking before “the past” became historicized in the late 18th century. . . .

How might history teachers use creative anachronisms to talk with students about historical thinking? Could we develop a Where's the Anachronistic Waldo games that exercise the historical part of the brain?

Weighing Scholarship

2011-12-06T09:07:00.004-05:00

Randall Stephens

On this blog we've looked at the issue of assessment, standards, and weighing scholarship here, here, and here. But I'm willing to bet that nothing we've posted will come close to stirring the kind of controversy and debate that Mark Bauerlein's essay in the Chronicle will likely provoke ("The Research Bust," December 4). The amount of time that literary studies scholars spend on articles and books, he says, just isn't paying off. One major problem: overproduction.

"However much they certify their authors as professionals and win them jobs and tenure, essays and books of high scholarly merit in literary studies suffer the same inattention all the time" observes Bauerlein. He goes on:

Why? Because after four decades of mountainous publication, literary studies has reached a saturation point, the cascade of research having exhausted most of the subfields and overwhelmed the capacity of individuals to absorb the annual output. Who can read all of the 80 items of scholarship that are published on George Eliot each year? After 5,000 studies of Melville since 1960, what can the 5,001st say that will have anything but a microscopic audience of interested readers?*

He knows that it's a controversial point. He uses Google Scholar to track citations. (See the lively comments section.) Doubters will point out, writes Bauerlein, that this is a flat-footed approach, which does not take in the larger contribution of scholarship. Some will say that research makes scholars into better teachers. And others will point out that we need lots of work on subjects that will not draw major attention. That does not mean that the work is useless or can be tossed aside. Still, Bauerlein counters, these objections hardly justify a college or university paying 1/3 of a salary for work that doesn't have a significant impact.

Could this same sort of assessment be on the table for historians? (Get ready to figure out how to amp up your Google Scholar stats.) How should administrators and reformers measure impact or influence? Should they be doing so at all?

Anniversaries and Birthdays, 2012

2011-12-05T09:48:00.006-05:00

Randall Stephens

2012 marks "the bicentenary of Dickens's birth, and the planned programme of events is huge," writes Dinah Birch in the TLS.

It will reach far beyond the literary world, encompassing exhibitions, debates, documentaries, theatrical performances, public readings, and television and radio programmes. Films will include a major new Great Expectations. In Houston, there is to be a half-marathon especially for Dickens enthusiasts. No one with a taste for history, books, public events, or dressing up need feel left out.

Dickens shares his birth year with Dorothea Dix, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, and Harriet Martineau. But to paraphrase The Smiths, some names are bigger than others. These others will generate relatively minor celebrations as compared with Dickens birthday. As far as I know, though, the adjectives "Dumasian" or "Hugoian" do not roll off the tongue or conjure a whole range of ideas. Why do we commemorate and celebrate what we do? What make some events, birthdays more important than others?

What other anniversaries can we expect will be celebrated/commemorated in 2012? (The following sampling is collected from historyorb.com)

1852

Mar 20th - Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" published (Boston)

May 18th - Massachusetts rules all school-age children must attend school

1912

Feb 8th - 1st eastbound US transcontinental flight lands in Jacksonville, Fla

Apr 2nd - Sun Yet Sen forms Guomindang-Party in China

Apr 15th - Titanic sinks at 2:27 AM off Newfoundland

Sep 27th - W C Handy publishes "Memphis Blues"

Oct 8th - 1st Balkan War begins - Montenegro declares war on Turkey

1952

Feb 7 – Elizabeth II is proclaimed Queen of the United Kingdom

Mar 27th - Sun Records of Memphis begins releasing records

May 8th - Mad Magazine debuts

Nov 4th - Eisenhower (R) elected 34th pres beating Adlai Stevenson (D)

A Plea for Maritime History

2011-12-02T08:12:00.004-05:00

Heather Cox Richardson

“Difficulty between the United States and Great Britain about Wild Pigs.”

How can anyone not love a title like that? It’s from the New York Times, May 23, 1854, p. 4. The story explains that American whalemen had killed a few wild pigs on one of the Falkland Islands and that England and America were at a diplomatic breaking point over the incident. According to the article, American fishermen had stocked the islands with hogs thirty years before, and hunted them for food when they were fishing in the area. The French had introduced cattle to one of the islands with the same purpose. The problem now arose because the British crown now claimed possession of the Falklands, and all the animals on them.

In February 1854, the commander of the H. M. S. Express arrested the captains of two American vessels for the crime of killing thirty wild pigs the previous year. He took the captured fishing schooners to Port William, where apparently the ships were to be sold for the value of the pigs and to pay the fine for the crime of killing the animals. The effort was a fiasco, it seems. The American consul at Port William called over a warship from the coast of Brazil; the trial revealed that no one really knew who was where, when, and what laws applied anyway (the only longstanding rule on the books was against killing “cattle, &c.,” forcing the prosecutors to try to argue that a “wild pig” fell under the “&c.” part of that rule). It wasn’t even clear how many pigs had been killed. Ultimately, one of the American captains was fined, a cost he paid under protest.

The message of the crisis was clear to the newspaper reporter, though:

The English are trying to do here what they attempt everywhere they get an opportunity. They bluster and bully, and claim what they please to, and if their claim is admitted very well—they will then negotiate, and let you, for a handsome consideration, enjoy what was your own before.

The message of the crisis is also clear to this historian: Why on earth isn’t maritime history more popular? Admittedly, the death of a few wild pigs might be of enormous historical significance itself, but looking into it does suggest that there is a whole world of history out there that isn’t getting the attention it deserves. The crisis over the pigs illuminates on ongoing contest between the claims of landholders and fishermen to resources, a contest that stretched throughout the nineteenth century and that was key both to the construction of nations and to their interactions with other countries. The Falkland Islands, for example, changed hands so many times in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that when I looked up their history I stopped trying to keep track. And a leading American newspaper highlighted the story of the wild pigs and interpreted it as a major development in the nation’s relationship with England.

Politics and economics only begin to dip into what we can seine from maritime history. What about the environment? Wild pigs do enormous damage to the land, as scientists in Hawaii have documented. How did whalemen change local environments by turning them into commissaries? What about communication networks? The same page of the newspaper that yielded the pig story has long columns listing all the ships that had sailed, been seen, or been contacted in the previous two months, their port of call, what they carried, and where they were at the time. It also mentioned collisions and damage to ships. A scholar using GIS could recreate these voyages, and with them the world of maritime trade.

It seems to me likely that interest in maritime history took a dive when the turn-of-the-century expansionism and nationalism of Alfred T. Mahan fell into disfavor. But the fact that early practitioners took their studies in a direction that is no longer popular is no reason to ignore the history of human interaction with what amounts to about seventy percent of the earth’s surface.

Roundup: TED Talks by Historians

2011-12-01T06:48:00.000-05:00

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David Christian: Big History, April 2011

Backed by stunning illustrations, David Christian narrates a complete history of the universe, from the Big Bang to the Internet, in a riveting 18 minutes. This is "Big History": an enlightening, wide-angle look at complexity, life and humanity, set against our slim share of the cosmic timeline.

George Dyson: The Birth of the Computer, June 2008

Historian George Dyson tells stories from the birth of the modern computer -- from its 17th-century origins to the hilarious notebooks of some early computer engineers.

Alice Dreger: Is Anatomy Destiny? June 2011

Alice Dreger works with people at the edge of anatomy, such as conjoined twins and intersexed people. In her observation, it's often a fuzzy line between male and female, among other anatomical distinctions. Which brings up a huge question: Why do we let our anatomy determine our fate?

Niall Ferguson: The 6 Killer Apps of Prosperity, September 2011

Over the past few centuries, Western cultures have been very good at creating general prosperity for themselves. Historian Niall Ferguson asks: Why the West, and less so the rest? He suggests half a dozen big ideas from Western culture — call them the 6 killer apps — that promote wealth, stability and innovation. And in this new century, he says, these apps are all shareable.

Edward Tenner: Unintended Consequences, September 2011

Every new invention changes the world — in ways both intentional and unexpected. Historian Edward Tenner tells stories that illustrate the under-appreciated gap between our ability to innovate and our ability to foresee the consequences.

Jared Diamond: Why Societies Collapse, October 2008

Why do societies fail? With lessons from the Norse of Iron Age Greenland, deforested Easter Island and present-day Montana, Jared Diamond talks about the signs that collapse is near, and how -- if we see it in time -- we can prevent it.

An Interview with Historian of Religion Paul Harvey

2011-11-30T09:57:00.004-05:00

Randall Stephens

From the new issue of Historically Speaking . . .

Paul Harvey is professor of history at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. Harvey is a historian of American religion and has written broadly on race, the South, and the U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries. He’s the author of Redeeming the South: Religious Cultures and Racial Identities Among Southern Baptists, 1865-1925 (University of North Carolina Press, 1997); and Freedom’s Coming: Religious Culture and the Shaping of the South from the Civil War through the Civil Rights Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). With Edward J. Blum he has written the forthcoming Jesus in Red, White, and Black (University of North Carolina Press).

Historically Speaking editor Randall Stephens recently caught up with Harvey to speak with him about the field of African-American religious history, teaching, and his new book Through the Storm, Through the Night: A History of African American Christianity (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011).

Randall J. Stephens: Could you say something about how historians wrote about African-American Christianity fifty years ago and how they write about it now?

Paul Harvey: Historians, at least white historians, mostly didn’t write about African-American Christianity fifty years ago. Black scholars did, of course, and fifty years ago the works of sociologists like E. Franklin Frazier dominated the field. Those scholars tended to be highly critical of what they called “the black church,” a term that was invented by 20th- century sociologists. They often saw “the black church” as either hopelessly other- worldly, peddling enthusiasm and a desperate eschatology rather than substantive improvements in the lives of their congregants, or (in the case of more well-established urban churches) too concerned with protecting bourgeois comforts to address the real issues facing most African Americans. Fifty years, ago, liberation theology and “black theology” were just beginning to take root in works such as Howard Thurman’s Jesus of the Dispossessed, a classic of 20th-century American theology. And of course Martin Luther King’s writings were just starting to enter the public realm, culminating with “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in 1963. But in terms of scholarly works, the broader historical community basically knew nothing about African-American religious history.

Obviously we’ve come a long way since then; the same revolution in social history that affected all other fields of history in the 1960s and 1970s shaped the writing of African-American history as well. The 1970s were the real years of landmark achievements, especially with the publication of Albert Raboteau’s Slave Religion (very well known at the time) and Mechal Sobel’s Trabelin’ On (less well known then and now, but a brilliant if sometimes rather eccentric book). Over the next decade or two, studies of religion during and after slavery poured forth, and in my own early work I tried to contribute to that by pushing forward studies of African-American religion in time, focusing on the years after the Civil War. Most recently, scholars such as Curtis Evans (The Burden of Black Religion) and Barbara Savage (Their Spirits Walk Among Us) have challenged us to question the very terms that have defined the field, including “the black church,” which are intellectual constructs of a very particular period rather than historical realities themselves. This kind of challenge really hit the public realm when Eddie Glaude published a short piece called “The Black Church is Dead” for the Huffington Post. Glaude’s piece suggested that contemporary black churches had lost their prophetic voice, and that black parishioners were gravitating toward gospel-of-prosperity preachers that celebrate American capitalism in a way that would shock a figure such as Martin Luther King. That piece generated such a controversy that it hit the New York Times. I begin my book by talking about the piece and the arguments that ensued from it.

Stephens: How do you think historians will be treating black religion fifty years from now?

Harvey: In the epilogue to my book I suggest a couple of themes that relate here: diversification and re-Africanization of African-American religion. The same trends of immigration and pluralism that have affected all of American religion apply to African-American religion as well. Churches with African immigrant congregants and pastors are becoming increasingly prominent in New York and other urban areas, and they will eventually spread to smaller cities and to the South. Many of these feature the kinds of spirit possessions, exorcisms, and supernatural theology that African- American church leaders in the 19th century tried to drive out of their church life; they saw them as too primitive. Catholicism is also an increasingly important part of black religious life, in part because of Afro-Carribean Catholic immigrants (most obviously Haitians, but black Brazilians and others as well). Then, too, Islam continues to exert a major influence, and draws a substantial number of black American converts, as well as African immigrants who come from Islamic traditions. In fifty years historians will be discussing how a once overwhelmingly Protestant group of black churchgoers became much more diverse. This is “back to the future” territory, because that is the kind of religious diversity with which Africans began their enforced sojourn in the Americas.

Stephens: Did your teaching of African-American history influence you as you wrote the book?

Harvey: My teaching always influences my books, and vice versa, so the short answer is yes. Perhaps even more so for this book, which is meant for classroom use. I had in mind while writing it, “What exactly should my students, or any students in a typical class, know about the particular subject I’m writing about here?” I tried to focus on those essentials and avoid some of the more arcane or esoteric points and debates that my other books have spent much more time on. I also tried hard to write a pretty traditional historical narrative, showing some of the basic stuff historians want to show— change over time, diversity, complexity, etc.

Stephens: What was it like to write for a more general audience? >>> Read on at Project Muse

The Meaning of National Boundaries

2011-11-29T07:54:00.001-05:00

Heather Cox Richardson

In a recent quest to explore American maritime history, I tumbled across Joshua M. Smith’s Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783-1820. Smith tells the story of smuggling in Passamaquoddy Bay at the mouth of the St. Croix River between Maine and New Brunswick. As he explores what smuggling meant to those involved, he also investigates the attempts of different governments to enforce boundaries. That, in turn, got me to thinking about just how malleable national boundaries really are.

In retrospect, that seems like a no-brainer, and probably is for most historians. But I’m accustomed to thinking of national boundaries as lines that divide land, demarcations that are often as stark in reality as they are on a map. In The Medicine Line: Life and Death on a North American Borderland, Beth LaDow explored the meaning of a hundred miles of border between Montana and Saskatchewan. She showed the power of national boundaries to change the fortunes of people escaping from the law on either side of the border. Most notably, perhaps, Sitting Bull and his people crossed that “medicine line” after the Battle of Little Bighorn, escaping to Canada to avoid the wrath of the U.S. soldiers sent to hunt them.

With examples like that in front of me, land boundaries have always seemed terribly clear.

Somehow, seeing Smith illustrate the concept of a boundary through water rather than land brought home just how hard it is to delineate a marker between nations. Men who smuggled in Passamaquoddy Bay spent very little time worrying about where the boundaries were, just as people who fish today often work hard not to notice when they “drift” into foreign waters. An artificial boundary dividing the bay had very little meaning for the everyday lives of people in Passamaquoddy, except when governments got involved.

That sudden realization—dawn breaks over Marblehead!—got me to thinking about national boundaries in general. To what extent are they entirely artificial, reflecting the wishes of a central state rather than the realities of life on a borderland? To what extent is the idea of a national boundary a modern concept? And if it is a recent idea, will it continue to be relevant as technology continues to break down borders?

Maybe I’m behind the curve on this idea, but it’s sure got me thinking . . .

KKK Books and the Direction of History

2011-11-28T08:06:00.003-05:00

Randall Stephens

[The following is a cross-post from the Religion in American History blog.]

Over at the New York Times, Kevin Boyle reviews two books on the Klan. Fellow blogmeister Kelly Baker's Gospel According to the Klan: The KKK’s Appeal to Protestant America, 1915-1930 is one of them along with Thomas R. Pegram's One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.

The authors take different tacks. "While Pegram builds his book up from the experiences of ordinary Klansmen," writes Boyle, Baker "builds out from the Klan’s official declarations of religious devotion drawn from K.K.K. newspapers and magazines." What did the Klan's rise and fall mean? Was it an anomaly of the era or did it represent something darker, more continuous with America's past?

"Yes, the Klan had a very short life," says Boyle. He goes on:

But it has to be understood, [Baker] contends, as of a piece with other moments of fevered religious nationalism, from the anti-Catholic riots of the antebellum era to modern anti-Islam bigots. Indeed, earlier this year, Herman Cain declared that he wouldn’t be comfortable with a Muslim in his cabinet. It’s tempting to see those moments as Pegram does the Klan: desperate, even pitiful attempts to stop the inevitable broadening of American society. But Baker seems closer to the mark when she says that there’s a dark strain of bigotry and exclusion running through the national experience. Sometimes it seems to weaken.

These books and Boyle's review bring up some weighty issues within American historiography.

How do historians and religious studies scholars generally see these episodes within the context of the arc of American history? Whig historians, of one variety or another, view them as bumps or potholes on the road to freedom and greater equality. Prigs look at them as something more, throwing the whole idea of progress up into the air. (Of course there are all sorts of opinions on the spectrum, shading from one end to the other. Historians need not even be aware of their own views on the subject. See Christopher Shannon's critique of the profession, which we published in Historically Speaking some months ago.)

