CLIOPATRIA: A Group Blog
Entries by Rob MacDougall
Thursday, November 6, 2008
American For A Day
[X-posted yesterday at Old is the New New. I waited all day for some post-election gushing here by some of the Historians for Obama at Cliopatria. But Ralph and KC and everyone have been so restrained, and Claire kept her excellent post-election post at her personal blog, so I guess it falls to me, bizarrely, to post something starry-eyed and breathless we can all be embarrassed about in years to come.]
Bart: "Wow. I feel so full of...what's the opposite of shame?"
Marge: "Pride?"
Bart: "No, not that far from shame."
Homer: [quavering] "Less shame?"
Bart: [happy] "Yeah..."
Wow. Congratulations, America. I feel so full of "less shame," I can't tell you. The votes have been counted, the people have spoken, and Malia and Sasha are getting a new puppy. Well done.
But I know Americans and the world woke up this morning with one burning question on their minds: "How, Rob, does this historic election affect you?"
I'm glad you asked, Americans and the world. The answer is: My job just got a lot easier.
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
The Gilded Age Internet and the People's Telephone
Ten years ago, Tom Standage wrote a best-seller called The Victorian Internet, which elaborated many similarities between the 19th century telegraph and today's interwebs. One could write a similar book about the early telephone, and in some ways, I guess I am doing just that. (I will next write a book about the Pony Express called The Jacksonian Internet, then a book about CB radio called The Jimmy Carterian Internet, and finally a book about the internet called The Millennial Pneumatic Tube.) I met Standage at this year's Business History Conference and he cheerfully admitted that he was in the business of "simplification and exaggeration." After several years of doing the opposite to the history of telephony, simplifying and exaggerating sounds like something fun to try.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
All That Camp
Well, they didn't throw me to the Oompa Loompas. This weekend I attended THATCamp, a BarCamp-style "unconference" on the humanities and technology (hence, THATCamp) hosted by the Center for History and New Media. It was terrific, and my earlier wibbling proved unjustified. While I was certainly in awe of the digital kung fu being thrown down, I could in fact follow 95% of the conversations, and I had a great time. Many, many thanks to the CHNM crew, especially Jeremy Boggs and Dave Lester (who I gather were the real architects of THATCamp) and to all the other great folks I met. Now I've got that post-conference power-up of enthusiasm, not to mention a lot of new blogs to follow, friends to correspond with, and things to think about. All should be fodder for future posts. But if I had to summarize what I took away from the weekend as a whole, I'd say this:
Monday, May 19, 2008
On A Planetary Scale
And here's one more concept course, but the great thing about this one is that I'm actually teaching it next year, with Bill Turkel. (Bill said in response to my last two posts, "I think your idea of 'concept courses' is great, except I think we should only teach concept courses, all of us, and standardized syllabuses and canons be damned.")
Science, Technology, and Global History
There are mad and beautiful things beneath the skin of the world we know, that you only see when you look at things on a planetary scale.
-- Warren Ellis, Planetary
Thursday, May 15, 2008
The Backwards Survey
Here's a second concept course, though the idea is neither new nor mine, and maybe it's not really a concept course if several people have done it. Still, I would really like to try this someday.
The Backwards Survey
"Every single event is the offspring not of one, but of all other events prior or contemporaneous ... it is an ever-living, ever-working Chaos of Being, wherein shape after shape bodies itself forth from innumerable elements. And this Chaos, boundless as the habitation and duration of man, unfathomable as the soul and destiny of man, is what the historian will depict, and scientifically gauge, we may say, by threading it with single lines of a few ells in length!"
-- Thomas Carlyle, "On History"
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Concept Courses
Last fall, Bill Turkel had a great blog entry calling for "concept projects" in academic history: like concept car prototypes or catwalk fashions, these would be imaginative efforts that need not prove wholly workable or utilitarian, but that might serve to get ideas into circulation, push the boundaries of the form, or, a la Thoreau, simply "affect the quality of the day." A similar staple of my old Boston gaming / blogging circle was the Game I'd Like To Run post: basically these were trailers or elevator pitches for mental movies, never-to-be-written novels, and genre mashups that we had no real intention of constructing, but were fun to imagine and share.
Recently, I've been thinking about a handful of "concept courses," probably because the school year just ended and so right now I'm about as far from facing a real classroom as the calendar lets me get. My next couple of posts, then, will be ideas for university classes that are interesting (to me at least) to think about and with. How they'd really work in practice, how they'd get approved by an education policy committee, whether I'd be qualified to teach them, are all of less importance than the notions themselves, the fragile but lovely potential of shiny soap-bubble ideas.
Here's the first:
The Great Game: Simulation, Gaming, and History
In time, those unconscionable maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guild struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following generations ... saw that the vast map was useless, and ... delivered it up to the inclemencies of sun and winter. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are tattered ruins of that map, inhabited by animals and beggars.
-- Jorge Luis Borges, "On Exactitude in Science"
Thursday, May 8, 2008
More Matters of Great Historical Import
(Am just now resurfacing from end of term grading. My apologies if any of these items have been linked here before.)
I know this was linked in the last Carnivalesque, but I don't think a solution has yet been found. The American historical profession must step up to the plate if we are to call ourselves historians: Why are there so many peeing dogs in historical prints of the American Revolution?
The Bowery Boys, a great weblog about Big Apple history, celebrates the arrival of Grand Theft Auto IV: Old People Beware with the history of New York City in video games from Donkey Kong on down.
In "The Paranoid Style is American Politics," Reason, 24 April, Jesse Walker turns not to Richard Hofstadter but Bernard Bailyn to survey paranoia in American politics from the Jacobin pawns of the Illuminati to the current presidential contest between the lesbian assassin of Vince Foster, a secret Muslim Communist Republican, and a brainwashed puppet of the Viet Cong.
In "Well, it's very bad history!" TV writer and producer Denis McGrath reviews HBO's John Adams and makes a sensitive case for emotional truth over strict accuracy in historical film.
And what do you think was "the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would've come off the whole enterprise"? According to Clay Shirky, it was the sitcom. The equivalent technology for the previous century? Gin! (Hat tip to Sharon Howard and my non-blogging buddy Sean.)
Monday, April 21, 2008
Weighty Historical Matters
There has been some great, chewy stuff on Cliopatria recently: Miriam's essay on the aesthetics of history, Manan and Nathanael's conversation about reconciliation and historical memory, and today our newest member, Claire, on the history of everyday rage. I've been so derelict in posting, I wanted to return to the fold with a similarly weighty and scholarly piece of work. And so I give you:
A thriving LiveJournal community, which examines historical figures and asks of each the vital question: Were They Hot? Recent contestants include Lord Byron (surely a no-brainer?), Frida Kahlo, Robespierre ("he's got a slightly squished face but I reckon he looks good naked"), and the Roman Emperor Philip ("I would ride this man to Damascus and back if I had to").
Kate Beaton's History Project and History Project Two, a series of winsome and ridiculous cartoons about history, much of it obscure and/or Canadian. I can't pick a favorite cartoon, as they always have a cumulative effect on me, but it's hard to argue with Sandford Fleming's beard. I wish the CBC would scrap the hokey old Heritage Minute and give my tax dollars directly to Kate.
Sometimes blog posts seem so blatantly written for me and me alone that I feel like a chimp when I link to them. But I suppose the internet is big enough that everybody feels that way from time to time. Anyway, one of our buddy Bill Turkel's digital history students recently wrote a software 'bot that impersonates Benjamin Franklin. I must admit it is not the most cunning impersonation one could imagine:
Turkel: So what do you think of Rob MacDougall's blog?
FranklinBot: Does it have anything to do with reductionism?
Turkel: Why yes it does.
FranklinBot: Yay!
Finally, here is some more of the internet-enabled infomancy I celebrated on my blog last week: Caleb Crain and Paul Collins track the origins of the essential phrase, "Mad, mad, I tell you!"
That's really all I want for my blogging life: to make a robot Ben Franklin say "yay" and to follow Paul Collins and Caleb Crain around like a dorky third wheel. "What are we doing today, guys? Guys?"
