2008
- Verifiability. Links to your sources allow me to verify whether or not your story is true. For this to work, though, they should point to hard news sources, not just another blog. Bobbie Sullivan does this on Aircrew Buzz and her other aviation blogs.
- Acknowledgment. Sources permit you to acknowledge where you got your ideas and information from in the first place. These can include not only hard news sources, but also any blog or other source that sparked you to think about the topic. If the information is not generally known, though, include additional sources to satisfy the verifiability requirement. I sometimes handle acknowledgments with a hat tip. You can see one Gavin Robinson gave me in the first paragraph of the 14th Military History Carnival.
- Examples. Sources can help provide you with the kinds of examples you need to support your arguments. Since the internet is a hypertext environment, sources can also help you to pack more information into a post without providing loads of background details. I used links in this manner in the second paragraph of a post about generational differences between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright. I’m also linking examples in this post about sources.
- Context. Sources help locate your ideas within their broader context. By providing links to that context, you help your reader to understand how your ideas relate to other opinions and discussions on the internet, and on your own blog. In the process you provide additional value to your reader, giving her one more reason to return. One blogger who often provides good context through linked sources is Rich Becker of Copywrite. Ink.
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Clio and Me was my history-focused blog. I later closed it and migrated posts to this domain. ↩︎
- Got News? Make it Quick. — Jeffrey Shaffer argues that too much emphasis on the current news cycle without doing the hard work of studying the past is causing myopia in the media and public at large. (Christian Science Monitor)
- The Five Most Influential Civil War Books of the Last Twenty Years (as if that’s possible Brooks) Kevin Levin attempts the impossible and makes some interesting choices. (Civil War Memory)
- Where Are This War’s Winter Soldiers? — Ronald R. Krebs reflects on why veterans from the current war have so little political influence when compared to their Vietnam predecessors. (Slate)
- War Torn: Five Years — Yes, the Iraq War has been going on long enough to have a history. John Burns reflects on the past five years. (New York Times)
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I can’t remember where I got this phrase, but the link is now dead or hidden behind the AHA paywall (November 26, 2014). ↩︎
The Most Famous Closed Trial with Secret Evidence
Sometimes history just leaps off the pages and proclaims its relevance for our own times. On December 24, 1894, The Times of London published a long editorial about the first trial of Captain Alfred Dreyfus for alleged treason.
"We must point out that, the more odious and unpopular a crime is, the more necessary is it that its proof and its punishment should be surrounded by all the safeguards of public justice. Of these, the most indispensable is publicity. . . . It may be important for the French people to preserve the secrets of their War Department, but it is of infinitely greater importance for them to guard their public justice against even the suspicion of unfairness or of subjection to the gusts of popular opinion."
The Times correspondent wrote these words when there was still little doubt of Dreyfus' guilt in the public at large. There were no Drefusards yet, that is, members of a movement to see the wrongfully convicted man exonerated. It was three years before Emile Zola wrote "J'accuse." The point wasn't about guilt or innocence. It was about the rule of law, which meant due process out in the open even for grave matters of national security. The later establishment of Dreyfus' innocence reminded observers why.
Tomorrow my class is discussing Michael Burns, France and the Dreyfus Affair: A Documentary History (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999). Burns tells this dramatic tale with his own gripping prose interspersed with documents from the period. And he extends the tale as far as 1998, in order to help readers understand the affair's legacy. For those with more time on their hands I also recommend Jean Denis Bredin, The Affair: The Case of Alfred Dreyfus, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (New York: George Braziller, 1986), a big history book that reads like a good political thriller.
Blogging and Myth-Busting
Kevin Levin of Civil War Memory has posted good material to his academic blog under the category, myth of black Confederates. Several recent posts include criticism of efforts by modern-day Confederate patriots and would-be historians who want to appropriate Weary Clyburn, a slave, as a defender of Southern liberty. In one he points out that writing good books to debunk myths is all well and good, but on the subject of black Confederates "the real fight must take place on the web."
In the same post he points to an earlier one he made in late March: "Should Civil War Historians Blog (academic that is)?" In it he observes how vast the public discourse about the American Civil War is, while the discourse in which professional historians participate is relatively narrow. Historians need to continue their current research and publishing mission, but they also have "a responsibility to engage a wider audience and contribute to the public discourse." Since much of the public turns to the internet for ready answers, historians need to offer these answers in an accessible format, especially for highly sensitive questions that shape American identity.
