Southern History Roundup

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"Mississippi Blues trail curriculum launched today," Clarion Ledger, May 6, 2013

A new Mississippi Blues Trail Curriculum launched online today will bring the state’s native arts and culture to the classroom by exploring Mississippi history through a Blues Trail lens.

The free 18-lesson curriculum, with an interactive, multi-media resource page, was launched by the Mississippi Arts Commission Monday. With three lessons for each of six core areas — music, meaning, cotton, transportation, civil rights and media — the curriculum is available at www.msbluestrail.org/curriculum.>>>

Jakob Schiller, "Civil War Lovers Can’t Leave the Past Behind at Awkward Reenactments," Wired, May 30, 2013

Some of our favorite photographers are ones that bring a fresh eye to a stale topic, which is what Anderson Scott has done with Civil War re-enactors — a favorite subject among photographers. In his recent photo book Whistling Dixie, Scott delves into the American South with a dirty aesthetic and an eye for the strange.

But just like his photos defy our expectations, the events themselves actually caught him by surprise. Scott, a lawyer in Atlanta, was raised in the South, but years spent documenting the Civil War reenactment scene revealed a group of staunch Confederate supporters among the history buffs and hobbyists.>>>

Robert Zieger, 1938-2013

Paul Ortiz

Robert H. Zieger, distinguished professor of history emeritus at the University of Florida, passed away on March 6, 2013.

Professor Zieger was one of the preeminent labor historians of the United States. He was a two-time recipient of the Philip Taft Labor History Book Award for the best book in labor history. He was a prolific writer and authored classic works including, For Jobs and Freedom: Race and Labor in America since 1865 (University Press of Kentucky, 2007),  The CIO, 1935-1955 (University of North Carolina Press, 1995), and America's Great War: World War I and the American Experience (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001).

In addition Bob was a spirited and rigorous historian who introduced countless scholars, students, union members, and community organizers to the field of labor history. He edited several key volumes in southern labor history including Life and Labor in the New New South (University Press of Florida, 2012) which presented some of the best new work in the field of southern labor studies.  Bob also penned essays on baseball for Harper's magazine, on labor race, and gender for Reviews in American History, and on the lessons of the past for Historically Speaking.

Does Florida need Anthropologists?

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.