Friday, January 25, 2008
Belated AHA Blogging: Passion, Process, and Public History
I don't know how the rest of you do it: long detailed posts about a conference as soon as you get home, or even while the conference is still going on! Aren't reflection and rumination our prerogatives as historians? So as my own post-AHA blogging trickles in, let's pretend that I've been deep in thought, and not scrambling madly to clear out my post-holiday inbox, writing a wagon-load of reference letters, and infected by every tropical microbe that wafts over my daughter's daycare.
It seems I went to more panels about process and the profession than about my own specific research interests this year. I can go to SHOT or the BHC to talk about pseudoscience or Gilded Age telecommunications. At the AHA it seems appropriate to reflect on things our whole profession has in common. And so, below the virtual fold: Tony Grafton gets passionate, Walter Johnson gets medieval, Gene Autry gets torched, and Scott Jaschik gets stuck with the check.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
The Further Adventures of Ben Franklin's Ghost
The other day, I posted about Ben Franklin’s posthumous popularity as the go to ghost for American spiritualists. Probably Franklin’s most frequent and energetic earthly correspondent was an abolitionist minister turned spiritualist named John Murray Spear. In 1851 or 1852, Spear and his daughter Sophronia began seeking messages from the spirit world. In 1853, they announced that Spear had become the mouthpiece for the General Assembly of Spirits, a benevolent association of departed worthies like Franklin, Jefferson, and Emmanuel Swedenborg. The Assembly of Spirits was divided into a number of committees and subcommittees: the "Educationizers," the "Governmentizers," the "Healthfulizers," the "Agriculturalizers," and so on, but it was the "Electricizers," headed of course by Franklin, who had immediate plans for Spear.
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
Great Franklin's Ghost
[X-posted, with references and a picture, at Old is the New New.]
I’ve been reading about Ben Franklin again—what else is new? But this time it’s actually related to a project, something I’m tinkering at with Bill Turkel and the clever, clever elves at the Center for History and New Media. About that project, more later. In the meantime, when you dine with Franklin, a side order of old weird America is always on the menu.
Benjamin Franklin was not, as he is often remembered, a statesman who happened to dabble in science—that sounds more like Thomas Jefferson—but a scientist who happened to dabble in statecraft. But as Franklin’s star rose in the century after his death, it was Poor Richard’s Yankee practicality that people remembered. Doctor Franklin the Enlightenment magus faded from popular memory. Washington was the soldier’s hero, and Jefferson remained beloved by democrats and other bearded yokels, but for industrializing America, Franklin the penny-counting businessman was the great archetype and inspiration: Early to bed and a penny earned, the Horatio Alger hero before there was Horatio Alger. Franklin’s science mostly dropped out of the picture: He invented bifocals, didn’t he? And something about a kite?
But there was one segment of American society which kept the memory of Franklin as scientist alive. In the middle to late nineteenth century, millions of Americans dabbled in spiritualism, visiting seances, decoding table rappings, pushing Ouija-style planchettes, and watching mediums emit ectoplasmic goo. And no spirit from the Other Side—no Puritan preacher, no messiah, no rich dead uncle—communicated with American spiritualists more frequently than the ghost of Benjamin Franklin.
Monday, July 9, 2007
History@Play: Madness and Civilization III
(Cross-posted to Old is the New New. Comments welcome either place.)
Jonathan Dresner is right: in my earlier post about history and play, I was a bit too flip in dismissing as “teacher logic” the instinct to leverage activities like computer games into historical learning. In this post, I’ll reconsider computer games—or, as the kids call them today, “games”—as teaching tools, and offer my take on two questions:
- Why computer games are not effective tools for teaching history.
- How they could be.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
History At Play
(Cross-posted to Old is the New New. Comments welcome either place.)
Bart: Oh boy! Free trading cards!
Milhouse: Wow! Joseph of Arimathea! Twenty six conversions in A.D. 46!
Nelson: Whoa, a Methuselah rookie card!
Ned Flanders: Well, boys, who'd have thought learning about history could be fun?
Bart: (horrrified) History??
Milhouse: Learning?!?
Nelson: Let's get out of here!!!
OK, so in the actual episode, Ned and Bart actually said "religion," not "history." I'm just playing with the text, which is partly what this post is about.
Is history fun? I recently read Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen's 1998 book, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life, which reports on a decade-long survey about the ways thousands of ordinary Americans engage with history (or don't) in their lives. Their major finding probably didn't or won't surprise anyone reading here, except perhaps in how starkly the data bore it out: while the majority of survey respondents cared deeply about the past, and engaged with it daily in a variety of informal ways, apathy or even hostility to formal history as taught in school was almost universal.
The Presence of the Past is full of interesting discoveries (I was struck by how much more successfully museums foster a sense of connection to the past than classrooms), but this post is about a bunch of activities Rosenzweig and Thelen mention without studying in detail:
Monday, June 18, 2007
While Ralph's Away
It may seem like the history blogiverse grinds to a halt without Ralph Luker, but it doesn't quite. A few things noted here and there:
In imitation of the nifty Presidental Speeches Tagline, CHNM's Dave Lester offers an American Studies Tagline, an "interactive timeline-based tag cloud" (read: a doohickey you can play with) to help visualize the evolution of American Studies from Henry Nash Smith in 1957 to Lucy Maddox in 1996.
Kevin Phillips reviews the Douglas Brinkley-edited Reagan Diaries in the Sunday NYT.
The cartoon history blog Animation ID asks "Why do MGM cartoons hate black people?" Apparently MGM cartoons like Tom & Jerry used blackface caricatures and sight gags more often and more recently than cartoons from any of the other major studios.
Jeffrey Hart lists five books essential to appreciating American literature of the 1920s.
Google is moving to digitize the collections of Michigan State University, including the Russel B. Nye Popular Culture Collection, one of the world's archives of 20th century comic books, strips, pulp and juvenile fiction anywhere.
Surely somebody has already linked Shorpy, the 100-year-old photo blog?
Since Ralph is not here to do it, I'll allow myself to plug my own blog: In R&D, I continue the deep history of roleplaying games begun in Dungeon Master Zero, this time with the RAND Corporation / Cold War gaming connection.
Finally, just what you didn't know your life was missing: Cliopatria as LOLCats. Thank you, and good night.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Speakers Wanted
It's that time again, when I abuse leverage my Cliopatria privileges to help me with my day job--but this time I won't employ the B word.
One of the best parts of my fairly new position at the University of Western Ontario's Centre for American Studies has been organizing its monthly speaker series. We had a terrific bunch of talks last year on all manner of topics: James Carroll on the history of the Pentagon, Lawrence Hill on The Book of Negroes, Jeffrey Cole on the World Internet Project, and the proverbial many more. Now I'm assembling next year's schedule, and I would love to hear suggestions from any of Cliopatria's readers as to speakers we ought to invite in the 2007-08 academic year.
A bit about the series: We are interested in speakers on any topic related to the United States: U.S. history, politics, foreign policy, literature, current events, and culture are all within our purview. Most of our speakers are academics, but this is not a high-level research seminar. Our goal is to attract a broad audience, including undergraduate students in particular. We pay all travel expenses and can offer a modest honorarium, but I am not talking here about big names with five- or six-figure speakers fees.
I am certain Cliopatria's readers are doing, and are in touch with other people doing, all kinds of interesting work. So: have you seen (or given) any great conference presentations lately? Do you have any colleagues who shine before an audience? Please think about people who are doing interesting work on U.S.-related topics, whom you know to be dynamic speakers, and who might be willing to come to London, Ontario (where the heck is that?) to speak to students and faculty here at UWO. Self-nominations are perfectly OK, as long as your feelings won't be hurt if I'm not able to invite you. (There are all sorts of factors that I won't go into here, about scheduling and balancing the range of speakers and topics, that affect who we ultimately bring in.) You can email suggestions to me directly (the address is Rob MacDougall, but with a dot instead of a space, at gmail dot com) or comment here to give your nominee a little extra publicity. Take a moment to think about it, and do let me know. Thanks!
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Weekend Diversions
What do we live for, if not to link to our neighbours, and be linked to by them in our turn?
SHOTnews (the weblog of the Society for the History of Technology) has posted a collection of interviews with eminent historians of technology (Thomas Hughes, John Staudenmaier, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, more) going back to the 1980s. Many of the interviewers (Jackson Lears, Robert Post, more) are plenty eminent too.