Take Slavery. How does it fit into the narrative of US history? In 1980 historian John David Smith wrote in the Journal of Negro History that "The importance of slavery in the racial thought of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has been vastly understated by scholars. Yet slavery held an unusual attraction for historians, popular writers, editors, and polemicists in these years." His piece marked a trend in the field. Slavery, historians now wrote, should be taken seriously as integral to the economy and to life in the 19th century. The PBS series Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery spelled out this theme for a wider audience and included talking head historians like Eric Foner, James Horton, and Nell Irvan Painter. Says Foner, "Slavery was an immense political power in the country, as well as an economic power. The three-fifths clause of the Constitution gave the slave South far greater representation in Congress, and a far larger number of electoral votes, than their white population really would have been entitled to. So the South really had an iron grip on the federal government, down to the middle of the 19th century."*

Other historians have been grappling with the issue of religious freedom/intolerance in ways that parallel Baker's approach. How does one chart the story of religious pluralism and religious bigotry? On this matter David Sehat sees a bleak side to America's past. "What if U.S. religious history was not a history of progressive and unfolding freedom?" he asks in his The Myth of American Religious Freedom. "What if, instead, it was a history of religious conflict? And what if that conflict involved extended periods of religious coercion and the continual attempt to maintain religious power and control?"

On the 19th century Protestant establishment an essay by Ronald P. Formisano and Stephen Pickering sheds some light (or, I guess I should say darkness?): “The Christian Nation Debate and Witness Competency,” in the Journal of the Early Republic. Most importantly, they note:

Historians have examined closely the Founders’ intentions regarding the First Amendment’s religious establishment clause as well as the influence of Protestant Christianity in the public life of the early republic. The new national government, and particularly several states, often breached Jefferson’s “wall of separation” between church and state. . . . In courtrooms across the country, well into the nineteenth century, judges allowed witnesses to be questioned regarding their religious beliefs, with some requiring belief in the “future state” doctrine of divine rewards and punishments before permitting them to testify.

Of course, one generation's dark moments are another's beacons of truth. From where we stand in 2011, we judge and think about the past in ways that are profoundly different from the perspective of historians and religious studies scholars half a century ago. (Think Mircea Eliade.)

If we pull back and gauge the whole, what is American history in general or American religious history in particular about? Do either have a direction or a larger point? What if--as Paul Harvey asked in his review of the PBS documentary God in America--"American religious history [is] about coercion and authority? . . . [W]hat if we make coercion, establishment, and repression as central to our narrative as freedom, disestablishment, and expression? What if this is a show in which Americans’ self-understanding as derived from Exodus is more critically examined than celebrated?"

A Seat at the Table of the Nation

2011-11-22T14:28:00.005-05:00

Steven Cromack

Thanksgiving approaches. In schools across the country, students are learning about the Pilgrims with their black buckle hats, the Indians with their feathers, and a feast in which both groups came together in peace and harmony. At this first thanksgiving, both groups celebrated the bountiful blessings of company and friendship, while the Pilgrims gave thanks to their gracious God. Students learn of the first thanksgiving proclamation made by President Washington, and that, since then, Thanksgiving has become part of our national tradition.

The reality is that the Thanksgiving holiday, as we know it today, comes from Sara Josepha Hale, a nineteenth-century journalist, who petitioned President Lincoln for a national day of thanks, and singlehandedly linked giving thanks with eating turkey and pies.

Although many attribute the first thanksgiving to the Pilgrims, that celebration was nothing more than a harvest festival. In his book, We Gather Together: The Story of Thanksgiving, anthropologist Ralph Linton outlined the harvest festivals celebrated in the Old World. In the Hebrew, Greek, Roman, Scottish, Irish, Dutch, English, and Slavic traditions, there appears an annual harvest festival of feasting and giving thanks. In the same way, the Pilgrims, who carried with them their Old World traditions, were naturally going to have harvest festivals and give thanks for their blessings.

In 1895, Reverend William DeLoss Love wrote a comprehensive history of the New England harvest festivals. He noted that the 1621 event, “was not a thanksgiving at all, judged by their Puritan customs, which they kept in 1621; but as we look back upon it after nearly three centuries, it seems so wonderfully like the day we love that we claim it as the progenitor of our harvest feasts” (69). Reverend Love, instead, would have more realistically been familiar with the events of a few decades earlier and one prominent journalist.

Nineteenth-century journalist Sara Josepha Hale invented the thanksgiving that exists today. Hale was the editor of Godey’s Lady's Book, the nation’s premiere magazine for nineteenth-century women. In it, she published numerous editorials urging the nation to set aside the last Thursday in November as a day of thanks. In the September 1860 edition of Godey, Hale wrote, “THANKSGIVING—the new National Holiday.—We must advert once more to this grand object of nationalizing Thanksgiving Day, by adopting, as a permanent rule, the last Thursday in November in all the States.” In addition to this one, she had published similar petitions in Godey’s since 1855. One reader wrote Hale in November of 1859, “DEAR MADAM: Your admirable suggestions in relation to the simultaneous observance of Thanksgiving Day over the whole Union have, before this, made a deep, and, let us trust, an abiding impression in the most influential and desirable quarters.” Hale also published a cookbook titled Mrs. Hale’s New Cook Book, with recipes for turkey and sweet potatoes. In an effort to make permanent her desire for a national holiday, she wrote over forty years worth of letters to governors and presidents.

Finally, in 1863, President Lincoln recognized the political advantage to having a national day of thanks. In 1863, he declared, “I do, therefore, invite my fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea and those who are sojourning in foreign lands, to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the heavens.” For Lincoln, appealing to the nation and God to give thanks was an attempt to start a healing process for a nation still embroiled in a bloody Civil War. In 1864, Lincoln made a similar proclamation. After Lincoln’s assassination, Hale wrote President Johnson and made the same request. As a result, every president following Lincoln, because of Hale’s letter writing, made thanksgiving proclamations in November. Thanksgiving, therefore, became a yearly tradition with Lincoln’s 1863 proclamation. Congress finally made Thanksgiving a national holiday in 1941.

It is because of Sara Josepha Hale, not the Pilgrims, that we eat turkey on the last Thursday of November. Thanksgiving only became a yearly tradition in the mid nineteenth-century. Her four-decade campaign changed the nation, and yet, not one American history textbook even mentions her enormous contribution to our tradition. Hale used Thanksgiving to bring the nation together. She wrote in 1857, “Last year, nearly all States and Territories united on that day. This year, we trust, there will be no blank in this number, nor a seat left vacant at the Table of the Nation.”

Further Reading:

Excerpts of Hale’s editorials, as well as letters written to her by readers, are online:
http://www.uvm.edu/~hag/godey/shtable/shtable-thanks.html

William DeLoss Love, The Fast and Thanksgiving Days of New England. New York:
Houghton-Mifflin, 1895.

Holiday Hiatus

2011-11-21T21:25:00.004-05:00

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The HS blog is on a brief hiatus for the holiday. Enjoy these past posts on Thanksgiving.

Heather Cox Richardson, "The History of National Thanksgiving," November 25, 2010

Heather Cox Richardson, "Pre-Holiday Stress Relief," November 24, 2010

Randall Stephens, "Rebunking the Pilgrims?" November 24, 2009

Historical Maps Roundup

2011-11-18T05:09:00.001-05:00

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Amy Standen, "New Water Map Washes Away An Urban Legend," KQED, October 29

A new, revised map of San Francisco has hit the stands. It's not a street map or a bus map; it's a map of the city's underground waterways, and it includes a change to what could be San Francisco's oldest urban legend. The map is the work of creek geologists Janet Sowers and Christopher Richard. They're like water detectives; they hunt for clues of old creeks and marshes that once ran through San Francisco. One mystery has nagged Richard for years.>>>

"UW librarians create digital historical street map," November 15, 2011

WATERLOO REGION — If you squint just right, you can almost imagine what Dearborn Street would have looked like before the University of Waterloo, before the plazas came and the condos appeared.>>>

Agustin Armendariz, "Historic California Maps: The U.S. Geological Survey Adds Over 13,000 Historical Topographic Maps To Its Archive," Huffington Post, November 10, 2011

This week, the U.S. Geological Survey added 13,688 historical California topographic maps to its online archive, hundreds of which date back to the 1800s. From the Gold Rush town of Downieville in the Sierras to El Cajon in the hills above San Diego Bay, the maps provide a picture of California from before the 20th century through the past decade.>>>

Benjamin Sutton, "Historical Map Reveals Location of Brooklyn's Native American Burial Ground," L Magazine, November 2, 2011

The Brooklyn Historical Society has lots of cool old maps, the latest of which it posted yesterday. It's Brooklyn Borough Historian (1944-71) James A. Kelly's 1946 "Indian villages, paths, ponds, and places in Kings County" map, and in addition to known Native American settlements in the borough and the routes connecting them, it also situates a major burial ground smack in the middle of brownstone Brooklyn.>>>

Alumination

2011-11-17T07:24:00.002-05:00

Chris Beneke

Since you’ve paused here to gaze upon this blog, dear web traveler, I presume that you possess some interest in history, and perhaps even for the things previously appearing on this site. From that I will speculate that might enjoy this recently published Boston Globe piece by Chris Marstall on Massachusetts’ aluminum historical markers: “History, Preserved in Sturdy Aluminum: Eighty Years Ago, What Did We Want to Remember about Massachusetts?”

In 1930, Marstall notes, “[s]ome 275 markers were erected … to mark the state’s 300th birthday,” and identify “places which played a leading part in the history of the colony.’” Marstall’s interest in the subject appears to have been sparked by the work of Robert Briere, president of the Sturbridge Historical Society, who is leading an effort to preserve and restore the 81 year-old signs. Another part-time historian, Russell Bixby, is “recording GPS coordinates for the 144 or so markers remaining in place,” which are then displayed with other information at HMDB.org.

Marstall’s piece makes it clear that he’s dealing with historiography, as well as history. The renowned Harvard historian, Samuel Eliot Morison, was responsible for most of the text on the signs, and his goal was to rehabilitate the Puritan image. To this end, Morison portrayed the commonwealth’s founders as “literate community builders, industrialists, and pathmakers,” rather than dogmatic prigs. Morison may have met some modest, temporary success in this regard. But what he could not account for was our judgment on his own work, including the observation that his many commemorations of Puritan and Indian battles severely minimized Indian deaths.*

The article brought to mind the first local historical marker that I recall noticing: a small stone monument that had been erected in a corn field on a back road in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. I was seventeen when I caught my first glimpse of the marker from the passenger side of my buddy’s Toyota Celica. The gently undulating field in which it squatted was not unlike the dozens of others that we rocketed past on the 10-mile trek between our rural homes and the ramshackle gym we frequented. But one summer evening, on the back leg of this teenage orbit, I noticed this greyish stone protrusion. Initially, as we hurtled pass at roughly twice the posted speed limit, I was able to decipher only a word or two. But after several passes, the entire text came into view: “Last Battle of Shays Rebellion was here Feb. 27, 1787.”

I’m pretty sure that I knew almost nothing about Shay’s Rebellion, but the name was familiar enough to trigger the curiosity of someone who prematurely fancied himself to be serious about things that happened in the past. To my adolescent mind, battles were the essence of serious history—you know, Caesar, Napoleon, George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower—all that. I had certainly passed markers before, but this one made an impression. The words engraved on that midget obelisk produced an intimation that my humble corner of the American continent possessed historical significance.

I’ve been an historian too long now to believe that a single sign can have any direct causal impact, like for instance, launching a seventeen-year-old on a career path. But also long enough also to appreciate the debt we owe to the resolute preservers of stone, aluminum and memory.

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* Not coincidentally, Marstall’s article was passed along to me by the incomparable Eric Schultz who blogs about business, innovation, and history at The Occasional CEO and who also happens to have written an excellent book on King Philip’s War.

Digital History Roundup

2011-11-16T09:11:00.005-05:00

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John Markoff, "It Started Digital Wheels Turning," New York Times, November 7, 2011

Researchers in Britain are about to embark on a 10-year, multimillion-dollar project to build a computer — but their goal is neither dazzling analytical power nor

lightning speed. Indeed, if they succeed, their machine will have only a tiny fraction of the computing power of today’s microprocessors. It will rely not on software and silicon but on metal gears and a primitive version of the quaint old I.B.M. punch card. What it may do, though, is answer a question that has tantalized historians for decades: Did an eccentric mathematician named Charles Babbage conceive of the first programmable computer in the 1830s, a hundred years before the idea was put forth in its modern form by Alan Turing?>>>

Ian Johnson, "How to uncover your family's military roots: Digitized records help Canadians leaf out family tree military history," CBC News, November 10, 2011

Researching a family's military history used to be a real challenge, but as more and more paper archives go digital and are transferred to the internet, it's becoming possible for anyone to leaf out a family tree in surprising detail by using a few tricks and knowing where to look. "The biggest thing that's changed is the ability to find digitized documents through simple things like Google and search tools specific to military family histories," says Alex Herd, lead researcher for the Historica-Dominion Institute Memory Project in Toronto that aims to increase the public's knowledge of Canadian history.>>>

Bryan Rosenblithe, "Analyzing history for today: Emerging technologies offer new challenges in the practice of historiography," Columbia Spectator, November 10, 2011

. . . . While it is now widely accepted in the historical profession that current events inform the questions we ask of the past, we are only beginning to come to terms with the profound transformation that digital information is making in every aspect of our lives. A quick comparison of the phrases “digital revolution” with “crisis of capitalism” points to the profundity of both moments and the relatively underdeveloped intellectual apparatus with which we are confronting the issues of our time relative to those of Finley’s day. It is this sense of a radical shift in our way of life coupled with the lack of a vocabulary with which to discuss it that makes the ridiculous statement from Douglas Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, “The digital revolution is far more significant than the invention of writing or even of printing,” appear meaningful.>>>

Dawn Setzer, "Dr. Livingstone's lost 1871 'massacre' diary recovered; discovery rewrites history," UCLA Newsroom, November 1, 2011

In Africa 140 years ago, David Livingstone, the Victorian explorer, met Henry M. Stanley of the New York Herald and gave him a harrowing account of a massacre he witnessed, in which slave traders slaughtered 400 innocent people. Stanley's press reports prompted the British government to close the East African slave trade, secured Livingstone's place in history and launched Stanley's own career as an imperialist in Africa. Today, an international team of scholars and scientists led by Dr. Adrian Wisnicki of Indiana University of Pennsylvania, publishes the results of an 18-month project to recover Livingstone's original account of the massacre. The story, found in a diary that was illegible until it was restored with advanced digital imaging, offers a unique insight into Livingstone's mind during the greatest crisis of his last expedition, on which he would die in 1873.>>>

Leigh Hornbeck, "Papers show daily colonial life: Old records discovered in Charlton home provide a closer look at a past era," Albany Times Union, October 30, 2011

BALLSTON SPA -- A recent donation to the Saratoga County Historian's Office gives a more intimate look than ever before at life in Colonial Charlton. The LaRue family donated 600 papers found inside a box nailed underneath floorboards of the attic floor in their house. They belonged to Joseph LaRue, an ancestor who moved to Saratoga County just before the American Revolution and served as a justice of the peace for 10 years. The collection includes a docket and written testimony from witnesses and defendants, along with records that show small details of 18th-century life often passed over by traditional historians. . . . Ned Porter, a junior from Skidmore College who worked as Roberts' intern over the summer, sorted the papers into categories and created a finding aid -- a document describing the collection -- with every legible name, which can be used by genealogists and others. The next step is to create a digital record so the fragile papers aren't handled more than necessary. Some of the documents are parchment, but most are thick rag paper. All the writing was done with quill pen.>>>

The Guns Will Be Silent

2011-11-15T06:53:00.001-05:00

Philip White

This past week we had a date anomaly – the day, week and month all mirroring each other. But for a small, and ever-dwindling, group of men, the past seven days were significant for a reason far more profound than calendar alignment. They gathered at sites across Europe and America commemorate the moment when, on the 11th hour of the 11th day in the 11th month of 1918, the roaring guns of World War I finally fell silent.

It soon became known as the “Great War,” yet that is ill-fitting in all respects save one – the great sacrifices made by soldiers and their families on both sides. More than 8.5 million died (and a further 21 million were wounded), and their number has been dubbed “The Lost Generation,” to signify the enormous loss of life and potential on the fields of Flanders and beyond.