I agree with Kevin about the need for Civil War historians to blog. I have also observed a similar need with respect to Holocaust denial, since I have found that Google can get it wrong. Until now I have used this blog mainly to reflect on what I do and to communicate with other historians, but as Kevin points out, Google brings him search engine traffic for important topics such as black Confederates, so his blog posts reach a wider audience. I have written a few of my posts with that awareness, but his arguments make me think I could do much more. So could other historians.
Authors of Interrogation Handbook Abuse Their Sources
In a piece called "Mind Games: Remembering Brainwashing" from today's New York Times, Tim Wiener points to one of the more irresponsible uses of historical documents that I have seen this summer. Apparently "American military and intelligence officers" (he is not more specific) decided in 2002 to examine Cold War CIA studies of Chinese interrogation methods during the Korean War. After all, these Communists were the supposed masters who fed the kinds of fears that later gave rise to a movie like "The Manchurian Candidate." In one major study the officers found examples of what are now often called "harsh interrogation techniques" when the more negatively valued term "torture" is being deliberately avoided. "They reprinted a 1957 chart describing death threats, degradation, sleep deprivation—and worse—inflicted by Chinese captors. And they made it part of a new handbook for interrogators at Guantánamo."
The provenance of these techniques might give pause, but here's the real bombshell:
The irony is that the original author of that chart, Albert D. Biderman, a social scientist who had distilled interviews with 235 Air Force P.O.W.’s, wrote that the Communists’ techniques mainly served to “extort false confessions.” And they were the same methods that “inquisitors had employed for centuries.” They had done nothing that “was not common practice to police and intelligence interrogators of other times and nations.”
This story reminds me of the student who hurriedly pulls a bunch of quotes from a book without actually reading or studying the book as a whole, let alone thinking about its historical context. The student then slaps the material together in a paper that might confirm his own beliefs, but whose conclusions bear no tangible relationship to the source that he supposedly read and analyzed. Is that what happened here? Or was the document perhaps too complex for them? Perhaps they needed to invest in some historians who were not afraid to dig through this kind of thing in an honest manner, no matter what conclusions the documents might suggest.
Received Rights versus Human Rights in the 'Declaration of Independence'
Featured image: The famous "Declaration of Independence" painting by John Trumbull
Today citizens of the United States celebrate Independence Day. On this day, 232 years ago, thirteen American colonies proclaimed their independence from Great Britain in a famous document that Thomas Jefferson wrote, the Declaration of Independence. As a history teacher, I find this document fascinating, because it fuses together two different political traditions. On one hand, it recalls seventeenth-century English constitutionalism and its arguments about what had supposedly always been the rights of Englishmen. On the other hand, it advances the kind of powerful and universalizing claims about natural law and human rights spawned in the Enlightenment and given their most dramatic expression during the French Revolution. These connections make the document an interesting object lesson for the history classroom. They also can act as a healthy reminder to Americans that our Declaration of Independence displays not only differences from European political traditions, but also powerful affinities for them.
Do You Link to Your Sources?
This following piece appeared on this day on the blog of the now defunct Blog Catalog. At the time the site was a hybrid blog portal–social networking site with an active community. I pulled it from the Wayback Machine.
Too often I come across an interesting piece of information on a blog that does not contain links to the author’s sources. That’s too bad. All I can do at that point is shrug my shoulders and wonder if the story is true. Then I’ll probably close that browser tab and go somewhere else, because I won’t risk experiencing similar frustration with a second story on the same blog. Of course, if the story is really important to me, I can do further research on Google, which is fair enough. At the same time, though, what reason have you given me to go back to your blog? None. Offer me a good, well sourced post, though, and I will be back. Links to your sources are important for at least four reasons:
Of course, not all blog posts need sources. If you are writing about your own life, you are the acknowledged expert on it. Enough said. And no one who has heard Tony Hogan’s music is going to ask him to provide sources for the advice he offers on learning the guitar. It helps, though, that he has a good about page on his blog, which tells us a bit more about him. And what about me? Why do I think I can offer this advice without providing sources on the art of sourcing? My field is history, and getting students to understand the value of sources is one of my everyday teaching concerns. Yes, I could be making this up, but you can find out more about me at Clio and Me.1
Ignorance or Deliberate Abuse?