Curious Expeditions is a fine new blog dedicated to "travelling and exhuming the extraordinary past." The territories they cover--animal hypnotism, museums of medical oddities, the blackest of the pudding arts--are similar to those mapped by the Kirchies, but if I am reading it right, D and M are actually travelling to many of the strange locales involved.
Another terrific blog exploring the old, weird Enlightenment is Heather McDougal's (no relation, afaik) Cabinet of Wonders. Here's her review of a book I'm also digging, David Standish's Hollow Earth.
David Bell and Eric Rauchway are discussing military history, counterfactuals, and anti-counterfactualism at Open University.
Data Mining offers some pretty maps of the blogosphere. (via Joho the Blog) What do you know, it is a sphere!
At No Fear of the Future, Jess Nevins (friend, terrifying polymath, and author of the essential Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana) offers an Alternate History of Chinese Science Fiction, from Liu Hui Wen's "Call of Cthulhu" to the "Spicy Gweilo" stories of Judge Bao.
Infocult has a link-rich post on medieval automata, a topic dear to my heart. These clockwork creepy-crawlies at Da Vinci Automata are not very historical, but aren't they cool?
Are you not diverted?
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.
On H-Business, David Kirsch reports the unfortunate news that the great business historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. passed away this morning.
Friday, April 27, 2007
History and Appliances
If you're reading my colleague Bill Turkel's routinely brilliant Digital History Hacks, you've already seen his recent posts on Luddism and history appliances . (And if you aren't, why aren't you? He won an award, you know.) Bill's "history appliances" series starts like this:
Imagine wandering into your living room after a day of work. You sit down in your chair and turn a dial to 1973. The stereo adjusts automatically, streaming Bob Marley, Elton John, Stevie Wonder and Jim Croce. LCD panels hanging on the wall switch to display Roberto Matta's Jazz Bande and Elizabeth Murray's Wave Painting. If you check your TV listings, you'll find Mean Streets, Paper Moon, American Graffiti, The Sting, Last Tango in Paris ... even Are You Being Served? In your newspaper you find stories about the cease-fire in Vietnam, about Watergate, about Skylab, about worldwide recession and OPEC and hostilities in the Middle East. If you want to read a novel instead, you might try Gravity's Rainbow or Breakfast of Champions.
Sounds pretty swell, doesn't it? But allow me to offer an alternate scenario:
Wednesday, April 18, 2007
Academic Careers Wiki
Hello world, long time no see. I'm in the thick of grading, and so I've been studiously ignoring Ralph's pleas to post to this "group blog," of which I am ostensibly a "contributor." Even more studiously than usual, I mean.
But this just came across the transom, and it seems like the sort of thing that everybody is about to know about very soon. Or maybe those of you on the job market know about it already, but it was news to me: the Academic Careers Wiki. Who is interviewing, who is hiring, who has sent out rejection letters, who got rejected by their candidates, and who got the job you didn't get. This is not H-Net. This is not where you go to find out what jobs you ought to apply for. It is where you go after you've applied, in order to vent, fret, dig up dirt, preen, spill beans, share gossip, and find out why oh why they didn't choose you.
This strikes me as possibly frightening to some and addictive to others. You might have to dig around the wiki a bit to get a feel for why. Here's the list of current U.S. History searches. Scroll down to the University of Chicago's 20th Century [edit: not 19th - thanks, Ralph] search to see how much detail some of these entries go into. Here's a page linking to all the current History searches. All in the fluid, caveat lector, "nobody's in charge here" state that is essential to the Wiki format.
What happens when you harness the collective gossip power / angst / desperation of thousands of job-hungry PhDs? When you take the kind of post-rejection Kremlinology and sour grapes that we all engage(d) in during our job hunts and wiki-fy it? It is, potentially, a lot more powerful than wistful First Person columns in the Chronicle of Higher Ed. There's room for all sorts of hurt feelings here, not to mention breaches of confidentiality and professional conduct. But there's also potential to shine some badly-needed light on a process often conducted in conditions of extreme ignorance and fear. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant," said Louis Brandeis. Let the sun shine in.
(X-posted at Old is the New New.)
Tuesday, October 3, 2006
(Un)Directed Reading Bleg
"Bleg" is a verb coined from "beg" and "blog", a neologism that manages, no mean feat, to be even uglier than its parent word, "blog." To bleg means to use one's blog to beg for assistance, in particular when you're asking your readers to do parts of your own job for you. Here, I'll give you a real-life example:
I'm supervising an independent "directed reading" course by a fourth-year undergraduate student who is, for a variety of reasons, unable to take my 20th Century U.S. History course. Between now and April, he'll be reading somewhere between a dozen and two dozen books, discussing them with me, and then writing some kind of a synthetic essay. Normally these directed readings are organized around a fairly narrow theme or topic--the idea is to offer them when a student is interested in a subject matter for which there is no course. But in this case the topic the student is interested in is just that broad: 20th Century U.S. History. I'm in the process of assembling a list of books to recommend.
Here's the fun part, and here's where you come in. I am choosing to look at the highly un-directed nature of this "directed reading" as an opportunity rather than an obstacle. We (my student and I, and you) can put almost anything we want on this list. It is not the same as a graduate reading list or a syllabus for a survey course. It does not matter if we cover all or even most aspects of 20th Century U.S. History. The student could, after all be doing a full course on something really specific like "late 19th and early 20th century spiritualism, stage magic, and show inventors" (which is the other independent study project I happen to be supervising this year) and would still get the same kind of credit. What I want to assemble, both for this student and for my own future reference, is a list of books in American history that have genuine scholarly merit but are above all good, accessible reads. What would you recommend?
Zachary Schrag, a smart young historian at George Mason University who I've had the pleasure of meeting at a conference or two, pulled a together just the sort of list I'm thinking of and posted it on his website as "A Layperson's Reading List in American History." It's a great list, and I've already borrowed from it liberally, but I know there are more books that could go on this list. Help me out, o denizens of Blogtown!
If you're not an Americanist, I'm still interested to hear your thoughts. What are the books in your own field that stand out? Not the magnum opuses that defined the field, but the great little books that you'd press into the hands of a smart undergraduate, or a relative, or a friend, saying, "yes, this is serious history, but it's also a great read."
Thursday, September 28, 2006
Secret Syllabus Redux
Two and a half addenda to my post about secret syllabi:
1. My colleague Bill Turkel assures me that his graduate course in digital history has no hidden syllabus; the questions he's assigned his students are exactly the questions he's wrestling with right now. In which case, I intend to get his students to see if they can hack my TiVo so it works in Canada. This reminds me: Bill's course here at the University of Western Ontario and Josh Greenberg's similar course at George Mason University have unleashed twenty-six new history bloggers on the 'sphere. Blogrollers take note, and completists despair.
2. The second half of my post was basically a mash note to Eric Rauchway... and that was written before he outed himself as a Whoey! If you thought I was a Rauchway fanboy before this, just watch me now. Eric sees the good Doctor (who?) as one in a long line of English heroes who are "crypto-foreigners," used by their creators to meditate on what it means to be British. I'd add to his list Christopher Banks, the Consulting Detective from Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans, and, since he's already opened the door to geek culture, the principals in Alan Moore's League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The other consequence of Rauchway's post? If he can talk about Doctor Who at TNR's Open University, never again will I refrain from posting something at Cliopatria because I think it might be too nerdy.
2 1/2. Ralph's mentioned it already, but I will be hosting History Carnival XL (extra large?) at Old Is The New New on Sunday, October 1. Keep those nominations coming to electromail - at - robmacdougall - org (not com) or use the handy form.
Wednesday, September 27, 2006
The Secret Syllabus
Doesn't that have a nice ring to it? The Secret Syllabus. It sounds like one of those erudite, but not too erudite, thrillers by photogenic Harvard undergrads who somehow score million-dollar advances for their first novels. Alas, it's really just a blog post by me.
Every course we teach has two syllabi, I think. There's the visible one, the actual list of readings and topics we assign to our students. And then there's the secret syllabus, made up of whatever assortment of books and articles we also happen to be reading while teaching the course. These are the various bees and bats in our belfries and bonnets, the things we're chewing on as we walk into the classroom, the new interpretations and the rediscovered classics that get us fired up about a topic we may have taught several times before.