After the war, the leaders of the Western Allies idealistically hoped for permanent peace, though the League of Nations that was set up to foster togetherness and prevent future hostility quickly proved to be a paper tiger. Nonetheless, the sentiment of “never again” was on most lips among the “victors.” Meanwhile, the defeated Germans smarted, not just at their losses of men and material, but also at the overly-punitive terms of the Treaty of Versailles, which punished the “Fatherland” by imposing harsh sanctions on an already ravaged economy, and confiscated territories far and wide. It was the resulting frustration and the promise of restoring national pride that enabled Hitler to take power so swiftly and terribly in the mid to late 1930s. Even with his rise, the majority outside of Germany still hoped for peace, not seeing that no number of Munich Agreements could slake the Fuhrer’s lust for revenge and land.

Though it is easy with hindsight to slam those who, like British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, signed such treaties and they must certainly be held accountable for inaction and, in some cases, capitulation, it is just as easy to forget how horrendous the trench-based battles of World War I were, and the impact they had on the collective psyches of both the victors and the vanquished.

Trench foot, rat bites, and typhoid were rampant, as the soldiers literally rotted in their water-logged holes, to say nothing of the mustard gas. There was no sanitation, no clean facilities to treat the wounded, no place to bury the dead. Then, when they were sent over the top, the weak, despairing bunch were greeted by machine gun fire that toppled their ranks like contorted dominoes and, if they advanced to the enemy lines, were ensnared as if they were game in barbed wire, or run through by enemy bayonets. Those who did not capture their foes’ positions yet could not make it back to their own trenches were sometimes so stunned by the clamor, the fear and the firework flashes of barking muzzles that they wandered around in “No Man’s Land” until captured, finished off or, for a lucky few, retrieved by their comrades. Some opposing trenches gained or lost a total of mere inches over the course of the war.

And so, can we blame Chamberlain and his ilk for wanting to never repeat such brutality? Even Winston Churchill, his most outspoken critic and the man whose vision highlighted his predecessor’s short-sighted foreign policy, could not condemn Chamberlain, saying at his funeral, “It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? . . . They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart—the love of peace.”

60 years after Chamberlain’s doomed attempt to save Europe from repeating the carnage of The Great War, I journeyed to Belgium for what was, I soon realized, one of the most moving experiences of my life. Along with 20 A-Level history classmates and our two teachers, we toured some of the pivotal World War I battlefield sites and watched the surviving veterans gather at the Menin Gate, tears streaming down their wrinkled faces as they hunched over in wheelchairs or leaned against stout sticks. They lit candles to commemorate their fallen brethren’s sacrifice.

Though going into the claustrophobic trenches was terrifying and viewing the seemingly infinite list of names at the Allied cemeteries depressing, I was most affected by a little country graveyard on the top of a Belgian hill. There, rows of white Portland stone headstones stood in neat rows on newly-trimmed, almost impossibly green grass, arrayed in a manner far more dignified than the inglorious ends of the lives they commemorated. My father owns a monumental mason’s business in England, so I am used to seeing well-kept cemeteries with finely-worded inscriptions on stone. But the sadness and, in some cases, disbelief of the families who had lost their boys on foreign fields was so starkly recorded that it was almost too much to take. And boys most were—19, 17, some even 16 years old—from a cluster of English villages. Communities’ entire young male populations finished. Dead. Never coming back. We learned from our instructors that some 14- and 15-year-olds had even faked birth certificates so they could go to the front with their pals. Knowing I would not have been so brave, I left with tears burning hot on my cheeks. No, I could not cry the same way that those old men in Ypres wept, for what do I know of war, of seeing my closest friends cut down like they are nothing? Yet, as I scribbled some heartfelt lines in my notebook later, I knew that any illusions I had of war being glorious were forever gone.

Structured Procrastination

2011-11-14T07:30:00.001-05:00

Heather Cox Richardson

Over the years, I have been blessed with wonderful teachers. Advisors taught me to think and to write; colleagues pointed out my egregious errors; students kept me from making logical leaps by tripping me up with healthy skepticism. But all of these teachers have all worked in the academic, rather than the spiritual realm.

Finally, finally, I have found a guru.

His name is John Perry, and he is an emeritus philosophy professor at Stanford. He has recently won an Ig Nobel Prize for his work exploring the benefits of procrastination. One day, Professor Perry realized with surprise that he had a reputation for high production even though, as far as he was concerned, he never did anything. Thinking about that contrast, he figured out that it was possible to use procrastination well. Some scholars, he argues, use their determination to avoid big, unwelcome projects to whip off a number of projects that they perceive to be small and easy. Professor Perry points out that really good structured procrastinators—like himself—actually get a lot done. It’s just not necessarily what they felt they had to do.

Professor Perry’s argument is so odd it’s funny, but it’s also one of those ideas that make you sit up and think. What he describes is precisely the way I work. Give me a big, unmanageable, and preferably boring project, and it’s astonishing how many other things I can accomplish in my quest to avoid it. Grading, blog posts, book chapters… all seem negligible when compared to getting estimates for fixing the caved-in car door (which, by the way, I still have not done). I think Dr. Perry is on to something, and I’m thrilled to hear such a prophet. In the spirit of an acolyte, I would urge everyone worried about that article they’re avoiding to spend some time reading what he has to say.

As far as I’m concerned, anyone whose webpage presents a photo of the author jumping rope with a piece of seaweed has got to be worth listening to.

College football has changed over time. And it hasn’t.

2011-11-11T07:01:00.005-05:00

Chris Beneke
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With Penn State football head coach Joe Paterno’s dismissal amid the sexual abuse scandal that has engulfed Happy Valley, college football is under scrutiny again. So too are the huge sums of money that sustain this monumental sports and media enterprise. Paterno will be paid a little over $1 million from Penn State this year. That is actually modest by comparison with his peers; in 2010, University of Alabama head coach Nick Saban received over $6 million in compensation. Paterno’s salary and celebrity stand out only in contrast with everyone else—his players for instance, as well the faculty who teach them. For good reason then, the head football coach’s salary is often treated as an index of the distance a college has departed from its core academic commitments (we’re still awaiting the first news van to be overturned in ousted PSU President Graham Spanier’s name), not to mention its ethical standards.

What is the history that got us here?

In his book Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era, historian Michael Oriard contends that the big change in college football occurred in the early 1970s. Until then, head coaches were paid much like deans or upper-tier professors. Moreover, many held tenured faculty positions. They were themselves part of the faculty. But with “the NCAA’s transformation of student-athletes into athlete-students in 1972 and 1973—making freshman eligible, dropping the 1.6 rule [which stipulated that a college could only offer you a scholarship if you were projected to receive at least a 1.6 GPA], and instituting the one-year scholarship” big-time college began to serve its own interests rather than the universities or their student-athletes (192). “When universities and conferences won the right to negotiate their own television contracts in 1984, and the competition for market share intensified, coaches were in a position to cash in.”* Huge, president-humbling salaries (PSU’s Spanier earned a mere $800K this year) followed.

But the exorbitant pay awarded to college coaches isn’t the only blemish on the system. While it has shot up shamelessly since the early 1970s, the compensation (essentially tuition, room, and board) at schools with big-time athletic programs has barely budged. “It’s socialism for athletes,” sociologist Allen Sack told New York Magazine, and “free enterprise for everyone else.” Agreeing that student athletes should be paid, Taylor Branch offered a devastating critique of the current system in the October issue of The Atlantic Monthly. “[T]he real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited,” Branch writes, “it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes.”

Since its improbable emergence on the most cerebral of campuses in the late 19^th century, college football has represented something of an anomaly—a consistently irresistible anomaly, it should be noted. Male-dominated and devastatingly brutal, it plays out its gridiron dramas nearly every Saturday at institutions which aim at very different ends during the week. Such tensions date at least to 1892, the year, Oriard notes, when the newly established University of Chicago hired Amos Alonzo Stagg, “a former Yale All-American, two years out of college, to start a football program [and agreed] to pay him as much as the school’s top professors in order to lure him from the East Coast.”^ In Stagg’s day, football deaths were common and corruption was rampant.

But don’t count on college football’s extinction, or even its radical reform, any time soon. Though the decimal points have moved to the right, the often indefinable allure of this sport—along with the celebrity it generates, the money it attracts, the ethical corruption and moral deprivation it sometimes invites—endures as ever. More on that, maybe, some other time.

*Michael Oriard, Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 192, 193.

^Oriard, Bowled Over, 191

Conference on Public Intellectuals, Harvard, 2012

2011-11-10T07:09:00.001-05:00

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Third Annual Conference on Public Intellectuals
History of Science Department
Harvard University
April 12-14, 2012

Call for Papers

Since the 1950s, American writers and thinkers such as Irving Howe, Kenneth Clark, Russell Jacoby, Thomas Bender, bell hooks, Richard Posner, Toni Morrison, Thomas Sowell, and Cornel West have debated the meaning and purpose of public intellectuals. Many have openly criticized what they call the increasing corporatization of public intellectual life within the academy. Increasing specialization and narrower disciplines, some argue, has led to a growing paucity of radical ideas and a growing obsession with a mass media-infused culture. Others on the ideological right maintain that leftist public intellectuals do not pay enough attention to market forces and are too protected by and safely ensconced in tenured ivory towers, writing and teaching only to indoctrinate their students.

This conference seeks to bring together scholars and researchers in all disciplines whose work focuses on public intellectuals. We hope to engage these issues while moving beyond past debates into new questions on the role of public intellectual life in the 21st century. Paper topics on all global areas as well as the U.S. are welcome. The conference also seeks to provide a forum for self-reflection by public intellectuals in the past and present. The conference format will include individual presentations organized into workshops of 3-4 presenters and three special roundtable sessions.

Proposals of 300 words or less must include your identifying information including name, title, institution, email, and phone number. Please send two copies to the co-organizers, Larry Friedman (ljfriedm@indiana.edu) and Damon Freeman (dfreeman@sp2.upenn.edu).

Deadline for paper and panel proposals: Wednesday, November 30.

JFK: A President of Firsts

2011-11-09T08:51:00.004-05:00

Philip White

This week marked the 51st anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s election victory, which saw him become the 35th President of the United States. The Camelot myth aside, he was undeniably a President of firsts:

• The first President to win the office at age 43, and the first "Chief Executive" born in the twentieth century.

• The first Catholic in the White House. It is easy to forget how difficult it was for the Kennedy clan (JFK’s father, Joseph–the US Ambassador to Britain who FDR pressured into resigning in November 1940–masterminded his son’s career) to overcome Protestant opposition to their faith during the campaign.

• The first President to win the Pulitzer Prize. His book, Profiles in Courage, which highlighted the bravery of John Quincy Adams and seven other U.S. Senators claimed the award in 1955. Interestingly, it was patterned on Winston Churchill’s Great Contemporaries, which was not the only literary connection between the two. Kennedy’s Harvard thesis, Why England Slept, (published by Wilfred Funk in 1940 after several big publishers rejected the manuscript) was a play on Churchill’s While England Slept, which examined Germany’s militarism and England’s failure to stem Hitler’s ambitions. Churchill went one better, winning the Nobel Prize for Literature for his war memoirs. On April 1, 1963, Kennedy conferred honorary citizenship on his literary and rhetorical hero.

• A participant in the first televised Presidential election debates, with Richard M. Nixon. Popular opinion contends that the first debate was a turning point in the campaign. The dashing Massachusetts senator and the Vice President were opposites in style and appearance–Kennedy fit and poised, Nixon unattractive and growling. The encounters moderated by Howard K. Smith (a pioneer of broadcast journalism and one of the Murrow Boys) also changed the campaigning landscape for good, and put a premium on candidates’ ability to come across well on the small screen. It’s fascinating to me that last year (yes, 2010) saw the first televised debates in British electoral history. That’s half a century after the US got in on the game!

• The first celebrity Presidential couple. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, were the most photographed, most fawned-over political partners in history. As in the debates, his camera-ready appearance helped, though he was often overshadowed by his gorgeous fashion queen.

• The first President to engage in a high-stakes encounter with a nuke-ready Soviet Union. The October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis saw the world on the brink of mutually assured destruction, and yet Kennedy’s cool head prevailed.

• The first President to take on the hitherto unchecked power of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. Aided by his brother, Attorney General and best friend, Robert, JFK sought to limit the jurisdiction of Hoover’s FBI fiefdom, and to reduce the clout of the irrepressible man who had ruled it since 1924.

What he could have achieved if death had not claimed him early, we can never know. But what is certain is that John F. Kennedy was a man of extraordinary talents who, despite his detractors’ vilification (and, certainly with regard to his philandering, some of their criticism is just), presided over heady and turbulent times with a grace and restraint few other politicians could have matched.

Elijah James Blum Memorial Fund

2011-11-08T08:01:00.002-05:00

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This from a dear friend and colleague:

The History Department at San Diego State University would like to announce its fundraising efforts to create the “Elijah James Blum Memorial Fund." Elijah, son of Associate Professor Edward J. Blum and Jennifer Blum, passed away on August 31, 2011, from complications related to a mitochondrial disorder. After developing cataracts in his eyes and degenerating muscularly such that his eating and breathing were impaired, Elijah died peacefully at home with his family. His favorite game was peek-a-boo and he laughed far more in life than he cried. He was just over eight months old.

The “Elijah James Blum Memorial Fund” will be used to support teaching and learning in the History Department at San Diego State University. Tax-deductible contributions to the fund may be made by writing a check to “The Campanile Foundation,” referencing the Elijah James Blum Memorial Fund on the memo line and sending it to Bonnie Akashian, SDSU Dept. of History, 5500 Campanile Dr., San Diego, CA 92182-6050. Please contact Beth Pollard (Associate Prof. of History, epollard@mail.sdsu.edu) or Nancy Lemkie (Senior Director of Development in CAL at SDSU, nlemkie@mail.sdsu.edu or 619-594-8569), if you have any questions.

A Quirky Political Dynasty

2011-11-07T06:59:00.001-05:00

Heather Cox Richardson

Yesterday was the anniversary of the day on which Jefferson Davis was elected president of the Confederate States of America, and I had every intention of writing about that epic event for today’s post. But when I started digging around in the history of that date, another event jumped out at me. November 6, 1841 was the birth date of Nelson W. Aldrich.

It’s a little astonishing that few people nowadays have heard of Nelson Aldrich, for in the late nineteenth century, he ran the Senate. And he ran it, unabashedly, in the service of corporations.

By 1881, when Aldrich entered the upper chamber of Congress, tariffs were crucial to the protection of American big business. High tariffs of around 50% of an item’s value guaranteed that foreign products could not compete with American-made products. The original intent of the Republicans who began the nation’s system of protective tariffs was to give domestic industry breathing space to develop. But by the 1880s, those industries were some of the most powerful in the world, and consumers charged that protection had become a tool to enable American industrialists to raise prices. As the newly rich industrialists—and their wives and daughters—spent their vast fortunes on Fifth Avenue mansions, racehorses, jewels, and lavish parties while workers eked by on pennies and farmers fell into debt, more and more voices started to call for “tariff reform” to lower the tariffs.

Against these voices, Senator Aldrich stood unbowed, marshaling his forces. He believed that society was based on an economic hierarchy, and that those at the top of that hierarchy—the wealthy industrialists—should run the nation. He had little respect for the average man who was, in his opinion, easy to mislead. The role of government was to promote industry, Aldrich thought, and he worked hard to protect steel manufacturers, railroad barons, wool interests, and so on, against what he saw as the delusions of the crowd. As the Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Aldrich wielded great power. As the man who determined how the Republican Party’s campaign money was spent, he wielded even more. The tariff fight consumed the country in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth; during those thirty years it was Senator Aldrich who held the Republican Party to the service of industrialists.

I’ve been spending time lately with Senator Aldrich and, while he undoubtedly makes it onto my list of unsavory companions, there is a funny quirk about his family that makes me unwilling to focus solely on his rather reactionary contribution to American history.

In 1901, Senator Aldrich’s daughter Abby* married J. D. Rockefeller’s son. Their third child was Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, who became vice-president under Gerald Ford. In contrast to his grandfather, Nelson Rockefeller gave his name to the moderates of his day, who are still known as “Rockefeller Republicans.”

His grandfather—who died when the boy was seven—would not have been pleased.
_________

* Abby was important in her own right. She was instrumental in establishing both the Museum of Modern Art and Colonial Williamsburg.

Nominations for Cliopatria's 2011 Awards

2011-11-04T09:19:00.000-04:00

Randall Stephens

It's that time of year again. Head over to the HNN Cliopatria blog to nominate your favorite blogs, writers, posts, and more. The more nominations Cliopatria gets, the better!