I can't decide whether the White House is deliberately insulting our intelligence with Bush's recent appeasement accusations or if they really don't know anything about Neville Chamberlain's appeasement. Chamberlain isn't criticized in history for talking to Hitler, but rather for giving away the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia and with it that country's means to defend itself against Germany. The difference is not trivial. And what does McCain's echoing of Bush's remarks tell us about him? Did he also not learn this bit of history? Or is this just politics? Be that as it may, Kevin Levin is right about this being a teachable moment. The "Hardball" video he posted on his blog is hilarious and sad at the same time.
The Responsibility to Protect
This is a post related to a bloggers human rights campaign. I'm merely leaving the Internet Archive link here because the link-heavy post makes more sense with that context. – MRS, 10/27/2024
Human Rights in the History Survey
I have been teaching History 100, the one-semester survey of Western Civilization that is required for all students at George Mason University. Yes, really. One semester. As I mentioned earlier, this semester I decided to abandon the old chronological approach and follow a thematic one instead. I organized the course into six major themes, plus an introductory unit on historical thinking. One of those themes was "Politics and Human Rights."
If one looks at Western Civ textbooks or the reading lists from my days as a graduate student, human rights are not going to be an obvious subject of study, especially not for a history survey that can only afford to choose six major topics. Yet they are not only important to learn about, they also offer a powerful integrative vehicle for talking about a variety of issues that have been central to the history of the West since the eighteenth century.
Language and Culture: The Way We Speak
I originally posted this piece on this day on my old teaching blog, Language for You.
Learning English is not just about sentence structure, grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and intonation. There is also the problem of culture. People talk about different things in different countries, and when they discuss these things, they might use blunt language, euphemistic language, or something in-between. The choice might be personal, but often it is cultural.
One cultural peculiarity of Americans is small talk. For instance, I have no trouble chatting with total strangers while waiting in a grocery store line or for a bus. When I try that in southern Germany, however, people look at me like I am very strange indeed, or so the reactions have seemed to me.
Culture also affects how we talk about ourselves at job interviews, which is the real point of this short post. You see, NPR recently did a story on the challenges non-native speakers encounter in the United States when hunting for a job. Check out Sally Herships, "Overcoming Cultural Barriers To Jobs."
What do you think? Have you got any cross-cultural stories to share?
DC Film Fest
The Washington, DC International Film Festival has been around for twenty-two years now, but this is the first time I’ve actually attended. Usually I’m too swamped by end-of-the-semester grading. This was true of this year too, but my wife wasn’t accepting that excuse, and I’m glad. We managed to see four films this week: “Egg” [Yumurta] (Semih Kaplanoglu, Turkey/Greece, 2007), “Tricks” [Sztuczki] (Andrzej Jakimowski, Poland, 2007), “The Edge of Heaven” [Auf der anderen Seite] (Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey, 2007), and “With Your Permission” [Til Doden os Skiller] (Paprika Steen, Sweden/Denmark, 2007).
Our favorite movies were “Egg” and “Tricks,” both of which contained not only humor, but a certain magical quality, where time and stress were suspended. As much happened in the people’s faces and as in their words. In “Egg” the looks passed between a man who returned to his hometown to bury his mother and the young woman who had taken care of his mother. In “Tricks” the looks passed between a young boy and his teenage sister, as well as between the boy and the man he was sure was his father. There was also a lot of movement in “Tricks” as the boy explored and played around the train station and town, though most of these actions were part of everyday life, not a dramatic sequence of events. I enjoyed getting lost in the worlds these two films offered.
We wanted to see “The Edge of Heaven”, because we had enjoyed an extremely funny movie by the same directory called “Kebab Connection.” We knew this movie wasn’t going to be funny, but I was surprised by the unpleasant turns of fate mixed with occasional joy and life’s refusal to stop moving on. It could have been an excellent, if sometimes confusing movie, had not the distributors sent the film to the theater with the reels in the wrong order. Instead of seeing the movie’s three parts in the correct order, we saw the middle, then the beginning, then the end. If it had to happen, I suppose this was the movie where it would do the least damage, but it was still disappointing. As it was, I got the story and simple slices of life from Germany and Turkey, but much of the overarching story was lost on me. Afterwards I ended up focusing my attention not on the message, but on trying to re-imagine the film in the correct order. Still not there yet.