Ideally, one syllabus will bear some resemblance to the other. In my first year of grad school, a Certain Eminent Historian sometimes came to our methods seminar more interested in talking about the previous night's Chicago Hope than The Rosicrucian Enlightenment or Time On The Cross. I don't think our Eminent Historian had any particular affinity for Mandy Patinkin, but it was the 1990s, and that's what people watched on Wednesday nights. Unless of course they were dim-witted graduate students busy plodding through Fogel and Engerman. His Eminence was pretty disgusted with us when he realized nobody was prepared to discuss last night's hospital drama. Was he more up to date with pop culture than his twenty-something grad students? What part of "Must-See TV" didn't we understand? I mean, it was a given that he'd be smarter than any of us, but he seemed a little put out by the indignity of being cooler than us too.
Friday, September 8, 2006
In The Archives
I'm at the MIT Archives today, not the NYPL, but I, and I imagine most historians, can relate to the following description of our work:
In the reading room of the New York Public Library, the vast mausoleum, designed by some schoolmaster with memories of hard oak, dust and gloom, there are men who sit day after day, bulwarked by stacks of books, scribbling, scribbling in the little pools of light from the green-shaded lamps on the long oak tables, and you look at them and wonder what will-o'-the-wisps they are pursuing day after day, year after year. One of them may be writing a history of dentistry in America, another studying explosives in order to blow up the world, a third gathering evidence that Shakespeare wrote the Bible. Their faces are pale and grim. The only cheerful people in that place are those who do not read the books, but only handle them as they come from the dumbwaiter, and set them on the counter like moldy slabs of beef. Those who sit at the long tables day after day are dedicated men; some of them are brave men. There is death in old books from the stacks of a great library; the dust that impregnates their pages is death and darkness; the dust says, 'These are books that no one have opened for twenty years, fifty years, eighty years; and when you have written your book, it too will gather dust.' White book dust, bone dust; garden dirt and axle grease are clean in comparison; they are living and unctuous; rubbed into the skin, they do good. The dust of books causes blains and hangnails; ingested it provokes dyspepsia, flatulence, and heartburn; in the lungs it is cancerous. Who would not choose, if he could, to sit chained to an oar in a Roman galley, in the sunlight and salt air, rather than in this sunless crypt?
That's from Prophet of the Unexplained, Damon Knight's 1971 biography of Charles Fort. I actually quite like working in the archives--blains, dyspepsia, and flatulence notwithstanding--but it's still a great passage.
(I am put out, though, that MIT of all places does not allow digital cameras in their archives, even though the material I'm looking at is not copyrighted, and my flash-less camera will do no more harm to the documents than the pressure of my eyeballs.)
Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Things Illustrated Here and There
I've been on hiatus from blogging for the past several weeks ("on hiatus" sounds so much more intentional than my usual habit of "not getting around to it," doesn't it?). But shiny links and pretty pictures do catch my eye from time to time. With apologies to Ralph Luker, here are some things I've noted here and there. Most of these links are word-light and picture-heavy, in case your brain is in summer semi-vacation mode.
Teaching America to Draw, on exhibit at New York's Grolier Club, features drawing manuals and ephemera from the 1790s through the 1920s. Drawing and sketching were widely popular pastimes in nineteenth century America. "Before box cameras became universal a century or so ago, people drew for pleasure but also because it was the best way to preserve a cherished sight, a memory, just as people played an instrument or sang if they wanted to hear music at home," says the New York Times' review. "Drawing was a civilized thing to do, like reading and writing. It was taught in elementary schools." The instructional manuals on display at the Grolier Club "presume a degree of skill among ordinary citizens — even children — that would now be regarded as noteworthy in the art world."
Even if you couldn't draw Skippy the Turtle to save your life, if you like looking at gorgeous illustration, you should get to know the weblog Drawn! (The exclamation point is theirs, not mine, which is not to say I don't recommend them highly.) They've had some historical content lately, like this link to a blogger posting great illustrations and cartoons from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and an extensive if idiosyncratic collection of antique engravings and woodcuts. (Deserted abbeys, stately manors, and diabolical siege engines feature prominently.) Considerably less picturesque are a pair of anti-Japanese training / propaganda pamphlets produced by the U.S. Army during World War II: "The Punch Below The Belt" and "How to Spot a Jap," the latter illustrated by Terry and the Pirates creator Milton Caniff.
From old ways of visualizing history to very new: SIMILE Timeline is "a DHTML-based AJAXy widget" (I'll get Bill Turkel to translate that bit for me) for constructing and sharing timelines of historical events. It's sort of like Google Maps for chronological information: you can drag timelines back and forth, zoom in and out on various events, and, if you know a little XML, create and share your own historical timelines. SIMILE (it's a computing project based at MIT, but it would only scare you away if I spelled out what the acronym stands for) offers a number of sample timelines you can explore, including the JFK assassination, the life of Monet, several millenia of Jewish and Christian history, and about 100 million years of dinosaurs.
Prefer moving pictures? Scott's wife is right--this has undoubtedly been the summer of YouTube. Just like online music in the "celestial jukebox" days of Napster, so it is with online video in 2006. There has never been more old TV and video available for free on the web than there is right at this very instant, and just as soon as the industries involved figure out how to monetize the medium, there probably never will be again. Everybody can find their own favorites: An IBM cartoon about computers from 1958. An early experimental film by Muppets creator Jim Henson. Dean Martin on the Tonight Show in 1969. Crispin Glover scaring the heck out of David Letterman in 1987 (or is it all staged?). A funky-creepy-trippy AT&T short on "how to use the telephone" from 1974. OK, so maybe I'm the only person on earth who is going to pick that last one as his favorite. The point is, if there's anything you ever saw on TV that you think you'd like to see again--a funny commercial, a video, a talk-show appearance--I urge you to search for it while you can.
This last TV link is of only slight historical value, but it has brought so much joy into my life I have to share it with the world: The Amazing Screw-On Head is a new cartoon from Hellboy creator Mike Mignola. It premieres on the Sci-Fi Channel this Thursday, but you can watch the entire 22 minute pilot online. The Amazing Screw-On Head features Paul Giamatti as the voice of, well, a robot screw-on head, top spy for Abraham Lincoln in the early days of the Civil War. Saith the head: "America is depending on me, Mr. President! And by America, I mean the world." A robot-happy historian of technology, if I knew anybody fitting that description, could base his argument for the cartoon's historical value in its wonky reimagining of nineteenth-century technology (witness Lincoln's flip-clock style talking portrait, numerous steam-driven robots, and the happy plentitude of zeppelins). Plus there's an undead David Hyde Pierce, a series of overly familiar manservants, and, if you stay to the end, the Secret Truth behind the Homestead Act of 1862. As I studiously avoid news of the Beltway, Baghdad, or Beirut (like I said, I'm on hiatus), reloading the video for the umpteenth time, I'm reminded of S.J. Perelman's motto: "Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws." Has it ever been more true?
Monday, June 5, 2006
Road Trip Redux
Thanks for all the great comments and suggestions re: the American Studies course I posted about last week. Kenneth Hite, whose praises I've sung before, went above and beyond the call by offering me a baker's dozen places to visit in the AmStudies anti-survey. Check them out. (His might skew a little more patriotic than mine, I think, though obviously it's all in how you present things.)
Also, I thought I'd mention that I'll be in Toronto this week for the Business History Conference. If anyone reading this is also going to be there, by all means drop me a line or just come on up and say hi. I'll be the bleary-eyed new daddy who hasn't written his talk yet.
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
American Studies Road Trip
It’s that time of year, as excellent posts by Caleb McDaniel and Kevin Levin remind us, and I too have been (re)designing the courses I’ll be teaching next fall. I have one new course to prep (20th Century U.S. History) and one course I’ll be repeating (American Studies).
Some people asked me to describe my American Studies course after I mentioned it in a post-Katrina post nearly a year ago, but I got so busy teaching it that only now have I had much of a chance to reflect on the class and how it went. It was a learning experience, as any first-year professor’s courses are going to be, but it really was a joy to teach. Our undergraduate program in American Studies is brand new, and the faculty very generously gave me a free hand to do almost anything I wanted with this seminar. In a lot of ways I got to teach my dream course.