The word from Cliopatria:

Nominations are open for the Cliopatria Awards, 2011. Until 30 November, you can nominate candidates for Best Group Blog, Best Individual Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, and Best Writer. This year, for the first time, there will be Awards for Best Twitter Feed and Best Podcast Episode. . . .

Nominations will be open through November; judges will make the final determinations in December. The winners will be announced at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in early January 2011; winners will be listed on HNN and earn the right to display the appropriate Cliopatria Award Logo on their blog.

Lecture on Writing Op Eds at Eastern Nazarene College on November 8

2011-11-03T07:14:00.002-04:00

Randall J. Stephens

Just a little plug for a lecture and discussion we'll be hosting next week at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, Mass. Eileen McNamara and Maura Jane Farrelly, both at Brandeis University, will be talking about writing op eds for print and radio. (Farrelly, a historian of Revolutionary America, has spoken to my history students in the past about the differences between and similarities of history and journalism.) From the ENC's website:

The History Department will present a free lecture on writing op-eds by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eileen McNamara and fellow Brandeis University Professor Maura Jane Farrelly at 6:00pm Tuesday, November 8 in the Mann Student Center Auditorium as part of its Fall Lecture Series.

McNamara is a professor of the Practice in Journalism at Brandeis University. In addition to receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1997, she has received numerous honors including the Yankee Quill Award (2007) and Distinguished Writing Award (1997), among others. Courses she has taught vary from Race and Gender in the News to Political Packaging in America to Media and Public Policy. Her published works include: The Parting Glass: A Toast To The Traditional Pubs of Ireland (2006), Breakdown: Sex, Suicide and the Harvard Psychiatrist (1993), and Eye on the President George Bush: History in Essays & Cartoons (1994).

Farrelly is assistant professor of American studies and director of the Journalism Program at Brandeis University. She holds a Ph.D. in history from Emory University, with an emphasis on the colonial and early-American periods, and on American religious history. She worked as a full-time reporter for several years at Georgia Public Radio in Atlanta and for the Voice of America in Washington, D.C. and New York. She has also freelanced for National Public Radio, Public Radio International and the British Broadcasting Corporation. She is the author of the forthcoming: Papist Patriots: The Making of an American Catholic Identity (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Gender Imbalance and History

2011-11-02T10:22:00.008-04:00

Randall Stephens

"Every so often, society experiences a 'crisis in gender," writes Kate Bolick in the new issue of the Atlantic Monthly ("All the Single Ladies," ht to Amy Wood). In a fascinating article on the state of marriage and the prospects for single women, Bolick muses on the ways that gender imbalance and social factors weigh on society.

Particularly interesting is her take on how this has played out through history:

Take the years after the Civil War, when America reeled from the loss of close to 620,000 men, the majority of them from the South. An article published last year in The Journal of Southern History reported that in 1860, there were 104 marriageable white men for every 100 white women; in 1870, that number dropped to 87.5. A generation of Southern women found themselves facing a “marriage squeeze.” They could no longer assume that they would become wives and mothers—a terrifying prospect in an era when women relied on marriage for social acceptability and financial resources.

Instead, they were forced to ask themselves: Will I marry a man who has poor prospects (“marrying down,” in sociological parlance)? Will I marry a man much older, or much younger? Will I remain alone, a spinster? Diaries and letters from the period reveal a populace fraught with insecurity. As casualties mounted, expectations dropped, and women resigned themselves to lives without husbands, or simply lowered their standards. (In 1862, a Confederate nurse named Ada Bacot described in her diary the lamentable fashion “of a woman marring a man younger than herself.”) Their fears were not unfounded—the mean age at first marriage did rise—but in time, approximately 92 percent of these Southern-born white women found someone to partner with. The anxious climate, however, as well as the extremely high levels of widowhood—nearly one-third of Southern white women over the age of 40 were widows in 1880—persisted.*

Certainly war takes a toll on society and on private lives in all sorts of ways that aren't imagined. Russia lost approximately 8-10 million soldiers in WW II and roughly 2 million in WW I. Talk about "marriage squeeze." Even in the United States--which, comparatively suffered far less in those conflicts--gender imbalance disrupted daily life and posed new challenges for the country.

Life magazine ran a photo essay on the troubled American family in 1948, lamenting climbing divorce rates and the breakdown of traditional families:

In the picture above an American family is shown in the sad process of breaking up. In city after city scenes like it are being repeated every day, each opening its own small cracks in our society, each a part of a cold statistical record which shows that last year 450,000 divorces were granted in U.S. courts, releasing a flood of children from these broken homes upon society. From such statistics emerges an unmistakable fact: the U.S. family, deep in the millrace of social and technological change, is itself deep in trouble.

American newspapers and magazines spilled gallons of ink on the family crisis and also worried about absent men. "The general fear of a shortage of eligible bachelors persisted even after the war," writes Kristin Celello in her Making Marriage Work: The History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States (UNC Press. 2009). "As the average age of marriage dropped for both men and women, unmarried women as young as twenty or twenty-one often thought of themselves as 'old maids'" (77). In the Life story above expert opinion is trotted out to show the hazards of immature young couples getting hitched.

Those of us who teach in colleges and universities are well aware of the gender imbalance in our classrooms. And today, writers across the spectrum are wringing hands or celebrating the "decline" of the American male.

How will current trends shape the course of history? What will historians be saying about the topic in 50 or 100 years from now?

November issue of Historically Speaking

2011-11-01T07:56:00.000-04:00

Randall Stephens

In not too long, the November issue of Historically Speaking will be shipping out. And, as usual, it will soon be posted on Project Muse. This issue features a forum with Joyce Appleby on the emergence of capitalism; Peter Coclanis and Stanley L. Engerman's discussion of the influence of Eugene and Elizabeth Fox Genovese; essays on the Christian America debate; and more. Here's the run down:

Historically Speaking (November 2011)

Taking Historical Fundamentalism Seriously
Johann N. Neem

Historians Meet Thanksgiving: What Would George Do?
Sam Wineburg and Eli Gottlieb

The Early Modern Origins of Capitalism: A Roundtable

The Cultural Roots of Capitalism
Joyce Appleby

What’s Left for Economics? A Comment on Appleby
Hans L. Eicholz

Comment on Appleby
Hendrik Hartog

Response
Joyce Appleby

Athens and Sparta and the War of Rank in Ancient Greece: An Interview with J.E. Lendon Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Labor Day: The Lessons of the Past
Robert H. Zieger

The Intellectual World of Southern Slaveholders: Two Assessments of the Recent Work of Eugene D. Genovese and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

Sic et Non
Peter A. Coclanis

The Richness of Intellectual Life in the Antebellum South
Stanley L. Engerman

Teaching and Writing about the History of African-American Christianity: An Interview with Paul Harvey
Conducted by Randall J. Stephens

Then, and Then Again
Joseph A. Amato

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin: An Interview with Timothy Snyder
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Does Florida need Anthropologists?

2011-10-31T05:22:00.001-04:00

Heather Cox Richardson

Recently, Florida Governor Rick Scott declared that Florida did not need to waste effort educating students in fields outside of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—the so-called STEM fields. Degrees in those fields, he said, would guarantee Floridians jobs, while tax money spent in other fields was thrown away. Florida doesn’t need “a lot more anthropologists,” he said. “It’s a great degree if people want to get it. But we don’t need them here.”*

While Governor Scott’s comments have raised hackles in the non-scientific academic community, he wasn’t saying anything we haven’t heard before. Indeed, there is something to what he says. Americans desperately need better training in math and the sciences, and we don’t currently have the tools to make that happen. Last year, for example, when New Hampshire officials listed the areas in which there were critical shortages of qualified teachers, they discovered critical shortages in mathematics and all the sciences—chemistry, earth sciences, life science, and physics—from grades 5-12. Ouch.

But there is a fatal flaw in the reasoning that we must invest in STEM to the detriment of other fields. People making that argument forget the central issue in science and technology today: that it is changing at an extraordinary rate. It is changing so fast, that, as the video below notes, the top ten in-demand jobs in 2010 did not exist in 2004. As the video points out, this means

that we are educating children today for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that have not been invented, to solve problems that we don’t yet know are problems.

To create educated workers and informed citizens in such a world, the solution is not to teach them specific technological skills. They need to be able to think creatively. They need to know how to manipulate information in a variety of ways, and they need to be able to communicate their discoveries. They need to know how to work with a variety of people in wide-flung fields, and they need to know how to adapt to changing technologies. They need to know how societies grow and change.

This is the turf of liberal arts scholars.

Recently, pundits have complained that liberal arts proponents offer as justification for their field of study either that it has an explicit economic use or that its beauty is that it has no use at all. In light of the extraordinary demands of today’s technological economy, it seems to me reasonable to argue instead that the continuing importance of the liberal arts is in providing the skills for today’s workers to move from job to job, from technology to technology, from idea to idea, throughout their lifetimes.

Florida probably needs anthropologists, after all.

Brief Hiatus

2011-10-24T07:59:00.000-04:00

Randall Stephens

With conference season in full swing, the HS blog will be on a brief hiatus.

See these popular posts from recent weeks, months, years:

Cincinnati Daguerreotype Time Machine, 1848
Randall Stephens

Visualizing Historiography
Dan Allosso

History Majors and the Job Market: What Can Faculty Do?
Gabriel Loiacono

Know Your Editor: Susan Ferber, Executive Editor, American and World History, Oxford University Press
Randall Stephens

An Interview with Robert Darnton on the Digital Public Library of America
Randall Stephens

Heather Cox Richardson's Richardson's Rules of Order Wins Cliopatria's Best Series of Posts
Randall Stephens

Teaching the Writing of History Roundtable in January Issue of Historically Speaking
Randall Stephens

Historians to Cheney
Randall Stephens

What would you, dear reader, like to see more of? Music history, material culture, history of private lives, military and diplomatic history, commodity biographies, reviews of reviews, ancient history, the intersection of history and archeology, macrohistory, microhistory, teaching, the history market, digital history, the state of the humanities, historiography, posts on the state of subfields???

The Brixton Pound and Localism

2011-10-20T09:11:00.003-04:00

Philip White

In recent years, there has been a resurgence in localism in the foodie and environmentalist communities in the US, with farmers markets and specialty grocers the beneficiaries of those looking for locally-grown produce sold outside of Wal-Mart and its ilk, which typically favor the cheapest possible foreign fare. The trend makes sense for health reasons – not a shock that peaches from an orchard five miles away are more nutrient-dense and typically less pesticide-afflicted than those shipped from Central America – and for the local economy. Traders such as independent book stores and one-off coffee shops have also benefited from those who’d prefer to patron small businesses with whom they can build long-term relationships, rather than store #7680 of a huge multinational.

However, there is no doubt that “Main Street” as it’s often called here and “The High Street” in the UK has failed to halt the overall decline in number of stores and business volume that arguably began since the advent of the big box stores that accompanied the expansion of suburbia in the 1950s and 1960s.

To help turn the tide, some towns are introducing local currencies that encourage residents and merchants to spend their money with neighboring small businesses. In the US, these and other forms of financial exchange media that became known as “scrip” – including Larkin Merchandise Bonds and Caslow Recovery Certificates – were introduced during the Great Depression to alleviate the challenges caused by lack of cash flow. As many as 5,000 were in circulation by the mid-1930s. More recently, local currencies such as San Francisco’s Bernal Bucks, Great Barrington (Mass.)’s Berkshares and the Ithaca (NY) HOUR (also a payment system for labor there) have promoted local trading. These are typically introduced by groups of business owners and/or private citizens, and are not backed by city, state or federal government.

The latest area-specific currency in the UK is the Brixton Pound (B£) re-launched earlier this month after a more limited first issue in 2009. Several rural English towns, including Lewes, Stroud and Totnes have run similar schemes with mixed results, but Brixton, located in south London, is the first urban area to try it. Rather than replacing the pound, the B£ is a complementary currency, which is supported by the local council but not backed by the government. Companies or individuals can exchange pounds for the local notes in person or by electronically transferring money into the B£ Community Interest Company account, which they can only spend in independent stores within Brixton. For a limited time, those who do so will get a 10 percent bonus. To help publicize the initiative, Brixton notes are embossed with images of local celebrities, such as NBA star Luol Deng, WWII secret agent Violette Szabo and, most notably, David Bowie in his memorable Aladdin Sane album pose.

So what effect will the Brixton Pound have on the local economy and, beyond that, on the lives of those who live there? It’s worth noting that the area has been a hotspot for racial tension in the past 30 years, with riots in 1981, 1985, 1995, and, most recently, this past August. Brixton is blighted by high unemployment, crime and poor relations between the police and residents. So, in one sense, any proactive policy that involves residents in a scheme that boosts pride in their area and engages them with local businesses has to be positive. And organizers are adamant that widespread use will reduce Brixton’s environmental impact. But whether such a plan can truly reinvigorate independent merchants or is merely postponing their demise remains to be seen. What else can local communities do to restore profitability to their ‘Ma and Pa’ shops? How do such schemes fit in with broad-stroke localism/direct democracy plans that would enhance local government while limiting centralized control?

Submit a Paper or Panel for the 2012 Historical Society Conference

2011-10-18T04:41:00.000-04:00

Randall Stephens

It's not too late to submit a paper or a panel proposal for the 2012 Historical Society Conference in Columbia, SC, Thursday, May 31st - Saturday, June 2nd, 2012.

But the deadline, December 1, will soon be upon us! Here's the CFP:

Professional historians in the United States are increasingly being called upon to produce more “popular,” more accessible history. How do and how should academic historians reach popular audiences? How and to what extent is “popular” history written around the world? Does the meaning of and audience for “popular history” vary from place to place? Along with professional historians, states, elites, and a variety of interest groups have long had an interest in sponsoring, supporting, and generating historical knowledge for popular and other audiences. We seek paper and panel proposals that will consider “popular” history in its various guises and locales. How and to what extent is the interest in “popular” history genuinely new? How do and how should historians interact with television and movie production or write op-ed pieces or blogs or serve as expert witnesses? Is there such a thing as a truly “popular” history? Do we need a distinctive “popular” history and are historians properly equipped to write it?

We especially encourage panel proposals, though individual paper proposals are welcome as well. And our interpretation of “panel” is broad: 2 or more presenters constitute a panel—chairs and commentators are optional. As at past conferences, we hope for bold yet informal presentations that will provoke lots of questions and discussion from the audience, not presenters reading papers word-for-word from a podium followed by a commentator doing the same.

Please submit proposals (brief abstract and brief CV) by
December 1, 2011 to Mark Smith and Dean Kinzley,
2012 Program Chairs, at jslucas@bu.edu

Hank Williams Re-imagined

2011-10-17T07:46:00.005-04:00

Randall Stephens

Few country music legends have cast as long a shadow as Hank Williams. Yodely vocals and mournful twangy guitars were his trademark. His songs were drenched with sadness and longing, like his rendition of "I'll Never Get Out Of This World Alive" (1952): "I ain't

gonna worry wrinkles in my brow, cuz nothin's never gonna be alright nohow. No matter how I struggle and strive, I'll never get out of this world alive."

Williams' music influenced countless other songwriters and performers, across the spectrum. And though he's been dead for nearly 60 years, new box sets, books, and documentaries continue to pay homage to him.

Now Bob Dylan and a score of other living legends have re-imagined a collection of Hank Williams' unfinished songs. The lyrics are Williams', the music is new.

"It's hard not to feel ambivalent about The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams," says Ken Tucker at NPR. "Yes, it does give us an opportunity to hear previously unreleased lyrics by one of the greatest songwriters country music has produced. But Williams didn't write the music that accompanies his words, and as sincere as these performers are, none of the words are framed the way Williams would have, had he completed the songwriting process. Would Hank, for example, have set 'The Love That Faded' to a waltz beat, as Bob Dylan has done with it?"

The Lost Notebooks raises all sorts of other questions about how we think about legendary artists, authenticity, and honoring the dead. Who owns the dead? Is an artist's legacy something sacred, to be protected? How are contemporaries in conversation with those who've gone before them?