“With Your Permission” is a worthwhile dark comedy with an operatic emotional high point. I’m glad I saw it, but it was not in the same league with the first two magical films I saw. Nor was it intended to be, I think. It begins with a man who has a black eye from his wife. She beats him more than once and he acts increasingly strange. His boss on the ferry makes him seek help. Unusual twists in the plot with some hilarious characters follow on the way to an emotionally satisfying result.
I would also like to mention one of the many films we wanted to see but couldn’t. We had time to see “Jazz in the Diamond District” (Lindsey Christian, USA, 2007), but it was sold out and shown only once. Oh well. I hope it gets more play here in DC. It’s not in the same league as the other films I saw this week, but it is about real people who live in my city, not the politicians. It even includes a school my son once attended, the Duke Ellington School ofDC Film Fest
The Washington, DC International Film Festival has been around for twenty-two years now, but this is the first time I’ve actually attended. Usually I’m too swamped by end-of-the-semester grading. This was true of this year too, but my wife wasn’t accepting that excuse, and I’m glad. We managed to see four films this week: “Egg” [Yumurta] (Semih Kaplanoglu, Turkey/Greece, 2007), “Tricks” [Sztuczki] (Andrzej Jakimowski, Poland, 2007), “The Edge of Heaven” [Auf der anderen Seite] (Fatih Akin, Germany/Turkey, 2007), and “With Your Permission” [Til Doden os Skiller] (Paprika Steen, Sweden/Denmark, 2007).
Our favorite movies were “Egg” and “Tricks,” both of which contained not only humor, but a certain magical quality, where time and stress were suspended. As much happened in the people’s faces and as in their words. In “Egg” the looks passed between a man who returned to his hometown to bury his mother and the young woman who had taken care of his mother. In “Tricks” the looks passed between a young boy and his teenage sister, as well as between the boy and the man he was sure was his father. There was also a lot of movement in “Tricks” as the boy explored and played around the train station and town, though most of these actions were part of everyday life, not a dramatic sequence of events. I enjoyed getting lost in the worlds these two films offered.
We wanted to see “The Edge of Heaven”, because we had enjoyed an extremely funny movie by the same directory called “Kebab Connection.” We knew this movie wasn’t going to be funny, but I was surprised by the unpleasant turns of fate mixed with occasional joy and life’s refusal to stop moving on. It could have been an excellent, if sometimes confusing movie, had not the distributors sent the film to the theater with the reels in the wrong order. Instead of seeing the movie’s three parts in the correct order, we saw the middle, then the beginning, then the end. If it had to happen, I suppose this was the movie where it would do the least damage, but it was still disappointing. As it was, I got the story and simple slices of life from Germany and Turkey, but much of the overarching story was lost on me. Afterwards I ended up focusing my attention not on the message, but on trying to re-imagine the film in the correct order. Still not there yet.
“With Your Permission” is a worthwhile dark comedy with an operatic emotional high point. I’m glad I saw it, but it was not in the same league with the first two magical films I saw. Nor was it intended to be, I think. It begins with a man who has a black eye from his wife. She beats him more than once and he acts increasingly strange. His boss on the ferry makes him seek help. Unusual twists in the plot with some hilarious characters follow on the way to an emotionally satisfying result.
I would also like to mention one of the many films we wanted to see but couldn’t. We had time to see “Jazz in the Diamond District” (Lindsey Christian, USA, 2007), but it was sold out and shown only once. Oh well. I hope it gets more play here in DC. It’s not in the same league as the other films I saw this week, but it is about real people who live in my city, not the politicians. It even includes a school my son once attended, the Duke Ellington School of the Arts. the Arts.
Happy May Day!
I found this poster on the Holt Labor Library's May Day website, which includes lots of links on International Workers' Day. You can also find a larger version of this image there.
Barack Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and Generational Differences
Times might have changed, but it seems that some didn’t get the memo. It would be nice if Reverend Jeremiah Wright would trust the next generation, embodied by Senator Barack Obama, to do things its way, instead of clinging to his own experiences and ignoring the great changes that this society has undergone. Why is he trying so hard to wreck the Obama campaign anyway? Maybe he doesn’t believe a black man can get elected and now he is in the business of creating a self-fulfilling prophesy? I dunno.