One of the few design specs they gave me was that I should not reproduce the perfectly good U.S. history survey we already have, so I designed American Studies 200 as a kind of anti-survey.
Sunday, May 14, 2006
The War Against Mothers Day
In North America, at least, a lot of the spring holidays seem like also-rans: Heritage Day, Family Day, Administrative Professionals Day… They're like the movies that come out in Spring, neither summer blockbusters like the 1st or 4th of July, nor the prestige offerings of Winter and Fall. They're the Hallmark holidays. We celebrate them, if at all, with the dim sense we've been had by the Greeting Card Octopus or the Florists' Trust.
Mother's Day is different, of course. I've never really heard anyone complain about Mother's Day. And I'd never heard anything about its rather melodramatic history or its progressive roots until I read Stephanie Coontz' 1992 book The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap. (It's possible I'm just out of the loop, though: I see the story is all over the internets today.)
"Mother's Day originated to celebrate the organized activities of women outside the home," Coontz writes. "The people who inspired Mother's Day … believed that motherhood was a political force. They wished to celebrate mothers' social roles as community organizers." The holiday became "trivialized and commercialized," she says, only after it was reoriented to celebrate private family relations.
Sunday, April 9, 2006
TransAmerica
I’ve enjoyed reading the conversation between Eric Rauchway, Caleb McDaniel, and now KC Johnson on globalization and transnational history. Perhaps I should say transnational American history, since all of them are coming at the topic from their studies of the United States—as am I—but the extent to which transnational history is American history, and American history is transnational history, is part of what is at issue here. (It may seem like I'm conflating transnational history and globalization here, but bear with me. I know that Thomas Bender and others like him are hardly prophets of globalization in the mold of Thomas Friedman, but any honest answer to the questions “why transnational American history?” and especially “why transnational American history now?” must surely involve the G word.)
KC, Caleb, and Eric’s positions (I’m just going to call them by their first names because I’ve met KC, been reading Caleb for ages, and because I saw a comment where Professor Rauchway said it was kosher to do so) seem complementary to me. Caleb is an advocate and (rara avis) an actual practitioner of transnational history, but he’s rightly skeptical of any grand proclamations about what globalization “proves” or “requires.” Eric has written a book on Gilded Age globalization and the United States that I obviously have to read: Blessed Among Nations: America’s Place in the World. He’s arguing for the continued relevance of political history now that transnational history is the new black. And KC wonders about the motivation of the transnationalists. Is it just another way to rationalize the marginalization of political and diplomatic history—to “take the state back out”?
In an earlier post on this subject, Caleb cited Thomas Bender’s Rethinking American History in a Global Age. This week my American Studies class discussed an article in that collection, Charles Bright and Michael Geyer’s “Where in the World Is America? The History of the United States in the Global Age.” With no greater qualifications on this subject than that, plus Ralph’s pleas for me to contribute to Cliopatria again sometime this decade, I’ll wade in with in a few thoughts.
Thursday, November 3, 2005
Cliopatria's Nightmares
Que je suis bête. I wrote the other day about Kenneth Hite’s “Clio’s Nightmares,” but lamented that I had no ideas for a Halloween-themed history bending post of my own. (Miriam’s Victorian Terrors more than made up for it.) It occurs to me now in the grey dawn of November that I what I should have written was “Cliopatria’s Nightmares”: not alternate histories but alternate Cliopatrias.
“Once a year, reason sleeps and the history blogosphere dreams of Cliopatrias that never were…” I’m not actually going to write up the alternates—not until next Halloween, at least—but I’m sure you can imagine a few. An obvious alternate Cliopatria would reverse everybody’s politics, like a Star Trek-style mirror universe. So maybe KC Johnson enforces political correctness in the classroom while the rest of the crew beats the drum for war in Iraq. Of course, unless movies and TV have lied to me, you can identify your evil alternate-universe twin by their goatee. But if I recall correctly, a disproportionate member of real-life Cliopatrians are goateed. Does that mean ours is the evil universe? Another alternate would re-imagine Cliopatria as an adolescent LiveJournal community, all high school drama and lower case typing. Rebecca Goetz and Caleb McDaniel squee over Orlando Bloom icons while Ralph Luker gloats in l33tspeak over the n00bs he has lately pwned or r0xx0rzed. (Juvenilia decoded on request, omg lol kthx bye!!!11!1eleveneleven) And in the last alternate, we’re all, I don't know, geographers. Or vampires. Vampire geographers. Something like that.
The above silliness is brought to you courtesy of my punchiness after a day deep in the archives. I’m in Indianapolis today and tomorrow doing research at the Indiana Historical Society and Indiana State Libraries. Apropos of nothing: They have a gorgeous set up here. Some Hoosier philanthropists must care a lot about state history.
Monday, October 31, 2005
Clio's Nightmares
I wish I had a good Halloween post for all of you today. A rollicking spooky-creepy alternate history. What I really wish I could do in honor of All Hallow’s Eve is just link directly to Ken Hite’s Suppressed Transmission and introduce the gentle readers of Cliopatria to Clio’s Nightmares.
Ken Hite is well-known by a tiny community of tabletop role-playing gamers, yet essentially unknown outside that little world. For several years now, Ken’s been writing a brilliant column called “Suppressed Transmission” for the online gaming magazine Pyramid. Alas, Pyramid is accessible to paid subscribers only. Ken’s column is a crazy grab-bag of historical mysteries, occult synchronicities in myth and literature, and gonzo alternate histories. While ostensibly written to provide fodder for role-playing scenarios, Suppressed Transmission is really just fine reading for anyone interested in the weirder side of history.
Wednesday, October 5, 2005
Math and Unicorns
On the day before school started this September, I got a haircut, something I’ve probably done on or around the day before school started for the last thirty years. But as I’ve just moved to a new city, I didn’t have a regular place to go. It is no doubt a sign of my advancing years, and my imminent ejection from the coveted “white males aged 18-34” demographic, that this year I sacrificed hipness for familiarity by going to a national hair-cutting chain.
The woman cutting my hair asked me what I do for a living. I told her I was about to start a brand new job as a history professor. I still grin every time I say that. No doubt the thrill wears off in time, but after mumble-mumble years of grad school and three consecutive bouts with the job market, I gotta tell you, it feels great to be a professor. OK, assistant professor, whatever. It’s faculty, baby, and it is fine by me.
“Wow,” the hairdresser said. “A history professor. You must be really good at math!”
That threw me. “Math? Why do you say that?”
“Oh, because of all the numbers you must have to remember.”
I don’t mean to make fun of her. The haircut I got was pretty good. And my comments about cutting hair probably sounded just as off base to her. But that conversation reminded me that what we do as historians is not what most people probably imagine we do.
I’ve been thinking about that conversation again as I read Sam Wineburg’s terrific (imho) Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts. [...]
Tuesday, September 6, 2005
The Good Flood
One of those odd synchronicities that accompany natural disasters like spooked horses and whining dogs: the week before Katrina, I happened to be reading up on the Louisiana flood of 1927, in James Cobb’s The Most Southern Place on Earth and John Barry’s Rising Tide. The American Studies course I’ll be teaching this year is built around a series of “places in time.” Each week or two, we’ll examine an event or site or moment where “America” and what it meant was constructed, contested, or otherwise up for grabs: the Boston Tea Party, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Mississippi Freedom Summer, and so on. I wanted to get a little farther off the path beaten by textbooks and survey courses, and I’d thought about including the 1927 flood. But with a historian’s unerring sense of topicality, I decided not to, three days before Katrina hit.
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
The Greatest American Hero
Look at what’s happened to me-eee
I can’t believe it myself
Flying away on a wing and a prayer
It should have been somebody else…
Alas, this post isn't really about the 1980s TV series, “The Greatest American Hero.” But now that I've got everybody of a certain age humming the theme song, the last line of those lyrics may at least be apropos. The Discovery Channel has just completed a TV series called “The Greatest American,” in which viewers chose among founding fathers, great inventors, and talk show hosts to select and rank the 25 “Greatest Americans” of all time. The final episode aired on Sunday; in the last week of voting, Harvard Square was blanketed with flyers (along with other history-friendly addresses, I presume) urging Americans to exercise their democratic right by phone, text message, or email. The top five contenders were (not in order): Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ronald Reagan. I’ll let you click through to the Discovery Channel site to discover the big winner, but here’s a hint: it was probably not the Harvard Square vote that put him over the top.