Exhibits, Shows Roundup

2011-10-14T10:05:00.003-04:00

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A Day in Pompeii, Nichols Gallery, Boston Museum of Science, through Feb 12, 2012

Get a glimpse of daily life in Pompeii, one of Imperial Rome's most cosmopolitan cities. Hundreds of artifacts —

including body casts of the volcano's victims — bring to light the vibrancy of this bustling resort town, but the darkening skies ahead and violent sounds of Vesuvius spewing ash and debris signal imminent danger.>>>

Passages, Oklahoma City Museum Of Art, through Oct 16, 2011

Passages is a 14,000-square-foot interactive, multimedia exhibition for all ages. It features some of the most exquisite and rare biblical manuscripts, printed Bibles, and historical items in the world. These cultural treasures include a Dead Sea Scroll text, ancient biblical papyri, beautifully illuminated manuscripts, early printed materials, including a portion of the Gutenberg Bible, and multiple first editions of the English Bible through the King James Version.>>>

Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt, Milwaukee Public Museum, Opens October 14

Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt features nearly 150 artifacts from Cleopatra’s time and helps visitors experience the present-day search for the elusive queen, which extends from the sands of Egypt to the depths of the Bay of Aboukir near Alexandria.>>>

1968 Exhibit, Minnesota History Center, Opens October 14
The Vietnam War, protests and assassinations were on the news. Peace signs, love-ins and psychedelic rock were on the scene. From the darkest hours to the incredible highs, the year 1968 comes alive in this extraordinary new exhibit.>>>

Celebrate TV, National Media Museum, Bradford, UK

This half term we're celebrating television. Journey back in time to see how TV began, what it looked like, and watch a selection of programmes we all loved. Fast forward to the future and see crystal clear images with our Super Hi-Vision TV.>>>

How Streaming Media Services Affect our Perception of “Owning” Music and Movies

2011-10-13T08:31:00.002-04:00

Philip White

Despite the company’s recent price increases, the decision to split its DVD delivery and streaming businesses and the lamentable choice to name the former “Qwikster” (as one friend commented, “It sounds like fast-drying spackling!”), I am an avid Netflix fan. And if the company can increase its still-inadequate library of on-demand content, this miser may eventually ditch my old, 500-pound behemoth of a TV and invest in one with Netflix streaming built in, or maybe just a Roku box. Right now, I occasionally watch a movie on my HTC Flyer tablet, which is a better viewing experience than an iPhone/iPod but still a little rinky dink for my liking.

So why does the ability to get movies without waiting for a DVD to arrive or, heaven forbid, leaving the house to patron the nearest Redbox, appeal? Because it’s quick, convenient, offers a (soon to be) wide choice and there’s a predictable, all-you-can-watch fee instead of an individual charge per disc. And if I sometime think that Amazon’s Instant Video has a better selection, maybe I’ll forsake Netflix.

So that’s the good, but what about the bad or potentially bad? How is the rise of streaming film and TV content affecting studios large and small, and the actors, producers, directors, crew members and others they employ? Were some of the same questions asked when other new technologies were rolled out? The television? The videotape machine?

Certainly, DVD and Blu-Ray sales are down. And movie prices continue to rise, much to my horror. $12 for a ticket? In the middle of Kansas? Really? I also loathe the gimmicky “cinema suites” that offer a crappy buffet and cheap beer if you’re willing to fork over $20 bucks or more per ticket, and possibly the shirt off your back, too. But how much of these price hikes and the luxury concept that seems to be borrowed from major league sports’ premium on suites and boxes is attributable to movie studios, and how much to the theater companies themselves? I admit that I don’t know.

What I do know is that the ability to stream movies and music on demand, on mobile devices as well as at home, is profoundly affecting how we think about owning this content. The point of buying a DVD (I still haven’t succumbed to the allure of Blu-Ray, though after being blown away by watching Saving Private Ryan in this format on my friend’s big screen it has been tempting) used to be that you could watch one of your faves whenever you like. Well, with streaming you can do that, while removing the embuggerance of actually having to get up from the couch, or, in my case, trusty leather recliner.

When I fully embrace streaming, there will be no disc to scratch, misplace or lose to the clutches of the kids. My wife and I will no longer yell at each other for me absent-mindedly putting The Fellowship of the Ring (mine) in the case meant for The Devil Wears Prada (hers). And if a film is bad, there will be no wait while I send the accursed item back to the Netflix warehouse, and then wait for them to send out the next DVD in your queue. Heck, even without switching to video on demand and just using Netflix’s plain ol’ two DVDs at a time plan, I buy less than a quarter of the DVDs I purchased even two years ago. And those I do get or request for a birthday or Christmas present are true favorites, rather than the mediocre films I kinda liked but only watched once a year that I used to purchase or hint at before Netflix. So, for me at least, I’ve almost completely abandoned DVD ownership, without even jumping headlong onto the bandwagon. And I’m not alone. According to Time DVD sales were down by 18.3% in the first six months of 2012, while spending on kiosk and on-demand services was up by 40 to 45%. Movie studios and distributors are doing their best to reverse this trend by ensuring that physical copies are available for rent and purchase a lot sooner than via Redbox, Netflix or Amazon.

The mass adoption of movie streaming is the biggest historical change in the film industry since the

introduction of the VHS-playing VCR to the U.S. in 1977. Once this format had smacked down Sony and its upstart Betamax (what is it with Sony and propriety formats? Anyone remember MiniDisc?), VHS gave people the ability to watch high quality (for that time) productions in their own home, as well as the ability to record live TV. With Netflix and its kind, the focus has shifted again, as it’s now no longer necessary to have a home-based content device, as a tablet or even a smart phone will suffice. We’ve gone from a cinema-based model to home-focused to mobility-focused, which in apt, given the ever-greater ease of international travel and the greater geographical transience within America today.

And what of music? I am not a Pandora user, nor have I logged into Spotify since signing up. I’ve come to prefer Amazon’s MP3 store to iTunes because of lower prices and my love of using the Amazon Cloud Player on my tablet, and usually buy digital instead of CDs, but I still buy as much music as I did a few years ago. Not sure that’s typical though–I know a lot of people, particularly in the UK where Spotify is more established–who listen to music almost exclusively through streaming offerings, whether it be radio or a paid subscription service.

In the U.S., how long will it be before the majority of major labels make 25 percent of revenue through streaming music subscribers to Spotify et al? Is this already diminishing CD and MP3 sales? The concept is similar to the instant video vs. Blu-Ray/DVD debate–a large and soon-to-be unlimited selection at your fingertips against the tangibility and permanent ownership of a physical product. I still find it easier and safer to plonk in a CD while in the car rather than messing around with an iPod, but with voice-controlled media systems becoming more prevalent (the new iPhone, for instance) and the continued success of satellite radio, that may change soon. I was late to the Netflix party, so maybe eventually I will succumb to the charms of music on demand, and stop buying music. I’m determined that vinyl will be the exception–still loving my Technics SL-1700 turntable and the sleeve design and notes on records old and new!

Thoughts? Do you primarily stream music and movies, or still buy individual copies (be they digital or physical)? Are the media changes afoot much greater than those of the 20th century?

Where the Newspapers Were

2011-10-12T07:00:00.004-04:00

Randall Stephens

My friend Leslie Graham just sent me a link to a wonderful map resource: "Data Visualization: Journalism's Voyage West." Part of Stanford University's Rural West Initiative, the site tracks the spread of newspapers into the American interior and the West. "With the American newspaper under stress from changing economics, technology and consumer behavior," notes the introduction, "it's easy to forget how ubiquitous and important they are in society. For this data visualization, we have taken the directory of US newspaper titles compiled by the Library of Congress' Chronicling America project--nearly 140,000 publications in all--and plotted them over time and space."

Running on Empty: Back to the Seventies

2011-10-11T08:04:00.000-04:00

Randall Stephens

At least since Bruce Schulman published his The Seventies: The Great Shift In American Culture, Society, and Politics in 2002, historians have been reflecting on that pivotal decade and how it altered the course of recent American history. Maybe it's a sign of the historiographical times that Jefferson R. Cowie's Stayin' Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class won the prestigious Parkman Prize in 2011.

Historians like Daniel T. Rodgers (Age of Fracture) and Judith Stein (Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies) also weighed in on the era in 2011. And new explorations of religion and politics in the postwar years are changing what we think about the "recent" rise of the Religious Right (see Dan Williams' God's Own Party: The Making of the Christian Right and Darren Dochuk's From Bible Belt to Sunbelt: Plain-Folk Religion, Grassroots Politics, and the Rise of Evangelical Conservatism).

Is this the scholarly analogue of what The Onion hilariously described back in 1997?: "U.S. Dept. Of Retro Warns: 'We May Be Running Out Of Past'". Unlikely. But, still, the past keeps catching up with us. The seventies--with all it's tragic pathos, decline, hirsute decadence, and acres of polyester--just pulls us in. The decade is certainly a draw for those observes who like to emphasize the heartbreaking, grim side of life. Maybe in these desperate economic times we also see ourselves reflected back in that bleak era.

Josh Rothman makes that point in the Boston Globe this Sunday. He also cites out very own Journal of the Historical Society.

When we talk about today's economic crisis, we tend to think about the 1930s and the Great Depression. Increasingly, though, economic historians are focusing on another decade -- the 1970s. It was during the seventies, conventionally dismissed as an aesthetically challenged interegnum between the revolutionary sixties and the Reaganite eighties, that the seeds of our current crisis were planted. The argument was advanced last year, primarily in Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies, by Judith Stein, a historian at CUNY. Now it's gaining momentum, with a roundtable of historians and economists responding to the book in this month's issue of The Journal of the Historical Society. As the historian Daniel Rodgers puts it, "In the economic history of the first half of the twentieth century, the crucial decade was the 1930s. For the second half of the twentieth century," there is a "growing consensus" that "the pivotal decade was the 1970s."

I couldn't agree more. In a modern US course several years ago my students and I explored the cultural and political dimensions of the seventies hangover by reading Andreas Killen's captivating, yet underappreciated 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America. (I take special pride in being born in such an awful year.)

John Lennon, not long before his death at the hands of a deranged man, told an interviewer: "Wasn't the 70s a drag, you know? Here we are. Well, let's try and make the 80s good, you know?" Yet the Me Decade would linger on and on. So writes Killen in his intro paragraph:

Will the seventies never end? The question asked recently by a pundit in the New York Times is a valid one. The sevenries are, indeed, the decade that refuses to end--despite the fact that, for a long time, they barely counred as a decade, so completely were they obscured by the long shadows cast by both the sixties and the eighties and by the noisy clamor of their respective partisans. While the former were claimed by the Left and the latter by the Right, the seventies remained the foundling of recent American history, claimed by no one. Despite the current wave of seventies nostalgia and revisionism, these years still need to be liberated from the two decades that bracket them. More than simply the aftermath to the one and the prelude to the other, this decade should be considered on its own terms, as a distinct cultural moment, a moment of rupture and discontinuity in American history but also of tremendous creativity.

“No More Plan B”—Apocalypse or Opportunity?

2011-10-10T07:51:00.000-04:00

Dan Allosso

Graduate students in the humanities are well aware that, in the words of Inside Higher Ed this week, many of our disciplines have promoted alternate career paths outside the academy while at the same time encouraging us to hold onto the hope that although others might need them, we won’t. Now, however, the president of the American Historical Association (AHA) has apparently committed his organization to admitting to history grad students that there are not enough jobs to go around, and the situation is not getting better.

These sentiments appear in a statement issued by Anthony Grafton, president of the AHA, and James Grossman, its executive director. The essay, titled “No More Plan B” and posted on the AHA website on September 26th, criticizes the traditional department’s approach to grad students on the grounds that it “ignores the facts of academic employment . . . it pushes talented scholars into narrow channels, and makes it less likely that they will take schooled historical thinking with them into a wide range of employment sectors.”

Now it would be easy to blame faculty for candy-coating both the overall change in the academy (or at least, in the humanities), and for making their program seem like one where these issues need not concern grad students. Would we be angry to find how few people our department has placed into significant, tenure-track positions in the last five years? But we’re all adults: why didn’t we know this going in?

Or—and this is where it gets interesting—if we really did suspect that the old center would not hold, why did we come anyway? Forgetting about the traditional academy and its appointment with oblivion, and remembering what we each, individually love about our discipline and subjects might be the key to personal solutions that will change not only our own outcomes, but the academy itself.

Yes, departments that can’t place PhDs should probably stop producing them. But what if this apocalypse for the academy liberates us, the grad students, and forces us to refocus? What do we hope to achieve by our work? What difference do we want to make in the world? Do we see ourselves teaching undergraduates in ten years, opening young people’s minds to creative, critical thinking; sharpening their analytical and interpretive skills; helping them learn to read, write, and speak effectively? If this is our core mission, does it matter whether the students are sitting in front of us in a lecture hall or convening in an online forum? On the other hand, if our main interest is research, or writing—either for expert audiences or for the general public—then perhaps the breakdown of the traditional professional model offers us a chance to focus on what we are really good at, and leave the rest behind.

The scary part is, we’ll have to really be good at it. The authors of “No More Plan B” hint that there’s something wrong with the idea that “the life of scholarship” protects us from “impure motives and bitter competition.” We shouldn’t see non-tenure track employment, they tell us, as a fall from “the light of humanistic inquiry into the darkness of grubby capitalism.” But it goes beyond simply embracing the market or awakening from a dream of the idealized, highly compensated academic life. The academy, after all, exists within society and the market, and responds—albeit slowly—to the needs and desires of students.

The rest of society has been struggling for a generation with many of the issues now facing the academy. Technology has been replacing humans on assembly lines, in service professions, and even in “Knowledge” work for decades. Globalization, outsourcing, and new media have changed or obsoleted entire industries. Along the way, the two questions that have been continually asked of each individual are, “what are your specific responsibilities?” and “what is your value-add?”

Steve Jobs was famous for promoting a corporate culture at Apple centered on the idea of the “DRI,” or directly responsible individual. Unlike many people at other companies (especially in Silicon Valley!) who rarely achieved anything from one staff meeting to the next, Apple workers got used to seeing a DRI name next to every task and action item. Individual responsibility helped the bottom line, of course; but it also gave people a way to say “I did that,” and know what they had contributed.

I’m not arguing that the academy should adopt direct individual responsibility—there are too many interests arrayed against it. I’m suggesting that each of us grad students can find a way out of the “Plan B” trap, by deciding what we do that benefits society (or the discipline, or the advance of useful knowledge, etc.), and then articulating it and doing it. What is our personal value-add? Regardless of whether we’re given an opportunity to do it in the institutional format we expected. After all, whose “Plan B” was it, anyway?

Historical Maps Roundup

2011-10-07T05:50:00.003-04:00

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Darren Murph, "'What Was There' project adds a pinch of history to augmented reality," engadget, September 18, 2011

So, it works as such. You dig up ancient photos -- a few generations prior, or even a few decades ago -- scan 'em in, and tag them to their rightful place on Google Maps. Then, folks who visit the 'What Was Here' project website or download the iOS app (all linked below) will be able to see what kind of world they'd be living in if Uncle Rico's time machine actually worked.>>>

“Toward a National Cartography: American Mapmaking, 1782-1800,” Artfix Daily, October 6, 2011

SOUTHAMPTON, MA – Boston Rare Maps, one of the country’s premier specialist dealers in rare and unusual antique maps, presents AmericanMapmaking.com, a virtual online exhibition of antique American maps from the late 18th Century. Originally hosted at the Harvard Map Collection, Toward a National Cartography: American Mapmaking, 1782-1800 traces the evolution of mapmaking during the formative years after the American Revolution, revealing the ways in which Americans sought to transform the landscape to suit their newly established economic and political goals. Included in the exhibition are works by renowned mapmakers such as Osgood Carleton, Andrew Ellicott, John Fitch and many others. For additional information or to view the virtual exhibition online, please visit www.AmericanMapmaking.com.>>>

"Hawaii mapping exhibit set," Maui News, September 14, 2011

WAILUKU - "The Mapping of Hawaii," an exhibit that traces the history of the Hawaiian Islands through maps, will be on display at the Bailey House Museum from Oct. 1 to 15.

There also are two other events tied to the traveling exhibit - on Oct. 7 at First Friday Wailuku, where the exhibit will be open for free, and Oct. 8 with speaker Riley Moffat, an authority on Hawaiian maps, speaking on the mapping of Maui from 1778 to 1929 at the Bailey House.>>>

"Travel website offers a whole new way to discover history," Jerusalem Post, October 2, 2011

From history fans to vacation sightseers, it seems that we all flock to see historic sites on our travels. Yet, while many of us follow the traditional tourist trail, one website is offering a simpler way to discover more of the world’s historic wonders, whether they be national landmarks or hidden gems.