What I do know is that someone else from his earlier generation is also out of touch with what leaders like Obama are saying. Listen to Bill Moyer’s interview with Wright, and you will see Moyers feeling very much at ease with the man. Moyers (born in 1934) is a little older than Wright (born in 1941), but both experienced the Johnson administration and the Civil Rights Movement as young men. I respect their experiences and enjoy hearing their thoughts on where America is at. I also enjoyed Moyer’s conversation with Fred Harris (born in 1930), the only surviving member of the Kerner Commission, which reported on the racism underlying the social inequality that had helped set off the race riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The thing about Moyers’ and Harris’ conversation that stood out most for me, however, was that it appeared on the show right after Moyer’s conversation with Mayer Cory Booker of Newark. Booker (born in 1969) did not speak the language of race and anger. Like Obama (born in 1961), he is very much about members of the community doing what they can to move forward. Watch the video and you’ll understand what I mean. (You’ll also maybe want to see him on the national stage at some point.) Watch too how Moyers is almost mystified by Booker’s perspective, one Obama shares. Moyers expects to see righteous anger in Booker. He wants Booker to blame all of Newark’s woes on racism and demand assistance from the federal government, but Booker refuses to follow that path. This conversation made clear to me that a vast gulf separates my generation (I am forty-five) from Moyers’. It also made me glad that leaders such as Obama and Booker are out there.
Obama understands the differences between the experiences of his generation and those of Wright’s. Wright might too, but he seems unwilling to trust the next generation to do the right thing. Instead he is out there doing what he seems to feel is truth-telling, that is, trying to wreck the very real chances that a former member of his congregation has to become the next president. Yet if he has done his job as the pastor of his congregation, he can trust those he helped bring up in his church to do the right thing. Time to let go, Reverend Wright, and give Senator Obama a chance to do it his way.
Yet Wright seems trapped in the experiences of his own generation. He seems unable to acknowledge that Obama’s generation has undergone a different set of experiences. He also thinks in unhistorical terms. As a historian I grew dizzy listening to him jump back and forth across the centuries and millennia, as if injustices here and there were all part of the same unchanging story. Thus I cringed when he called himself a historian of religion at one point in his conversation with Moyers. He knows more than I ever will about the subject, but he was not thinking historically. He could not move across different times and imagine that each period involved different mentalities and experiences. For him it was all one story with one set of values. Thus, he seems to differ from Obama not just in generational terms, but also in terms of the philosophy of history that underlies his worldview. Obama’s major speech on race was keenly aware of the passage of time and its impact on people living in it. Wright, on the other hand, is almost oblivious to it—unless he is just getting carried away by his own intemperate and impolitic rBarack Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and Generational Differences
Times might have changed, but it seems that some didn’t get the memo. It would be nice if Reverend Jeremiah Wright would trust the next generation, embodied by Senator Barack Obama, to do things its way, instead of clinging to his own experiences and ignoring the great changes that this society has undergone. Why is he trying so hard to wreck the Obama campaign anyway? Maybe he doesn’t believe a black man can get elected and now he is in the business of creating a self-fulfilling prophesy? I dunno.
What I do know is that someone else from his earlier generation is also out of touch with what leaders like Obama are saying. Listen to Bill Moyer’s interview with Wright, and you will see Moyers feeling very much at ease with the man. Moyers (born in 1934) is a little older than Wright (born in 1941), but both experienced the Johnson administration and the Civil Rights Movement as young men. I respect their experiences and enjoy hearing their thoughts on where America is at. I also enjoyed Moyer’s conversation with Fred Harris (born in 1930), the only surviving member of the Kerner Commission, which reported on the racism underlying the social inequality that had helped set off the race riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. The thing about Moyers’ and Harris’ conversation that stood out most for me, however, was that it appeared on the show right after Moyer’s conversation with Mayer Cory Booker of Newark. Booker (born in 1969) did not speak the language of race and anger. Like Obama (born in 1961), he is very much about members of the community doing what they can to move forward. Watch the video and you’ll understand what I mean. (You’ll also maybe want to see him on the national stage at some point.) Watch too how Moyers is almost mystified by Booker’s perspective, one Obama shares. Moyers expects to see righteous anger in Booker. He wants Booker to blame all of Newark’s woes on racism and demand assistance from the federal government, but Booker refuses to follow that path. This conversation made clear to me that a vast gulf separates my generation (I am forty-five) from Moyers’. It also made me glad that leaders such as Obama and Booker are out there.