“Greatest American” was modeled on the BBC’s “Greatest Briton,” a surprise hit in 2002. Winston Churchill beat out a very deep bench to win that contest over Princess Diana (third place) and the 19th century engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (carried into second place by a get-out-the-vote drive from students at Brunel University).
Copycat shows followed around the Commonwealth, with the kinds of ups and downs endemic to internet polls. In the race to name the “Greatest South African,” early voting was so lopsided in favor of Nelson Mandela that, nine weeks before the series ended, the South African Broadcasting Company went ahead and acclaimed Mandela as “indisputably the Greatest South African”—so viewers were really only voting to choose the Second Greatest South African. That coveted title went to golf star Gary Player; Mahatma Gandhi came in third. But the SABC pulled the plug on the series after an embarassingly strong showing by several pro-apartheid figures—Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd, the chief architect of South African apartheid, came in 19th, and white supremacist Eugene Terre’Blanche came in 25th. The final episodes were never aired.
(I must admit I didn’t know about Mahatma Gandhi’s South African connection before now. There has not been a “Greatest Indian” TV series as far as I know; there was a magazine poll with that title, but Gandhi was ineligible, as the poll only covered the years after Indian independence. Mother Teresa ended up topping that list, and she was actually Albanian, so it seems churlish to refuse Gandhi the honor of being the Third Greatest South African.)
The fight to name the CBC’s “Greatest Canadian” was considerably more sedate (though there was understandable harrumphing at the Anglophone character of the final list). Saskatchewan premier Tommy Douglas won the number one spot, a nice endorsement of Canadian Medicare and social welfare at a time when they seem under regular attack. My man Alexander Graham Bell also made the Canadian top ten, squeaking by the Great One himself, which is not bad considering Bell wasn’t really Canadian. (Nor did not being American stop Bell from making the U.S. top 100.)
Anyway, the people have now spoken, and the 25 Greatest Americans are ranked at the Discovery Channel site, with the Greatest 100 also listed in alphabetical order. The enterprise has about as much historical rigor as American Idol, but hey, lists and contests are fun. Complaining about the choices is at once pointless and the entire point. Here, I’ll get you started: Dr. Phil???
Thursday, April 7, 2005
Unprofessional Wrestling
Ralph Luker usually keeps all of us up to date on campus speech controversies. So I am rather surprised that I apparently have the following scoop: This past Tuesday, the College Republicans at the University of Connecticut invited Jim Hellwig, better known as face-painted pro wrestler “The Ultimate Warrior” to speak at their school. But students in attendance were shocked, shocked when, instead of comporting himself like a proper professional wrestler, the Ultimate Warrior launched into an angry, incoherent tirade.
Students started heckling Hellwig when his remarks turned (allegedly) racist and homophobic. The Ultimate Warrior (who, I’m sure all our readers will recall, bested Ravishing Rick Rude in a steel cage match at Summer Slam ’89) only got angrier, and eventually campus security had to shut the event down.
The UConn College Republicans have apologized for the incident, but Warrior (my Chicago Manual tells me it is correct to drop “the Ultimate” after second reference) appears unrepentant. In a memo “from the desk of Warrior,” he dubs the UConn Republicans “spineless” for not tagging off to come to his defense, and calls his critics the “World Class Crew of Crybabies.” (Which is ironic, because I’m pretty sure the WC3 took on the Hart Foundation in Wrestlemania 4.) Civility waxes and wanes at Cliopatria, but I suppose we may count ourselves lucky that neither David Horowitz nor Michael Berube are (to my knowledge) masters of the Top Rope Frankensteiner or the Guerilla Press Bodyslam.
Friday, March 25, 2005
Interesting Narratives
You will have to take my word for it, but I was drafting my own post for Cliopatria about Olaudah Equiano before I saw Caleb McDaniel’s very smart reflections on the same subject. I’d just had the opportunity to meet the eminent African-Americanists Ira Berlin and Vincent Carretta. I told Prof. Berlin a pretty good story (second-hand) about cooking burritos on the radiators in Widener Library, but conversation then turned to Carretta’s work on Olaudah Equiano and the somewhat similar controversy around Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins.
Earlier posts by Caleb and Ralph Luker should have you covered on both Equiano and Kelley-Hawkins, but just to recap: Equiano was a freed slave, a sailor, an abolitionist, and the author of The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, published in 1789. Equiano's Interesting Narrative is one of the earliest extant slave narratives, and one of our only primary accounts of the Middle Passage from Africa to America on a slaving ship. Except that it might not be a primary account. Vincent Carretta’s work argues that Equiano was born a slave in South Carolina, and that his description of the middle passage was based on oral testimony from other slaves. (Brycchan Carey has a very useful website on Equiano, including excerpts from the Narrative and an outline of the debate around Equiano's birthplace.)
And Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins was the 19th century novelist, “rediscovered” in the 1980s as a “lost” African-American author, who now appears to have been white all along. “Whispered behind this discussion,” Ralph said last month, “is the fact that this may be the second time that Henry Louis Gates has identified the literary work of a white woman as that of an African American woman.” I have indeed heard that whispered, and even spoken in a normal tone of voice, but one might also whisper that there are many who find it very satisfying to catch a scholar with the visibility of Henry Louis Gates in a muddle like this, and perhaps cast the whole enterprise of literary historicism into question. See how discussion at Crooked Timber quickly turned to whether the whole field had been “Sokalled” (a reference to physicist Allan Sokal’s 1996 hoax on the cultural studies journal Social Text.) Viewers of The Simpsons will know what I mean when I say that some commentaries on l’affair Kelley-Hawkins bear a distinct resemblance to Nelson Munce’s “HA-ha!”
Once the fun of Sokalling the lit crits has faded, I imagine Kelley-Hawkins will be, as Scott McLemee puts it, “re-forgotten.” You can, with some effort, come up with reasons to keep studying her—as a kind of Borgesian fabulation or as an example of nineteenth-century racial prejudice—but I have doubts that these are going to keep Kelley-Hawkins in the limelight for long. The one thing that everyone seems to agree on is how dull her novels are. I haven't read her, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Kelley-Hawkins is no Borges, and dull or racist Victorian writers are hardly in short supply.
First-hand accounts of the Middle Passage are harder to come by, so the Equiano case is a little different. If “the African” was not in fact born in Africa, in many ways that makes his Interesting Narrative even more interesting than it already is. It makes it easier, as Caleb said, for students to see Equiano's Narrative as a rhetorical text, to ask how it works and why it was written. It emphasizes, as Prof. Berlin pointed out, that the Narrative is an artifact of a black Atlantic culture. And it turns the Narrative into a rather audacious act of self-invention—like other 18th century autobiographies I could mention.
But it also means that the Narrative is not, strictly speaking, true. Even if we assume that Equiano’s second-hand version of the Middle Passage is largely accurate, Carretta's discovery would still remove one of a very few first-hand primary sources on the experience, and on African society in the eighteenth century more generally. It is easy to see, without imputing misrepresentation or sloppy scholarship to anyone, why many historians would not want Carretta's hypothesis to be correct.
I trust that outright falsification is very rare in the academy, and that the way academia works usually corrects for it when it does occur. We all want a scoop, so there is always an incentive for research, revision, and verification. But it’s also true that we all have our own kinds of blinders on. Some questions seem more salient than others. Some lines of investigation get deemed blind alleys. We can be deeply invested in certain ways of thinking without even knowing it. We tend to find in history what we want to find, not because we’re being dishonest, but because history is big and we’re being selective.
This also makes me think about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. DNA evidence now seems to confirm that Jefferson fathered several of Sally Hemings’ children. DNA testing is pretty new, but the Jefferson-Hemings story is not. The claim that Hemings bore Jefferson’s children was leveled publicly during his first term as president, and considerable evidence to support it has always been around. But the story was never given credence by mainstream historians, and it lurked for nearly two centuries in the not-quite-respectable corners of sub-history. Today, the Jefferson-Hemings story has been added to standard U.S. history textbooks. I myself wrote a few new paragraphs on it for the revised edition of a U.S. history text published in 2000. Was it really DNA testing that brought the Jefferson-Hemings story into the master narrative? Or was it a shift in the kinds of things we want to know about the past—the questions we consider worthwhile as history?