Historvius.com maps the world’s top historic sites online, making it simple and easier for people to gather information and ‘visit’ great historic places across the globe.>>>

"In pictures: Scotland on the map," BBC, September 22, 2011

A new book, Scotland: Mapping the Nation, brings together historic and unusual maps as a "window into Scottish history". The Ptolemy map is the earliest known depiction of Scotland in a map. Ptolemy was a 2nd Century Roman geographer. This map first appeared in a book in 1654. The maps come from the National Library of Scotland.>>>

Surviving a Book Edit

2011-10-06T08:17:00.001-04:00

Philip White

The title of this blog post may have drawn more readers if it read “Surviving a Shark Attack” or “Surviving a Tsunami” but, though it may lack the same drama, I hope this particular musing will be more useful for the would-be book writer.

I have been working on my book (shameless plug alert!), Our Supreme Task: How Winston Churchill’s Iron Curtain Speech Defined the Cold War Alliance, since March 2009. From its genesis, it has gone through multiple metamorphoses, with entire chapters re-written and axed, new sources discovered and integrated, and days spent at the Churchill Archives Center, the National Churchill Museum, the Harry S. Truman Library and other archival treasure troves.

When I first settled on September 1 as my manuscript submission date, almost nine months ago, it seemed a lifetime away. After all, I’d already put hundreds or even thousands of hours into the project, had what I thought were five complete chapters (of 11) on my hard drive, and was rolling along with the remainder.

However, the deadline that once seemed so far off soon appeared right before my nose, like the knights caught unawares by Sir Lancelot in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Liz Murphy, archivist at the National Churchill museum, came across a batch of pertinent Churchill letters just days before, and I was still hurrying to incorporate this new material. I was also hastily acquiring rights for photos from the Potsdam Conference and Churchill’s 1946 visit to the U.S., while trying to cut bloat from certain chapters. Arrggh! I thought I had this under control! How did it become this mad panic?

Anyway, I got the manuscript and images away a couple days early, and took a deep breath. Two weeks later, my editor mailed back a Yellow Pages-sized packet of paper, with red pen to indicate her first read comments and blue pen to show comments from the second pass. The first eight chapters were smooth sailing, but numbers nine and eleven were anything but – too much detail, too long, too everything other than ready to go to print. So I spent an entire day cutting away, and eventually, after four and a half days of hard work, sent back my response to her comments. In the midst of cutting almost 20,000 words, re-formatting a chapter and putting my pride to the sword, here’s what I learned:

Organization

As I’ve written before on this blog, I am not a naturally organized person. But I’ve developed some habits and systems to force myself to be less haphazard and they’ve proved effective. When I first opened the UPS envelope from PublicAffairs, I laid each chapter face down in its own pile on the kitchen table, with chapter one on the far left. Completed chapters went into a “Sept 2011 edits” folder.

As I moved through each section, I jotted down notes on my tablet to remind me about global changes, such as replacing the use of “C-T Day” (referring to Churchill and Truman’s March 6, 1946 visit to Fulton, Mo.) with “Churchill-Truman Day,” and removing overly complicated numerical details. I then addressed these as I went along. Though the temptation was there to discover the scope of my challenge, I did not so much as peek at chapter two before I was done with chapter one. It was agony. Nonetheless, these simple steps proved highly effective.

Venue

I recently read an old article on David McCullough’s writing, and discovered he works in a converted shed in his back garden. He built this haven so his grandkids wouldn’t have to tiptoe around the house while he was working, and so that he could focus. The bonus disc in the HBO adaptation of John Adams also features this hideaway.

Now, I doubt my tyrannical homeowner’s association would tolerate such a structure even if could summon the practical muster to build one (my wife will laugh when she reads this, as I can barely hammer a nail into the wall to hang a picture). So, when it came time to hunker down I left the family at home and went to the library at my alma mater, and when it closed, to my local Starbucks. Hey, good enough for Obama’s chief speechwriter, good enough for me. The combo of a large desk and silence at the former and my noise-canceling headphones and enough caffeine to kill a small horse at the latter did the job.

Know Thy Limits

With the afore-mentioned caffeine coursing through me and my enthusiasm stoked, I wanted to plough through the night on the first day of this process. It wouldn’t be the first time. But about six months ago I “hit the wall,” as a friend and fellow writer describes it – I can no longer work until 3:00 a.m., get up three hours later and repeat as needed. So I stopped at 1:45 a.m. that night, got six hours sleep, and then put the stovetop espresso maker back on. I had a lot more clarity in both my main job and the editing process than if I’d pushed myself to the limit of exhaustion.

Balance

Though much of the weekend was a write-off, I spent at least two hours with my sons and wife each day, worked out, and got enough sunshine to replenish my vitamin D levels so I didn’t feel like a cave troll. When pushing hard to make a deadline, it is tempting to shut every other part of your world down, but that’s counter-productive. By making time for myself and those around me, I kept myself focused and emotionally stable when I returned to my labors.

Receptivity

When you’ve spent more than two and a half years on a book, you become too close to it and the people who inhabit its pages, to the detriment of perspective and the authorial agenda – i.e. what to keep and what to discard. In my case, I wanted to honor the time commitment of each person I interviewed by recording as much of their stories on the page as possible. This added depth to the narrative and gave history a human touch, but it also slowed down the pace and distracted the reader (my editor).

Initially, I reacted poorly to the red and blue ink on the page – particularly in the chapters with entire pages crossed out. But once I’d examined my motivation for keeping those passages and recognized that it may not be constructive, I got over myself and forged ahead. That being said, there were certain sections she wanted to cut that I knew should stay, so I retained them and was ready to advocate for them. To develop and maintain a productive relationship with your editor, you must trust them and recognize that their comments are going to make your work better – ego by darned!

Commitment

“Good enough” is not good enough! It’s pointless to put in full effort in the research and writing phases if you’re going to phone it in during editing. Sure, you may be sick of the sight of your manuscript, but you must close out strong for your book to be its best. If you need to ask for a few extra days so you can do another complete read, then do so. Above all, don’t submit your final version until you’re sure you’ve done everything possible to make it a success.

To those of you who’ve also been through book submission and editing, or indeed thesis review, I pose a question: What have you learned about the process and yourself?

Woodrow Wilson Appears Before Congress, April 7, 1913

2011-10-05T09:52:00.001-04:00

Heather Cox Richardson

Woodrow Wilson was the first president since John Adams to speak directly to Congress.

This was news to me when I stumbled on it yesterday.

His appearance was no small thing. It was headline news across the nation, and it sent official Washington into a tizzy.

Wilson went to Congress—and took his entire Cabinet with him, for good measure—because he really, really wanted congressmen to pay attention to his signature measure: a bill that would lower the tariff. As soon as he had been inaugurated, Wilson had called a special session of Congress to convene on April 7, 1913, to consider tariff revision. Then he had spent a month strong-arming congressmen into supporting lower tariffs. This was a harder sell than he had thought it would be, for Democratic congressmen who had talked fervently about free trade on the political stump balked at lowering tariff rates for products that competed with the things made by their own constituents—notably sugar from the deep South.

When it came time to spur reluctant congressmen to action on the measure Wilson’s lieutenants had written, the President decided to interpret literally the clause of the Constitution that provided the president “shall from time to time give congress information on the state of the union and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”

Wilson designed his personal visit to combat Congress’s habit of ignoring presidential communications. In the nineteenth century, the president transmitted a message to Congress by having it printed, then handing it to a secretary, who then appeared on the floor of Congress. The chair of each house would recognize the secretary, who would deliver the printed missive. The chair would read the message at a convenient time, but few congressmen bothered to hang around to listen. They would read the printed message at their leisure. Or ignore it.

Wilson was determined to make Congress listen to him. While he put it nicely, insisting that he was simply hoping for close relations with congressmen, the bottom line was that he was forcing representatives and senators to endure a lecture from the executive branch. And while he was very careful to keep the message exceedingly short, congressmen—even Democrats—warned him he was playing with fire. They implored him to stick to “advising,” rather than dictating.

The tariff revision that emerged from this jockeying was hugely important. The Revenue Act of 1913 changed the nation’s tariff principles for the first time since the Republicans had taken power in 1861, lowering tariffs and abandoning the government’s high-protectionist stance. To make up revenue lost from the lower rates, the measure also enacted an income tax of 1% for incomes over $4,000, with higher rates for those making more than $20,000 a year.

Considering how many precedents it broke and how many it established, I’m shocked that this entire episode was news to me.

Jesse James and Anwar al-Awlaki

2011-10-04T07:43:00.003-04:00

Heather Cox Richardson

There has been a great deal of debate over whether or not it was legal for the Obama administration to order the September 30 killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. It seems unlikely to go far in the realm of political discussion, since al-Awlaki was not on American soil, and since few Americans seem to have digested the fact that, although he had a foreign name and was clearly implicated in major terrorist attacks on the United States, al-Awlaki was born in America and was thus an American citizen.

A similar question did, though, roil American politics in the 1880s: should the government be able to order the assassination of an American citizen? Then, unlike now, it was discussed on both sides of the political divide as a principled question of executive power and the rights of citizens.

The targeted citizen, in that case, was Jesse James.

James had fought for the Confederacy as one of Quantrill’s Raiders in Missouri. These men were so hated by the pro-Union Missourians that, when the end of the war permitted most Confederate soldiers to go home in peace, Unionists refused to acknowledge the Raiders as Confederate soldiers. Someone put a bullet in Jesse as he made his way home from the fighting.

For their part, James and his buddies were not cheerfully reconstructed ex-Confederates. They survived by robbing trains, banks, and express companies, all of which were associated after the Civil War with the Republican federal government. But James insisted that he was not a criminal; he had been forced outside the law by the government itself. After the war, ex-Confederate Democrats in Missouri could not vote, sit on juries, work as lawyers, or hold government offices. James maintained that the true perpetrators of the crimes for which he was blamed were Republicans. In his view, state laws barring Democrats from access to legal protection, juries, and offices guaranteed that he could never get a fair hearing. According to a sympathetic biographer (he referred to Jesse as “an angel of light”), their manhood forced men like James to “turn upon that law that hounded them and that society that hunted them, and outrage and defy it.”

Missouri officials had no luck bringing James to justice. Neither did Pinkerton detectives, hired by angry express company owners. (The James Gang robbed stagecoaches, banks, and trains and committing a host of murders along the way.) Finally, in desperation, the Missouri governor, T. T. Crittenden, persuaded a member of James’s own gang to murder him. Bob Ford shot James as he straightened a picture on the wall. When Ford and his brother pled guilty to the murder and were sentenced to death, the governor promptly pardoned them and paid them the bounty he had placed on James’s head.

Predictably, Democrats were outraged by the prospect of an elected Republican official arranging for the murder of a Democrat. But many Republicans were also unsettled. Crittenden had “hired an assassin” as if he were a potentate, one Republican newspaper editor wrote. Popular opinion swung quickly to an acknowledgement that James was a criminal, and even rejoiced that he was out of commission, but rejected entirely the idea that government officials should have the power to ignore legal processes and simply murder their domestic enemies. James’s portrayal as a man persecuted by the government made him a popular hero.

While any parallels should not be pushed too far, James’s situation was not unlike that of al-Awlaki. Both appear to have been criminals who protested a government that would not acknowledge their grievances. At the same time, al-Awlaki’s case raises questions the James case did not, questions, for example, about the nature of war powers during times of undeclared war, and how international terrorism should affect Constitutional rights. These are not unimportant issues. It’s too bad that they will most likely not get the bipartisan public airing they need in the wake of al-Awlaki’s death, the same public debate that followed Jesse James’s assassination.

David D. Hall on Why I Became a Historian

2011-10-03T08:22:00.004-04:00

Randall Stephens

I first read David D. Hall's work when I was a grad student at the University of Florida. David Hackett taught a wonderful course on Religion and American Culture, which familiarized students with the big themes

in religious history.

Hall's study of the religious world of 17th-century American Puritans challenged my uniformed ideas of what it meant to be a "puritan." His writing on "lived religion," especially intrigued me. He described it as "a shorthand phrase that has long been current in the French tradition of the sociology of religion (la religion veçue) but is relatively novel in the American context." It was "rooted less in sociology than in cultural and ethnographical approaches to the study of religion and American religious history that have come to the fore in recent years." It involved "the study of 'daily life,' especially among Protestant laity [and a] reflection on 'practice' as the center or focus of the Christian life." (Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice [Princeton University Press, 1997], vii.)

Hall has edited and authored a number of books and articles on American religious history, including: The Faithful Shepherd: A History of the New England Ministry in the Seventeenth Century (Omohundro Institute, 1972); Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Harvard University Press, 1990); Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology (Princeton University Press, 2004); Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); and, most recently, A Reforming People: Puritanism and the Transformation of Public Life in New England (Knopf, 2011).

Hall has had a major impact on the fields of religious history and religious studies in recent decades. As such, he's a great fit for the new HS blog series "Why I Became a Historian." I caught up with him last week at the American religious history group meeting at Boston University. In the video embedded here I ask Hall why he was drawn to history and he responds by describing his early interest in the past, his reading of history at a young age, and his later college and grad school pursuits.

Hall's comments make me wonder if most historians had an early affinity for history through family, location, and a curiosity about all those things that had come before us.

Edward J. Blum on Race and Religion in Recent History

2011-09-30T07:27:00.004-04:00

Randall Stephens

On Wednesday the history department at my institution hosted San Diego State University historian Edward J. Blum, who delivered an intriguing lecture on "What Humor Tells Us about Race and Jesus in America."

Blum is the author, with Paul Harvey, of the forthcoming Jesus Christ in Red, White, and Black (UNC Press, 2012), which "examines the central roles played by depictions of Christ in racial battles from the colonial era to the present."* Blum has also authored a variety of other books and articles on race, religion, and American culture.

In his lecture here on campus, Blum asked students, faculty, and community members to think about how humor in America has changed since the 1970s. What might have been utterly taboo in previous decades--jokes about Jesus, or cracks about religion and race--are now common.

A reporter from the local paper, Dan McCready, showed up and wrote a brief piece on the event. (See the article here along with a short video.) Blum addressed depictions of Jesus and described how Americans have talked about and represented God over the decades and centuries. Those images and ideas about race in general led to innumerable conflicts in the 1960s and 70s, many rehearsed on TV and the big screen. Said Blum to McCready: "What happens in the 1970’s is [that] Americans tire out from the Civil Rights movement, they tired out from all the struggles and we see a backlash to racial problems." Enter Archie Bunker, Dirty Harry, and Rocky Balboa.

Using episodes from South Park and Family Guy, along with popular films, Blum ably guided the audience through the twists and turns of popular culture and showed how we got from point A to point B. Few topics could get students to think about change over time as this did. And I'm always glad to have that key aspect of history discussed by visiting speakers!

Impressions

2011-09-29T07:12:00.001-04:00

Chris Beneke

My understanding of art history is tenuous. At best. But one thing I’ve learned from the popular science writer Jonah Lehrer is that a revolution in 19th-century painting coincided with the advent of a disruptive new technology.* That technology was the camera, and the artistic innovation that it encouraged was Impressionism. With the emergence of the camera, Lehrer writes, “painting lost its monopoly on representation.” Once the static could be captured by a mechanical device, the painter’s comparative advantage resided in his or her ability to convey the fleeting, sensory-laden character of everyday experience. Representation gave way to impression, symbol, and expression.

There may be a lesson here for academia, and historians in particular. Educationally related technological breakthroughs of recent decades—yellow lined paper, VHS players, Laserdiscs, PowerPoint, the insulated thermos mug—could be harnessed by the lecturing professor in the traditional classroom. DVDs and YouTube allowed the professor to illustrate her points with a vivid film clip, or to catch a rejuvenating 45-minute nap. However, the larger cyber universe won’t be so easily tamed. The internet, as we have been told, is a genuinely disruptive technology. There will be no napping.

None of this is news. Dan Allosso has been writing about the radical and generally positive impact online learning is likely to have. I wrote something myself a couple of years ago. And nearly every day, someone pronounces the end of the university as we know it. Usually, that person is Kevin Carey, but not always. Online learning clearly presents a challenge to the way things have been done. (If you doubt it, ask yourself whether you are capable of giving a better lecture on a particular topic than anyone in the world—or check out Jonathan Rees’ blog.) It’s concurrence with an increasingly untenable college cost structure should be worrisome to all of us.

Setting aside the daunting tuition and student debt issues, the parallel rise of the camera and Impressionist painting offers us an example of how a disruptive technological change can result in the sort of transformative change that Allosso, Carey, Rees and others been talking about. Like the Impressionists, we need to capitalize on the ephemerality and distinctiveness of each classroom situation, every day. We also need to presume that the seats bolted to the floors in our lecture halls and classrooms will not be occupied because a professor happens to be standing in front of them delivering the same lecture—one now easily recorded and distributed—he has been giving for the past 15 years. Because of the web’s capacity for delivering knowledge to us in the comfort of our homes or our carefully guarded Starbucks tables, the live lecture’s marginal utility as a means of conveying static truths to a passive audience has diminished, maybe forever.