Obama understands the differences between the experiences of his generation and those of Wright’s. Wright might too, but he seems unwilling to trust the next generation to do the right thing. Instead he is out there doing what he seems to feel is truth-telling, that is, trying to wreck the very real chances that a former member of his congregation has to become the next president. Yet if he has done his job as the pastor of his congregation, he can trust those he helped bring up in his church to do the right thing. Time to let go, Reverend Wright, and give Senator Obama a chance to do it his way.
Yet Wright seems trapped in the experiences of his own generation. He seems unable to acknowledge that Obama’s generation has undergone a different set of experiences. He also thinks in unhistorical terms. As a historian I grew dizzy listening to him jump back and forth across the centuries and millennia, as if injustices here and there were all part of the same unchanging story. Thus I cringed when he called himself a historian of religion at one point in his conversation with Moyers. He knows more than I ever will about the subject, but he was not thinking historically. He could not move across different times and imagine that each period involved different mentalities and experiences. For him it was all one story with one set of values. Thus, he seems to differ from Obama not just in generational terms, but also in terms of the philosophy of history that underlies his worldview. Obama’s major speech on race was keenly aware of the passage of time and its impact on people living in it. Wright, on the other hand, is almost oblivious to it—unless he is just getting carried away by his own intemperate and impolitic rhetoric.hetoric.
War and Public Opinion
Last October, in connection with the bad news about Blackwater coming out, I made the following remarks on Clio and Me:
One of President Bush’s mistakes was to go to war with only enough public support to begin it. There is no such thing as war on the cheap. Private contractors are expensive in mere dollars, but they have helped the administration to avoid seeking a more solid domestic political foundation for the war—or accepting the consequences if it is unable to do so.
I stand by those remarks, but a piece in Sunday’s New York Times points to more sophisticated Pentagon management of the media than I had believed possible. In “Behind Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand,” David Barstow reports on the Pentagon’s active courtship of so-called independent military analysts on the major television news networks. The analysts were seduced not only by the flattering attention by the Pentagon and the fees paid by the media, but also by the financial opportunities that their access to the Pentagon provided because of their ties to companies seeking military contracts.
On my tumblelog I was only half-joking when earlier this evening I wrote:
One more reason to watch The News Hour on PBS instead. So what is this now? The military-industrial-media complex? Or is everything okay since this has been stage-managed by our duly elected president’s appointed cronies?
Of course, propaganda or “psyops” [psychological operations] will only get the administration and Pentagon so far.
Textbook Costs
I heard a report on Marketplace this evening about the high cost of textbooks and how Congress wants to force publishers to reveal to professors the costs of books they require in their courses. I find it strange that such a measure should be necessary. Is it that hard to figure out what books cost? I use Amazon when writing a syllabus. So do many other cost-conscious professors. And who is this professor they quoted who talked about being courted by publishing representatives with good chocolate in the mailroom and meals out? Certainly no history professor.
The report blamed the rapidly growing cost of textbooks on an expansion of the used book market because of the internet. Really? Used books sounds right, but to my mind this isn't the internet per se, but rather the chains that sell books in so many university book stores. I don't know what kind of arrangement they have with their host universities, but I wouldn't be surprised if these universities are complicit in the process, insofar as they are earning money from these arrangements.
Returning to the original topic, it is sometimes hard to tell how much new books will cost students, because publishers can only qoute net prices. In the past I tried to bundle books from a publisher, in order to lower costs. Result: the net price to the bookstore went down, but the bookstore priced the bundle with no discount, because it had to make these books more expensive than the used books it wanted to sell at some two thirds to three quarters of the new price. It earns a higher margin on those, after all.
Some students at Georgetown University have the right idea. They set up a book coop that collects books at the end of the semester and sells books at the beginning of the next semester at the prices the owners of the books set. I wish George Mason University had something like that. I've tried to help by setting up a Google group on which my students can establish contact with each other for the purpose of buying and selling their books. So far I've had no takers.