Not every scoop makes the papers, or even Cliopatria. Historical discoveries, though true, may still flounder in the marketplace of ideas. If there is such a thing as an idea whose time has come, then there must also be ideas whose times have not yet come, and others whose times have come and gone.
I admit to being perplexed by all these issues. Hopefully I have achieved the “informed and thoughtful befuddlement” Caleb tries to model for his students—a wonderful phrase, by the way, Caleb, and an admirable goal. I do have an idea that I can bring this rambling to some resolution, in my own mind at least, by connecting it all to the history of the telephone—but that awaits another post.
(Cross-posted to my own Roblog.)
Wednesday, February 2, 2005
The Great Wave: Tsunamis and Criticality
The earthquake that caused the tsunami of December 26 2004 will keep generating waves for some time. Not the waves of water that killed more than 280,000 people, but other sorts of aftershocks and consequences. Waves of disease like typhoid and cholera remain a danger, though the United Nations now seems hopeful that widespread famine can be averted. More happily, the tsunami generated waves of sympathy around the world and, after a bit of a slow start, waves of generosity as well. Somewhere between plague and human kindness in terms of desirability are the great waves of comment and punditry that the tsunami also produced, as we all feebly attempt to make sense of a human tragedy on this inhuman scale.
The great Lisbon earthquake (and tsunami) of 1755 was both an immense disaster and a major metaphysical event. The intellectual work of making sense of that disaster—why did this happen, what does it mean?—turned the course of Enlightenment philosophy. In the book Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Modern Philosophy, Susan Neiman argues that the day after the Lisbon earthquake was the first day of the modern world:
The eighteenth century used the word Lisbon much as we use the word Auschwitz today. How much weight can a brute reference carry? It takes no more than the name of a place to mean: the collapse of the most basic trust in the world, the grounds that make civilization possible. Learning this, modern readers may feel wistful: lucky the age to which an earthquake can do so much damage. [read more]
Leibniz and Rousseau said the earthquake must serve some purpose in the grand scheme of things—they just couldn’t see what it was. Voltaire was disgusted by these responses; to him, Lisbon mocked belief in a benevolent and orderly Providence. (The Lisbon earthquake also inspired Immanuel Kant, in ways I'm not clever enough to figure out, to articulate the concept of the sublime.)
But I’m leaning towards Voltaire on this one. The wisest reflections on the Indian Ocean tsunami, or the ones that seemed most wise to me, were those that acknowledged the near impossibility of making sense of it, of fitting something that big and impersonal and awful into any kind of useful or comforting human narrative. In my own little corner of the infosphere, I’d include among the wiser philosophes James Carroll, my colleague this year at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Caleb McDaniel, my new virtual colleague here at Cliopatria. Early in January, Caleb asked if “rattling on about the meaning of these deaths” might interfere with feeling compassion for those who are suffering. But then, noting that “compassion” actually means “suffering with,” he also asked in what sense he and his readers—warm, fed, privileged, and alive—could possibly “suffer with” those who lost everything to the great wave. And in a Boston Globe column that is reposted here, Jim Carroll turned in his thoughtful way to the biblical story of Job as a meditation on the mystery of suffering. Job is defined, Jim wrote, by his insistence that unearned suffering must have some larger purpose or meaning. But what is that meaning? Where are the great answers to be found? Not in the land of the living, Job learns. “Don’t ask me,” says the Abyss. “Talk to the hand,” says the Sea. (I’m paraphrasing.) Oh, and I also liked Ralph Luker’s observation right here at Cliopatria that three basic tenets of Western religious thought—God is omnipotent, God is good, evil is real—cannot all be simultaneously true. It’s like “good, fast, and cheap,” I suppose, or “cheap land, cheap labor, and freedom”; you can pick any two.
But what if we just take the Big G-hyphen-D out of the picture? If you don’t believe in God, if you don’t think the universe owes us any straight answers, you might still seek a way to wrap your mind around a catastrophe on this scale. How does a nonbeliever try to come to terms with something like the tsunami? Let’s imagine, for argument’s sake, a fairly sensitive Canadian historian of the United States, one with a sporadically-updated weblog, a love for robots, and a winning smile. How might such an admirable fellow try to grapple with a disaster like the Indian Ocean tsunami?
Well, if he had a weakness for trendy ideas in math and science, he might start by thinking about criticality and the apparent ubiquity of power law relationships. What does that mean? The Lisbon and Indian Ocean tsunamis were triggered by earthquakes. Earthquakes are actually very common. There are in fact thousands of them every day. But the vast majority of these tremors are so tiny as to be imperceptible. Larger earthquakes, which can be felt but do little damage, are far less common, and extremely large earthquakes, the kind that topple buildings and create tsunamis, are thankfully rarer still.
The interesting thing about this is that the relationship between the size and frequency of earthquakes is predictable and nearly constant. Double the size of an earthquake and it becomes four times as rare. This is known as the Gutenberg-Richter relationship, and it’s probably the most famous and robust example of a power law distribution. But what is even more interesting is that the same kind of predictable relationship between the intensity of an event and its frequency seems to apply across a very wide range of phenomena, both natural and man-made: forest fires, stock market fluctuations, the extinction of species, the shape of the internet. Power law relationships have almost no predictive power: knowing the probability of a magnitude 8.0 earthquake does absolutely no good in predicting when or where it will be. But they do turn up in all sorts of places.
This is a lot of science, even overly-simplified pop science, for a history blog, but I’m coming back around to our usual subject. The eminent Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis talks about criticality and power law relationships in his book The Landscape of History. Gaddis asks whether historians might also find such patterns in human-made history:
Can we detect criticality in history? Of course we can in retrospect: that’s what we’re doing when we trace the rise and fall of empires, the beginnings and endings of wars, the diffusion of ideas and technologies, the outbreaks of plagues and famines, perhaps even the emergence and disappearance of “great” men and women whose qualifications for “greatness” depend upon their capacity to influence others.
Tangent: Other historians may note that Gaddis lists here as the central concerns of history empires, wars, and great men (and great women, to be fair). I find it notable and a little vexing that the only historians I know who like to think about metaphors from modern math and science in relation to history are those from the stereotypically right-leaning (relatively speaking) wings of the academy. There seems to be something about diplomatic historians and military historians and so on that makes them open to ideas like criticality or chaos theory or counterfactuals in ways that “bottom up” social historians and meaning-oriented cultural historians usually are not. Maybe it has to do with a greater faith in discrete causation. I’m thinking particularly of a talk I saw last year on chaos theory and the origins of the First World War that began with some very interesting ideas but ultimately revealed as its true agenda (I thought) the scoring of historiographical points against cultural and social histories in favor of an old school “drums and bugles” approach.
Anyway. Criticality and power law relationships, like chaos and complexity theory, or emergence and the so-called science of networks, are trendy ideas right now that are being applied in a lot of places. Serious scholars get skeptical, and rightly so, when an idea like criticality gains a lot of momentum in the pop science world. Especially when people start extrapolating from genuine science to woolly-headed quasi-philosophical discussion. Which is just what I’m doing here. So I should stress, as Gaddis also does, that I’m using these ideas as metaphors. I’m not talking about highly specific mathematical and physical processes. But if we accept that we are just talking about metaphors here, about ways of representing states of being and relationships between predictable and non-predictable phenomena, then the idea of consistent power law relationships might be useful in thinking about events like the Indian Ocean tsunami, or about the orderliness and disorderliness of nature more generally.
What all the examples of power law relationships above are said to share is a state called criticality. Criticality is neither stability nor instability, but something in between. Most of the time, a system in a state of criticality keeps on doing whatever its doing. But there is always the possibility of an abrupt change: an earthquake, an avalanche, a stock market crash. The likelihood of that happening is inversely proportional to the magnitude of the event when it occurs. I’ll spare you the mathematics. Just Google for “self-organized criticality” or check out this syllabus from MIT and you’ll have all the reading on the subject you’ll ever need.