History teachers need not wholly despair. For years, pedagogical experts (don’t smirk, there is some truth to the designation) have been telling us that students need to be actively engaged in order to learn better anyway. Until now, many of us have been able to evade the implications of that insight because our anecdote-riddled sixty-minute accounts of past events have been so, well, engaging. But like the 19th-century artists who found that their value as purveyors of verisimilitude had faded, we too need to develop creative ways to use history to expand our audience’s understanding of the world. That’s a cliché I know—like telling a baseball team that it needs to win one game at a time. And this process will prove challenging for people like me who have always seen ourselves as doing our job best when we represent the past most faithfully. But it may already be past time for us to think seriously about painting water lilies.

________

* It’s conceivable that my art history problem is related to the fact that I derive my conclusions about the subject from popular science writing, but I digress.

Exploring History from National Geographic

2011-09-28T06:53:00.006-04:00

Randall Stephens

National Geographic has rolled out a new magazine, Exploring History, which promises readable and easily accessible essays and features on ancient to modern topics. The magazine has the polish of History Today, though it does not include the range of historians that HT does so well.

The first installment includes a cover story on Abraham Lincoln that delves into that giant's political career and his inner world. K. M. Kostyal presents the man who would become the 16th president as a contrarian:

Growing up in a land of hunters, he spurned hunting; in a land of overt religiosity, he was a skeptic and kept his beliefs private, in a frontier society preoccupied with physical labor, he disdained it, in an environment indifferent to education, he had a passion for learning; raised by farmers, he left the farm; in a rough-cut male culture, he didn't smoke, chew, curse, gamble, or drink; surrounded by slavery sympathizers, he opposed it.

Kostyal draws on the work of scholars and uses firsthand sources throughout and asks "What propelled Abe Lincoln from the obscurity of frontier life to leading the nation, and becoming the most written about president of the United States?" Like other articles in this inaugural issue, this piece could be used for undergrads in a history survey.

The Fall 2011 issue also includes essays on "Rome's War Machine," "The Rise and Fall of Moctezuma," "Joan of Arc--Beyond Belief," and "Birth of the Pyramids." Editor Anne Alexander writes "Just as National Geographic has been revealing the wonders of the world to readers for more than a century, this magazine will dig deep to unlock the mysteries of time, from the dawn of civilization to the modern era."

Richly illustrated and laid out with clean precision, Exploring History is a must have for history buffs, general enthusiasts, teachers, and professional historians.

Chinese History Roundup

2011-09-27T08:31:00.004-04:00

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Rana Mitter, "The Opium War by Julia Lovell – review," Guardian, September 2, 2011

The newly refurbished National Museum of China opened in March 2011 in Tiananmen Square, adorned with groundbreaking technology and architecture. But the story it tells is far less innovative than the design. In the museum's narrative, China's modern period of history opens with the opium war, the original sin of western imperialism in East Asia that forced China to open itself to a century of humiliation, conquest and exploitation until Chairman Mao came to sweep all that away. It's titled "The Road to Rejuvenation", but it could just as easily be called "1842 and all that". This version of the past says more about contemporary Chinese politics, still drawing on China's history as a victim of western imperialism, than it does about the reality of the clash between the 19th century's greatest land and naval empires. Even in a 21st-century museum, the stain of a history more than 150 years old is central.>>>

Daniel J. Watkin, "Historical Opera Is Canceled in Beijing," NYT blog, September 26, 2011

An opera about Sun Yat-sen, China’s first president and Nationalist leader, has been canceled shortly before its scheduled opening at the National Center for the Performing Arts in Beijing because of official objections to the music, according to the composer’s representatives. The work, “Dr. Sun Yat-sen” by Huang Ruo and a production of Opera Hong Kong, was to have opened on Friday, roughly coinciding celebrations of the 100th anniversary of the Chinese revolution. Mr. Ruo’s management, Karsten Witt Music Management in Berlin, said a government official had gone to rehearsals and decided that the music was inappropriate.>>>

John DeFore, "Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame (Di Renjie)," Washington Post, September 23, 2011

Filmmaker Tsui Hark, who helped define Hong Kong cinema in the '80s and '90s, brings supernatural sleuthing to the Tang Dynasty in "Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame," a lightweight but enjoyable yarn set in the days before the official rise to power of China's only empress regnant.>>>

Karen Wada, "Huntington Library sets shows on American history, Chinese mirrors," LA Times, September 1, 2011

Two American history shows -- one looking at the sweeping changes spawned by the transcontinental railroad and the other at how Civil War photographs influenced the ways the nation grieved -- will highlight the 2012 exhibition season at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. . . . The Huntington also is announcing Thursday an addition to its 2011 calendar: the first public display of a group of Chinese bronze mirrors spanning 3,000 years. "Ancient Chinese Bronze Mirrors from the Lloyd Cotsen Collection," which will run Nov. 12 to May 14, will feature about 80 intricately decorated items from the Qijia Culture (c. 2100 to 1700 B.C.) to the Jin Dynasty (1115-1234).>>>

David Whiting, "‘New’ China asks for understanding," OC Register, September 23, 2011

. . . . Echoing many I met, Hong Lei, a deputy director-general at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, suggested that instead of looking at China from an American perspective, try looking at China though a Chinese perspective.

For Lei and others, that means getting to know a little Chinese history. Why history?

Stuff happens and laws get made, often for a reason.

Consider our First and Second Amendments. Without British oppression, they might not exist.

In a small-world twist, British oppression also helped form modern China.>>>

What the Amazon Tablet Means for Bookselling

2011-09-26T07:21:00.002-04:00

Philip White

Yep, I’m well aware that this is not a technology blog. But for the next few paragraphs, please indulge me by reading how a forthcoming, yet-to-be-confirmed gadget (and, while we’re on the subject, the Borders meltdown) will impact the bookselling business.

So here’s the rub. In November, Amazon will almost certainly introduce its own tablet. Now, on the surface, this may provoke a yawn and something like, "Really, another iPad clone?" And you would be justified for such a response--numerous non-Apple manufacturers have tried to emulate the success of the iPad. Most (even my own beloved HTC Flyer, which, unlike the rest, allows you to write on the screen, synch the notes to Evernote and perform a full-text search to find them--a true digital notepad) have sold a moderate number of units, but nothing to trouble the Cupertino-based behemoth. Others, like the ill-fated Motorola Xoom and, even worse, the discontinued HP Touchpad have tanked.

But here is where Amazon is different. Unlike its afore-mentioned peers, the company isn’t trying to create an all things to all people device, and doesn’t have some kind of inferiority complex about the iPad that leads to throwaway features such as a rear-facing camera--which will own the Worst Tablet Thingy Nobody Uses title until tablet makers get the hint and stop including it.

By contrast, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and his crew know their customers--not least because they have millions of data points from all the amazon.com transactions--and realize what they want. With the Kindle, this was the largest selection of ebooks, long battery life, no screen glare, and the convenient, portable size of a paperback book. With the forthcoming Amazon Kindle Tablet or whatever they call it, the first three of these will hold true. The fourth is trickier because it will be a glossy touchscreen instead of an e-ink display. However, from my own tablet experience, if you set the background color to sepia and reduce the contrast to minimum, the eye strain issue typical of reading on a shiny screen goes away.

Amazon also knows that its customers want music and movies on the go, and don’t want to worry about storing them on a tiny device. So what has it done in advance? Boosted the selection of its instant video streaming service, and launched its own cloud-based music offering. Amazon’s MP3 store is a winner--consistently offering albums cheaper than iTunes with an equal selection. There are rumors that those who buy the Kindle Tablet will get the video subscription fee waved for a year. Double win. And it’s not a coincidence that on the "Shop All Departments" menu on the Amazon homepage, its video, MP3 and e-book "departments" are #s1, 2 and 3 on the list. The next reason for buying the Kindle Tablet will be the price: the estimated $250 cost is half that of the cheapest iPad. Due to its convenient form factor, focus on e-books, movies and music (instead of apps, a market that Apple dominates) and brand loyalty, I predict that the device will own the #2 spot in the tablet sales charts.

Anyway, I digress--back to books. The ability to reach tens of millions of customers via one device (Kindle) put Amazon in a strong position in its continuing pricing negotiations with publishers. With two such devices (not counting the Kindle DX flop here), this will be solidified. Amazon is also riding the wave of the Borders implosion. As publishers will no longer to fight over table space at the big B--though Barnes & Noble is still a factor--they will focus their attention on getting books onto Amazon’s "best of" lists, on offering early discounts for forthcoming bestsellers, and to finally getting e-book pricing right. Now, the debate over what an ebook is worth will continue, because Amazon knows its users are ticked off when ebook prices go over 10 bucks (some Kindle user groups even flag such books to dissuade others from buying), and the publishers need to maintain the perceived value of books and boost per-copy margins. But with the power of its ever-wider reach, Amazon will be, for better or worse, in a stronger position to tip that argument towards its side of the see-saw. It will also be fascinating to see how the success of the Kindle Tablet and decline of Borders affects hardback and softback prices on amazon.com. If only we’d see the start of e-book and hardback bundles.

Another factor that bolsters Amazon’s position as the primary bookseller is its publishing arm. Initially focusing on obscure books and relatively unknown authors, this is now pinching big-name writers such as Timothy Ferriss, author of The Four-Hour Work Week. And the interesting thing? Instead of being wooed, Ferriss and his fellow defectors come to Amazon! As the company expands its roster and its catalog, it is developing a seamless, end-to-end model--signing talent, publishing their books, and selling these titles through its own distribution point. This is a powerful new variation of Amazon’s self-publishing empire, which already has an almost unassailable position in that ever-growing niche.

How traditional publishers will compete with these factors remains to be seen. From a writer’s perspective, the benefits of going with a publisher instead of Amazon’s publishing arm are undeniable--skilled editors with years of experience, publicity managers with large contact books, and relationships with newspapers, magazines, radio stations and bloggers. Same goes for the "why to sell rights to a publisher instead of self-publishing" list, to which you can also add guaranteed money up front. Also, it’s unclear (to this writer, at least) whether Amazon will publish physical copies or just ebooks. If it’s just the latter, are they missing out on potential revenue, or merely reading the tea leaves and seeing ever-increasing ebook sales, diminishing hard copy revenue and more bookstores closing? Regardless, Amazon is the dominant force in bookselling, and with its latest gadget soon to be unveiled and its publishing wing taking off, that won’t be changing any time soon.

Computing Machines

2011-09-23T08:04:00.004-04:00

Randall Stephens

How did we get here?

I'm typing this on my MacBook Pro, a laptop that is a gazillion times more powerful and "pro" than the towering, whirring, always-freezing-up computers I used back in grad school. In fact, my iPad is much faster on many applications than the Dell laptop I carted around five years ago. (Check out Dan's great post from February on a related topic.)

For a little wisdom on the early days of computing and the accelerated pace of change, have a look at this clip of a BBC documentary from the early 1990s.

History Reviews Roundup

2011-09-22T05:18:00.000-04:00

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David Hill, "Book Review: Good Living Street," New Zealand Herald, Sep 19, 2011

A family history. Also a social and intellectual history, and a different take on the Australian Dream. Historian and environmental lawyer Tim Bonyhady follows three generations of Austrian Jews from the scintillating salons of late 19th century Vienna through World War I, Nazi occupation and growing persecution, to a made-for-television escape to Sydney, and a realisation that the struggle wasn't over.>>>

Michael Taylor, "BOOK REVIEW: A bloody season for black Americans," Richmond Times-Dispatch, September 18, 2011

The year 1919 was a terrifying time for many African-Americans. From April to November, a wave of anti-black riots and lynchings swept across the United States. By the time the violence subsided, hundreds of people, most of them black, were dead, thousands had been injured or forced to flee and damage to homes and businesses was estimated to be in the millions.>>>

Chris Hale, "American History Now: An Apt Book for the Times from Temple University Press," Perspectives on History, September 2011

Published by Temple University Press for the American Historical Association, American History Now is a thought-provoking follow up to The New American History, originally published in 1990 (with a revised edition in 1997). Like its predecessor, American History Now thoroughly examines the current states of American historiography, editing out certain areas or specializations that have lost favor since 1990 (such as social history) and emphasizing new ones at the forefront of current research (such as borderlands and religious history).>>>

Anson Rabinbach, "The untold story of the city," TLS, August 22, 2011

In 1934, Martin Heidegger wrote a famous essay explaining why he had refused an invitation to teach in Berlin. “Why I Still Remain in the Provinces” was an anti-urban philippic, warning that cities exposed thinkers to what he called “destructive error”. But when the wise philosopher listened to the local peasants and to “what the mountains, and the forest and the farmlands were saying”, he was reassured. Heidegger was by no means the only twentieth-century intellectual to subscribe to an inexhaustible liturgy of anxieties about modernity and the perils of city life.>>>

One, Two, Three O'clock, Four O'clock Rock Course

2011-09-21T08:27:00.004-04:00

Randall Stephens

I'm teaching a course this semester on rock history. That's a topic I naturally enjoy and it fits in well with other classes I've offered--America in the 1960s, History of the Civil Rights Movement, the South since 1865.

But I've found my inner cynic asking, is this worth a semester of study, time, and attention? Does the subject lend itself to an academic, historical treatment. (Maybe I imagine a medievalist indignantly saying, "You teach what?!")

In the end, I think rock history does, in fact, deserve critical, serious treatment. Since the 1970s historians have studied and taught topics once considered to involve, as E. H. Carr might have put it, "facts" of no historical significance. We now have courses in our profession on sports history, the history of leisure, and more. So why not this? And, of course, it's not like this is the first time a rock history class has been offered.

Still, I like to challenge students now and then with questions about rock's relevance and larger cultural impact. The class is organized around a series of questions--some large, some small. On the small side, yesterday we asked why it is that over fifty years later most of the students in the class know at least 10 different Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller songs. Could the average college student come up with even three

songs from the 1920s? So . . . what accounts for the longevity of rock? Why has it lasted when other styles lay in the dustbin of history? Will twenty-year-olds still remember 1950s rock in another fifty years?

We can also talk about change over time and ask questions about how we get from point A to point B. The class reading from the other day covered the rise of Sun

Records, the critical response to rock in the media, and the appeal and star power of Elvis Presley. We looked at two versions of the same song to talk about how early rockers reworked what they sang. The orginal, Bill Monroe's 1947 "Blue Moon of Kentucky," is embedded above. Elvis's rock-a-billy retooling is obvious in the cover version from less than a decade later. But what accounts for the difference between the two? What musical developments were underway in the years between the two?

In addition we also have some overarching questions, like the following:

How did rock become the dominant genre of popular music?
What factors led to the popularity of certain bands and performers?
How was rock based on earlier styles of music?
In what ways did rock change society?
How can we best understand the relationship between fans and musicians?
Is “rock” still a viable form?

We'll see how well those questions work as the semester progresses. Perhaps I'll settle on other ones if these prove useless!

Jack Rakove on Why I Became a Historian

2011-09-20T06:26:00.001-04:00

Randall Stephens

For the last year I've been kicking around an idea for a new series of video interviews. I thought it might be interesting to ask various historians why they decided to study history. In the short responses that I'll post

you'll hear about what drew a scholar to the field and what engaged them on a personal level. I've always enjoyed reading autobiographical reflections of historians, and this is, in some way, a little extension of that genre.

The first installment features Jack N. Rakove, who reflects on his early fascination with history and his later pursuit of graduate study and career as a professor and author.

Rakove is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies and Professor of Political Science and Law at Stanford University. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 1975. Rakove is the author of a variety of books on legal and political history and the American Revolution, including: The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress (Knopf, 1979); James Madison and the Creation of the American Republic (Scott Forsman, 1990); Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents (Bedford 1997); Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights (Barnes & Noble, 2006); and Revolutionaries: Inventing an American Nation (Houghton Mifflin, 2010). His Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution (Knopf, 1996) won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in History. Rakove is currently working on a book titled Beyond Belief, Beyond Conscience: The Radical Significance of the Free Exercise of Religion for Oxford University Press.

Women in World War II: A Photo Essay

2011-09-19T09:09:00.000-04:00

Heather Cox Richardson

My mother was a WAC, so I’ve always paid particular attention to women’s participation in WWII. But this new photo essay in The Atlantic took my breath away. It shows female snipers, field workers, nurses, executioners, prisoners, and pilots, from a whole range of countries.