Links: History, Politics, and Memory
Orange Juice, Apple Juice and Applesauce
We get most of our fruit and vegetables through a local cooperative called a CSA, which stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Unlike a typical buying cooperative though, a CSA also works to support the producers of food, often one farmer. It binds producers and consumers together, so that producers know they have a certain income, and consumers get more or less food, depending on how things are going.
The one to which my wife and I belong is called Spiritual Food CSA. It supports biodynamic farming, which practices more stringent standards than regular organic farming, though I don’t know all the details. The word spiritual comes in, because the CSA is organized by a local yoga ashram, for whom healthy food, a healthy earth, healthy people, and a healthy spiritual life are inseparable. At least that’s what I think it means. I don’t get into the spiritual side of things, but I like taking yoga, and the people at the Shanti Yoga Ashram are just plain good folk. If only I had time for yoga right now. My commute from Northwest DC to Fairfax, VA and my teaching schedule has been keeping me away. Must change that.
Anyway, we pay one price for half a year and then pick up a share of food every week. Apples from the fall harvest had been accumulating in my fridge, as had oranges, which the CSA gets direct from Florida. Today, I decided to take action. I dug out the old juice maker and made orange juice and apple juice. I also made a large glass of apple sauce. Yum!
Fostering Historical Thinking with Brecht’s Galileo
Spring is almost here, which means its time to order books for the summer term. Summer in DC gets hot, and the summer terms are short, so I usually try to assign things that are both reasonably entertaining and not too long for the general audience I get in my introductory survey courses that are mandatory requirements for all majors. Besides covering a variety of themes and genres, I often try to pick one book that will jump-start historical thinking. I want a book that will make students more aware of how much "the past is like a foreign country" that we will not understand, if we do not try to fathom the conditions and assumptions of the time without letting our contemporary worldview get in our way.
Last year I tried Bertolt Brecht's Galileo, which I had first experienced as a TA for Sandra Horvath-Peterson at Georgetown University back in the 1990s. Of course, Brecht adapts Galileo's story to his own purposes, but it provides a useful point of departure for a discussion about the Scientific Revolution. It also forces students to come to terms with the limits of historical fiction.
It usually goes pretty well, though the first section I did it in was a little rocky, partly because not enough students had done the reading, but also because I was surprised that so few people had any general knowledge of fascism. The paperback edition we used, translated by Eric Bently, contains some excellent material on Brecht's prejudices, but it spends too much time on material more of interest to specialists in drama. Some students read the first part of it, but most gave up and went straight to the play. So I integrated a mini talk of Brecht's time into the discussions and got them to reason out how the problems of the nineteen thirties and forties had manifested themselves in a play Brecht had set in the seventeenth century. I also assigned sources from 1615 and 1633, so that they could get a sense of the issues from Galileo's own time.
One point I tried to make clear was that science was only then beginning to manifest itself as an independent discourse, that it was perfectly natural for the Church to be interested in science at the time and even claim authority on the matter. Of course, I'm no specialist on the matter, but it seems to me that this basic point is worth making. Most students seemed to get it too. Indeed, I felt like cheering when one woman near the end of a class wondered aloud what people would think about our own world in another few hundred years. Sound trivial? Maybe to historians and those for whom historical thinking comes naturally. In our presentist society and with this presentist generation, I think the question was excellent. This student and her classmates were thinking historically.
The success of this discussion was also due in part to another issue. I have begun to “legitimate confusion” for my students,1 that is, I have begun to cultivate an awareness in them of just how hard historical interpretation can be and how important learning how to ask questions can be. With this attitude, students can explore sources and ideas honestly and thoughtfully without fear of getting it wrong and looking bad. With such an awareness, students were willing to attempt the leaps of imagination necessary to navigate among three different time periods, the early twenty-first century, the nineteen thirties and forties, and the first few decades of the seventeenth century.
I might try this book again, though I could also do with a change. Perhaps some of you have some ideas?
Spring Break and Teaching
It's spring break at George Mason University (GMU), and, starting tomorrow, I will have the apartment to myself during the day. Of course, there is a mountain of student work to correct and classes to prepare, but I think I will be able to resume blogging here again. For starters, I do not have to spend three hours a day in busses and trains between Northwest DC and Fairfax, VA. Excuses aside, I sure do admire those of you who are able to teach and blog at the same time, and I hope to begin doing the same again myself. And, hey, I even have a TA this semester, though I don't really have an office, unless having a place available for office hours that three other people use counts.