Somewhere in there, there may be an alternative to a binary choice where the universe either makes sense or it doesn’t, where, to quote Kant, there is either “a purpose in nature” or only “a senseless course of events.” Albert Einstein told Max Born, “You believe in the God who plays dice, and I in complete law and order.” But maybe criticality lets both Einstein and Born be right. It offers a way of describing a world ruled both by dice and order. (As does Dungeons & Dragons, but that’s another post.) Criticality and power law relationships don’t promise that history or nature have a purpose, but they do propose that they have patterns. They tell us what I think we instinctively feel to be true: that things usually stay the same, except when they don’t. A few big things happen to us, and a lot of small things. The bigger the thing, the less often it should happen. Criticality is not quite order and not quite chaos, but criticality is where, alas and hooray, we seem to live our lives.
This is far from a great answer to the questions of evil, or unearned suffering, or the awesome destruction nature very occasionally wreaks. (Were you actually expecting a great answer to any of these questions? In a weblog?) But it is to me a much more believable answer than “this is all part of some great plan,” and also a better answer than no answer at all.
(Crossposted to www.robmacdougall.org.)
Sunday, December 26, 2004
Coulter and Carlson vs. Canada
I wasn't sure if I wanted this to be my first post on Cliopatria. It's a little bit petulant, and I hate the way petulance creeps in whenever we Canadians try to talk about the Canada-U.S. thing. There's a certain kind of Canadian expat in the U.S. who wears their Canadian-ness like a big cedar chip on their shoulder, or a maple-leaf emblazoned backpack full of rocks. I take considerable pains not to be that guy. Also, as Jonathan Dresner pointed out, Cliopatria has been blessedly Coulter-free for some time. But I do want to get started posting here, and as the following testimonial has occasioned some comment on my home blog and that of my college buddy Joey DeVilla, I suppose I will share it here. And I'll make it a New Year's resolution: no more Coulter Content from me in 2005. (Michelle Malkin, on the other hand...)
I was in Upper Canada last weekend, where it was -30° C in the daytime, and the following bit of video from the time of George Bush's Ottawa visit was making the rounds. It's Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson taking a few cheap shots at Canadians while some gormless backbencher clucks feebly in the Dominion's defense. I must warn you, the clip does neither country any credit. And it's not nearly as satisfying as the justly famous video of Jon Stewart schooling Tucker on Crossfire. But you can go watch it now, in Quicktime or Windows Media. I'll wait.
Are you back? OK. Yes. I know. Well, don't say I didn't warn you.
Ann and Tucker don't really surprise or dismay me here. Dog sledding cracks, “we could roll over and crush you,” “you need us more than we need you”—yes, yes, the United States is big, Canada is small, it's cold, quite a formidable argument you have there. If somebody (let's say, hypothetically, a conservative American TV pundit) has spent absolutely no time in their life thinking about Canada, the first time they do have any reason to do so, these are exactly the things they will think of. And because they have never had these thoughts before, every little thing that pops into their mind will strike them as deliciously novel and clever. I'm only surprised Tucker didn't manage to say “oot and aboot,” and Ann didn't ask why the NHL doesn't have a bunch of really fat hockey goalies.
Tangent: You see, the very first time anybody watches a hockey game, the same thought always occurs to them: Why don't hockey teams get somebody really fat to be the goalie? Wouldn't that make it much easier to block the puck? Now, after two to three minutes of rational thought, most primates will see that a hockey net is six feet wide by four feet high, so unless you're strapping skates and pads on Jabba the Hutt, you're not going to block any goals by girth alone. The result of this universal thought process is that if somebody ever does suggest fat goalies to you, you will know that the very concept of hockey only entered their mind in the last 180 seconds or so.
Anyway. Ann and Tucker don't bother me in this footage any more than they usually do. What does anguish me is the utterly feeble response from Canada's designated defenders. Alan Colmes does his ineffectual “I'm not really a liberal but I play one on FOX” bit, and Ann just rolls right over him, not unlike the hypothetical invasion of Canada that has her licking her lips. I kind of like the other guy in the first clip, Newsday's Ellis Henican, who just bounces up and down saying “oooooh!” to everything, like he's egging on a fight in the junior high lunchroom. But Carolyn Parrish going toe to toe with Tucker Carlson on the Wolf Blitzer show? Oy, Canada. I weep for my country.
Parrish is the Canadian Member of Parliament for Mississauga, Ontario, and she was recently ejected from the Liberal Party for her outbursts against both George Bush and Prime Minister Paul Martin. She's on CNN because, ostensibly, she's a leading Canadian critic of American foreign policy. She made cracks about a “coalition of idiots,” stomped on a George Bush action figure on the news-comedy show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, and told the rest of her party to “go to hell.” So why is it that when faced with an honest-to-goodness red-blooded red-state right-wing American, this firebrand of the Canadian left (/sarcasm) is absolutely flummoxed? Has she truly never had the “what do Americans think about Canada” conversation? Has she never met a living American citizen? Tucker Carlson is making the same kind of juvenile but, let's face it, harmless jokes that probably two-thirds of Americans (on the left or the right) think of the first time they encounter a Canadian. Yet Carolyn is totally blindsided. “Oh, oh, Tucker. I can't believe you just said that. Oh, my. Oh, dear. Oh, heavens.” She should have worn a monocle in one eye so that it could have popped out in aristocratic astonishment. (Obligatory Simpsons ref: “That's my third monocle this week! I simply must stop being so horrified!”)
Just to recap: the source of Carolyn's beef with the Bush administration is the war in Iraq. Thirteen hundred Americans and at least ten times that many Iraqis are dead. Yet with Wolf Blitzer's help, Carolyn and Tucker spend more than half that segment discussing the proportion of Canadians likely to be dog sledding. Is this really the pressing issue of the day? Finally, and worst of all, here is Carolyn's zinger. Here is her big money punchline, her comeback on behalf of all Canadians to this smarmy punk:
“There's a lot of dog walking, my friend. Not a lot of dog sledding.”
(Long silence. A lonesome cricket chirps. Or maybe for Canadian content, the mournful call of a distant loon.)
Oh, Carolyn, Carolyn, Carolyn. That line might have earned a grudging chuckle on Front Page Challenge in 1963, but it is not going to stop the enfants terrible of 21st Century neoconservatism in their tracks. I hang my head in shame.
Why does this bother me so much? I think it's because the Canadians I know are clever, and quick-witted, and media-savvy. At least, that's how I like to see them. They—and when I say “they,” I mean “we”—aren't just weaned on American TV, they're steeped in it. That's something I really like about Canadians. Call us socialists, if you want. Make jokes aboot our accents, or donuts, or the cold. Am I going to deny it? It was 30 degrees below zero in Southern Ontario Monday! But make us look like we don't know how television works? Like we don't know our American media and pop culture? Now that hurts.
What should Carolyn have said? What would I have said in her place? I'm not sure. Keep in mind I am a bit of an anomaly as a left-leaning Canadian who also happens to truly love the U.S.A. But I might have tossed out something like, “TUCKER. YOU ARE A SHILL FOR A MONSTROUS AND UNWINNABLE WAR.” As an icebreaker. And then, you know, just let that take the conversation where it may. I would not, I hope, have engaged the dog sledding question. I would not, I hope, have tried to win the “you need us more than we need you” debate. I might have said, “Of course we need you. Of course Canada needs the United States more than the United States needs Canada. Canada needs the United States to be part the world community and not a war-making pariah. Canada needs it not to mortgage our futures by sinking the economy that feeds us too. Canada needs it not to flee from the terrors of liberty into becoming a paranoid police state.” I might have said, “We know you got hurt. We know you didn't deserve it, and we know you didn't see it coming. And we know you're lashing out now, and flailing around, and hurting yourself and the other people who love you. We're telling you this because we are your friends, and we know you better than anybody else, and that is what friends do.” I might have said, “We know you're scared, but we need you to be brave now, brave enough to see that this war is not doing you or anybody else any good any more. We need you to live up to all the things we've always loved about you. We need you to be adults.”
I have no illusions that any of that would have worked on Tucker or Ann. But at least I could watch it on television without wanting to emigrate to Mexico.
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