These photos are stunning. My patience is short for photo essays. I rarely make it past the first few images, but I’ve examined this essay in its entirety twice already. It’s worth it.

Aside from their individual significance, these photos together make a statement about women, history, and women’s history. The resistance fighters, condemned prisoners, harvesters, and so on, in these images are not shown as wives and mothers, or in any role that highlights their gender; they are integral actors in the wide range of extreme roles humans assume during wartime.

Seeing these photos begs the long-standing question of under what societal conditions we can study women separately from men. Surely, in these images, ideology, survival, and nationalism trump gender. But just as surely, gender trumps other social impulses at other times. Is there any reliable way to gauge gender’s relative importance compared to other factors? Or does it have to be studied on a case-by-case basis?

The Conspirator Roundup

2011-09-15T07:38:00.003-04:00

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The Conspirator, a 2011 film about the plot to kill president Lincoln, is now out on DVD and Blu-ray.

Peter Rainer, "The Conspirator: movie review," Christian Science Monitor, April 15, 2011

Robert Redford’s workmanlike “The Conspirator” is about Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), a Confederate sympathizer who was

executed for her complicity, which she denied, in the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. Tried in a military court as a civilian along with eight other alleged conspirators, she became the first woman to be executed by the United States federal government.>>>

Anthony Lane, "Casualties of War," New Yorker, April 18, 2011

Of the many questions posed by “The Conspirator,” and left unresolved, the most pressing are these: How much did Mary Surratt (Robin Wright) know of the plot to kill Abraham Lincoln? How could she not have known of it, given that some of it was hatched within the respectable boarding house that she ran in Washington, D.C.? If her son John (Johnny Simmons), who certainly did know of the plot, had surrendered to the authorities, rather than remaining on the run, could he have saved his mother’s skin? Why did Andrew Johnson, the new President, reject the last-minute, late-night application by Surratt’s lawyer for a retrial? And was there ever any likelihood, considering the public revulsion at the murder, that she would receive a fair trial in the first place?>>>

Jason Solomons, "The Conspirator – review," Guardian, July 2, 2011

Almost by decree, British actor Tom Wilkinson turns up in mutton chops to play an American senator in Robert Redford's starchy period piece The Conspirator. Has Tom pinched those whiskers from the Hollywood props cupboard, forcing studios to cast him in every historical movie just so they might wrench them back off him during make-up? He's clearly too quick for them. I swear Tom Conti did a similar thing and nicked the FilmFour moustache back in the 1980s. He never gave it back either – he just secretly handed it on to Alfred Molina. I hear the 'tache now lives in Malibu and has its own agent.>>>

Rex Reed, "Movie Review: The Conspirator is Redford’s Best Film in Decades," New York Observer, April 12, 2011

As an iconic actor, conscientious director and liberal political activist, Robert Redford loves history lessons. Everybody knew about white-collar crime in the White House during Watergate, but nobody knew anything about the two reporters who exposed the story until Mr. Redford and Dustin Hoffman played them in All the President’s Men, in the interests of the great profession of journalism. In The Conspirator, Robert Redford the director addresses another footnote to American history that’s left out of textbooks: the little-known story of Mary Surratt, an innocent woman caught up in the U.S. government witch hunt following the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. It’s an exhaustively researched, brilliantly scripted, carefully made film that cautiously avoids preachy propaganda of yesteryear, while unavoidably reflecting the similar anxiety, tension and fear of a polarized nation today. What goes around, Mr. Redford seems to be saying, comes around.>>>

Overlapping History Projects

2011-09-14T06:52:00.001-04:00

Dan Allosso

It’s interesting and sometimes instructive when different threads of work occasionally overlap. I had this experience earlier in the week, when I turned from some brainstorming I was doing regarding the Historical Society’s RIHA program (thinking about how I might structure a proposal that incorporated some 19th-century American and British social innovators who lived on the fuzzy edge between religion and irreligion), back to my online Environmental History project. I’ve been dragging my feet completing the next video in that series, but I had some time yesterday afternoon, so I parked myself in the library’s coffee area determined to write up my notes on Theodore Steinberg’s Nature Incorporated, which is the basis for my next “chapter.”

For those unfamiliar with Steinberg’s book, it’s an insightful look at early New England textile industrialization, and how the social understanding of common resources gradually changed to allow corporations to completely control the Merrimack River from Lake Winnipiseogee to the ocean. Taken from his dissertation, Steinberg’s story of the gradual “instrumentalization” of natural resources leans heavily on the work of his advisor, Morton Horwitz, who showed (in The Transformation of American Law) how many of the most sweeping legal changes of the nineteenth century happened not as a result of legislative or executive action, but through seemingly insignificant lower court rulings and changes in contract law. This is clearly a missing link in the chain of “how the heck did we get here?!” that environmentalists have to deal with, so you can see why I want to highlight it in an “EH for regular people” series. But neither Steinberg’s book nor Horwitz’s are easy reads, so they’re easily overlooked outside the academy. So my task is to render the main ideas in 10-15 minutes, in plain English.

So here’s the overlap: around 1810, Boston merchants Francis Cabot Lowell and Nathan Appleton each individually seem to have visited Robert Owen’s New Lanark textile mills in Scotland. Lowell and Appleton took what they learned at Owen’s water-powered mills, and returned to Massachusetts to form the Boston Manufacturing Company on the Charles River and later, as the Boston Associates, developed the Merrimack. No doubt the size of New Lanark (Owen’s mills were the largest in Britain at the time) and the community that had been built to serve the mills suggested some of the new forms of social engineering the Boston Associates developed in Lawrence, Lowell, and Manchester. They had a different effect on Owen himself.

Robert Owen emigrated to Indiana in 1825 and established a socialist community called New Harmony, on the site of an earlier “Harmony” built by the followers of German pietist George Rapp. The New Harmony Working Men’s Institute (est. 1838) contains the oldest continuously operated library in Indiana. Owen’s son, Robert Dale Owen, became a leader of the Working Men’s Party in New York before entering politics as an Indiana Representative, corresponding with Lincoln about Emancipation, and writing a radical draft of the 14th Amendment. Both the Owens are claimed by social reformers, radicals, and secularists in Britain and America as founding fathers of their various movements.

Robert Owen’s story suggests that there was a moment of recognition, when he and others like him discovered the magnitude of the social forces they were manipulating. Why the Owens chose to respond to this discovery as they did, and the Lowells and Appletons as they did, might turn out to be a very interesting, very contemporary story.

Chroniclers

2011-09-13T09:46:00.001-04:00

Philip White

With the brief lull following my manuscript submission, I’ve finally been able to start reading for pleasure again. Having zeroed in on Churchill-focused books for the past three years, I scoured my shelves for something completely unrelated, and settled on Juliet Barker’s Agincourt, which vividly recreates the battle between heavily outnumbered British troops and their French foes on October 25, 1415.

One of the central figures is Henry V, the iconic English monarch. Previously, I had (somewhat embarrassingly, for an Englishman) only read of his exploits by way of William Shakespeare in Henry V, and through watching the film portrayals by Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh.

Such the Bard’s reputation and flair for characterization that we (or at least, I) often forget that he took creative license in his portrayal, and was crafting plays to entertain common, noble, and royal audiences rather than to provide an accurate historical record.

Still, it came as a surprise when Barker revealed that the incident that defines Act I, Scene II – the French prince sending Henry a set of tennis balls that mocked his youth and poured scorn on his negotiators’ attempts to acquire former British territory in France by peaceful means – was merely a myth. Shakespeare did not invent this incident, but seems to have conveniently used this piece of royal tittle tattle for dramatic effect and to set up one of Henry’s most famous utterances in the play:

We are glad the Dauphin is so pleasant with us;
His present and your pains we thank you for:
When we have match'd our rackets to these balls,
We will, in France, by God's grace, play a set
Shall strike his father's crown into the hazard

In fact, Barker contends, Henry did not believe that negotiations with the French would yield the land he was claiming without force and while the French did not play ball with English diplomats, no tennis equipment was sent across the English Channel to irk the monarch. So much for fancy words and clever plot tools.

Rather than relying on the playwright’s populist tales for source material, Barker makes fine use of medieval chronicles from Britain and France, including Thomas Elmham, Archbishop of Canterbury and founder of All Soul’s College, Oxford Henry Chichele and Enguerrand de Monstrelet. She uses their stories and anecdotes judiciously, relying on material that is verified in more than one account and debunking falsehoods as needed – such as Raphael Holinshed’s account of the tennis balls that inspired Shakespeare’s aforementioned scene.

As with all primary sources, these chroniclers’ words are not without bias. Many were supported by royal or noble patrons and some, as in Chichele’s case, were in the king’s inner circle. They were indeed writing for posterity, but in many cases, feared that negative observations about their masters could lead to severe punishment in the present. After all, this was an age in which beheading and burning at the stake were common. Thus, the chroniclers’ characterizations of Henry and other leading figures of the era were mostly positive. Yet despite their partiality, these writers give us an invaluable window into this distant age that is far less opaque than the work of Shakespeare – not least because, in the case of Henry V, he was writing about the Battle of Agincourt more than 150 years afterwards.

Reading Agincourt got me thinking about how the art of the chronicle has evolved. Who are the chroniclers of today? Perhaps certain journalists, historians, and filmmakers, or have bloggers taken on the mantle of these Middle Ages scribes? What value will their accounts hold for future generations, and how will their myths and bias find their way into our enduring literary works?

Lascaux, Staffordshire, and the Serendipity of History

2011-09-12T06:13:00.004-04:00

Heather Cox Richardson

On September 12, 1940, a dog named Robot ran away in southwestern France. Robot’s owner, the teenaged Marcel Ravidat, along with three of his buddies—Jacques Marsal, Georges Agnel, and Simon Coencas—set out to find him. They found not only the straying dog, but also 900 other animals, all painted on the walls and ceilings of a complex of caves near the village of Montignac.

These dramatic paintings of more than 2000 images in total—including abstract figures, animals, and one human figure—make up the Lascaux cave paintings. They are estimated to be more than 17,000 years old. They are the world’s most famous collection of Paleolithic art.

Extensive tourism to the site changed the environment of the caves and encouraged the growth of fungus and mold, forcing authorities to close the caves to protect them. But anyone interested can take an on-line tour of the caves at: http://www.lascaux.culture.fr/. One can only imagine the awe, and perhaps the growing fear, of the boys as they saw the giant horses, ibexes, and bison from thousands of years before thundering across the ceilings of the caves.

The serendipity of the discovery of the Lascaux caves reminds me of the 2009 discovery of the Staffordshire Hoard the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found. In that case, Terry Herbert decided to try out his metal detector in a farm field close to his home. When it started to beep, he turned up not old beer cans, but more than 3,500 items of gold and silver, inset with precious stones, made in the 6th to 8th centuries C.E.

The treasures of Lascaux can help us to understand the first expressions of human culture, and those of Staffordshire the culture of Anglo-Saxon artistry and warfare. For a historian, though, their discovery also represents the extraordinary excitement of discovering something new and unexpected in the world around us.

Alabama Claims, Economic Development, and a Possible Thesis Topic

2011-09-09T09:51:00.003-04:00

Heather Cox Richardson

Like most other good, red-blooded Americans, I have spent much time lately thinking about the Alabama Claims.

After the Civil War, the American government demanded that the British government pay damages in reparation for the destruction caused to American shipping by warships built for the Confederacy in England. International arbiters threw their weight behind the American argument, and in 1872 Britain paid America $15.5 million to settle the cases.

A paragraph or two on the Alabama Claims shows up in every textbook on the American Civil War, and scholars always refer to them when discussing the foreign policy issues of those dramatic war years. Sometimes we even mention them when we talk about postwar trading patterns, explaining that the burning anger Northerners developed for England during the war encouraged them to look for new trading partners in the Pacific to enable the nation to sever ties with Europe.

But it came to my attention this summer that I had never seen a discussion of what ultimately happened to that $15.5 million. In the references I’ve seen, it simply stops dead when it goes to the United States.

It turns out that’s not at all the way it played out.

I had a conversation this summer with an elderly woman who mentioned that her prominent family’s financial start had come from the lump sum her seafaring great grandfather had received from the U. S. government because he had been “captured by pirates.” This didn’t quite add up, since I couldn’t figure out why the government would reimburse a sea captain for a pirate attack, and because the dates the man lived didn’t coincide with any major pirate activity on the American East Coast, where he sailed. My friend knew the name of his ship, enabling me to chase down what had happened to it. A quick search of on-line newspapers revealed that the “pirate” who had captured and plundered his ship was Rafael Semmes, captain of the C. S. S. Alabama, and the ship had been taken during the Civil War. Her great grandfather received a cut of the Alabama Claims money, and it was enough to enable him to establish a store, hotel, ice cream parlor, and bowling alley in his New England town. To this day, his heirs remain a leading family in the community.

Was it unusual that her family had received enough cash to establish them as prominent citizens in their New England town? I started to poke around a bit, and at the Yarmouth Historical Society discovered the history of Alfred Thomas Small, the master of the Lafayette. Semmes captured this ship on February 23, 1862, and held the captain and crew in chains for several days before sending them back to Boston in another of his prizes. He then burned the Lafayette to the waterline.

On June 10, 1875, Captain Small received a settlement of $6,712.91 from the Alabama Claims, along with $3,391.51 in interest since the taking of his ship, netting the captain a tidy sum of more than $10,000. It was enough to set him up as a local magnate in a thriving seaport. After thirty-five years at sea, Captain Small settled in Yarmouth, Maine, and managed the Yarmouth Manufacturing Company that generated electricity for the town. He quickly became a leading citizen.

Two stories of wealth brought into New England towns through the Alabama Claims do not a pattern make, but they are suggestive. Has anyone ever traced down what happens to reparations claims in general? How do they affect economic development? In the end, who pockets the cash, and what do they do with it? And what about the Alabama Claims in particular? Since the ships taken by Confederate raiders largely came from New England, did the Alabama Claims have a noticeable effect on postwar development in small New England towns?

Seems to me like a thesis begging to be written. Any takers?

Animals in History Roundup

2011-09-08T06:33:00.002-04:00

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James Hookway, "Historian Won't Let Scotland's Most Famous Dog Lie," Wall Street Journal, September 3, 2011

EDINBURGH, Scotland—To millions of people around the world, he's the loyal dog who kept a lonely vigil at his master's graveside.

Greyfriars Bobby, a Skye terrier, supposedly spent 14 years pining by the grave of his owner, a local known as Auld Jock who died in 1858. The tale of devotion has beguiled generations of visitors to Scotland's capital and inspired dozens of children's books and a 1961 Disney film, "Greyfriars Bobby: The True Story of a Dog.">>>

"Humans are Hardwired to Respond to Animals," International Business Times, August 30, 2011

No matter how immersed we are in the high-tech modern world, a new study finds that the human brain is hardwired to respond to animals.

Animals have been an important source of both food and fear throughout human history, and they have helped to shape our evolutionary path. Years of running from and running after animals have apparently left a mark on the human brain - just looking at a photo of an animal jolts our brains into actions.>>>

Jonathan Jones, "Horses shaped our art of war and peace," Guardian, August 29, 2011

Horses throng the history of art. The most ancient paintings that are known, in Chauvet cave in France, feature herds of horses, and Mark Wallinger is keeping the equine dream alive in today's art even if he never does get the money for his giant horse at Ebbsfleet.

The Chauvet horses are wild animals, observed by ice-age artists among the mammoths and rhinos of a Europe abundant in beasts long gone today. But our artistic relationship with the horse has evolved alongside the animal's domestication.>>>

"Trip to the Zhou: Remains of horses and chariots unearthed from tomb dating back to 3,000-year-old Chinese dynasty," Daily Mail, September 2, 2011

It could have been as early as 700 years before the birth of Jesus Christ that these horses were moved on to greener pastures - and no one has laid eyes on them until now.

Archaeologists have painstakingly uncovered the almost 3,000-year-old remains of horses and wooden chariots in a Zhou Dynasty tomb in Luoyang, Henan Province, China.>>>

Amina Khan, "New species of ancient rhinoceros found in Tibet," Los Angeles Times, September 2, 2011

Searching across the Tibetan plateau, paleontologists have discovered a species of woolly rhinoceros that may be an ancestor of the great ice age beasts that roamed the plains of North America, Europe and Asia.

The Coelodonta thibetana fossil dates to about 3.7 million years ago, about a million years before other known woolly rhinos.>>>