I'm teaching three sections of History 100 again, that is, GMU's one-semester survey in Western Civilization. I'm doing it differently this semester than in previous semesters. I've thrown out the chronological approach in favor of a thematic one. I would have done this earlier, but I never got around to planning it out. This time I did not let a minor detail like that get in my way. Better to name six major themes ahead of time and then work my way through them during the semester. The chronological alternative was simply too frustrating for both me and my students.
I've also dispensed with traditional exams and writing assignments. Instead they are each doing a Wikipedia project, an idea I got from Mills Kelly. They are also doing a group research project (three to four students each) that will result in electronic output, whether a wiki, a blog, an old-fashioned website, or something on GoogleDocs. Traditional writing and research skills still matter, but I thought I would give them assignments that teach other skills as well.
One thing I've learned in the process already: I have to spend a lot of one-on-one time with individual students who are less familiar with this media. But they're catching on, and the course wiki I set up with Wikispaces is working well. Each page has a place for threaded discussions, and the students are talking. I'd like to think it was for the love of the subject, which in some cases it is. I am also basing a substantial chunk of their grades for the course on online and class participation.
I do not think my thematic approach will have implications for my summer session at Georgetown University, where the mandatory survey, Themes in European Civilization, lasts two semesters. Also, because each course meets daily for five weeks in the summer, there will be no need for a wiki and there will be less opportunity for a long-term project. I'll probably work with the old format of exams and short papers, but I want to give that a little more thought.
Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day
I’ve started reading Thomas Pynchon’s, Against the Day. I enjoy Pynchon, though there’s no guarantee I’ll be able to say anything meaningful about his novel because his narratives are often difficult to follow. Take, for instance, the cryptic but thought-provoking quote from Thelonius Monk at the beginning of the book: “It’s always night, or we wouldn’t need light.”
This novel is set at the turn of the previous century, beginning with the Columbian World’s Fair in 1893 and running past the First World War. As usual, Pynchon sometimes seems to play fast and loose with historical facts, so it doesn’t feel like historical fiction in any traditional sense. That’s not a criticism, mind you, just something to keep in mind when reading it.
Maybe I will have to make use of the Thomas Pynchon Wiki, which I just discovered. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll check out some of the many reviews on the novel, though I don’t want to spoil it for myself, especially since I find my tastes are often out of sync with those of the reviewers.
One practical thing I like: with 1085 pages, this $18.00 paperback is a relative bargain; it’s going to keep me busy for a long time.
Perhaps after that I’ll go back and look at some of his earlier stuff. I read Vineland when it came out in paperback, but I hadn’t touched Pynchon before that since I was maybe only twenty-one. I read Gravity’s Rainbow, for instance, while in the field artillery on maneuver in Grafenwöhr, Germany. I still remember clinging to the book while bouncing up and down and eating dust on dirt roads on the back of a self-propelled eight-inch howitzer.
American Idealism
In his 1998 survey of human history, The Way of the World, David Fromkin writes of Prohibition in the United States thus:
The experiment proved to be a disaster. Human nature resisted it. The inability of the government to enforce the laws against alcohol brought about a general collapse of law and order in such cities as Chicago in the 1920s. In the 1930s the law and the constitutional amendment were repealed, and order was restored. (215)
This observation reminds me of both drug policy and immigration policy in the United States. We legislate social change and then are surprised when it doesn’t occur or law and order come under threat. Fromkin is on to something when he writes, “Prohibition was an extreme symptom of a general American view that anything can be changed by passing a law, a view that ignores rooted realities of human nature” (215). This idealism is also evident in our foreign policy.
Paradoxically, we used to criticize the Soviet Union for its utopian attempt to remake human nature as it strove to realize the Communist dreams of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. While it took some American idealism to overcome the Soviet threat, it also took hard-nosed realism. Where would we be now if we had decided to turn the Cold War into a shooting war in the name of an idea called democracy?
The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency
My wife has had a handful of volumes from Alexander McCall Smith’s wonderful private detective series set in Botswana. I had long wanted to get going on them, but she had loaned out the first volume and we don’t know who has it. Last week I was pleased to find a copy of the first volume in our laundry room, where people in my building sometimes deposit unwanted books. I am so glad I began reading it. I was hoping for detective stories with a harder edge, but that didn’t happen. Instead I got something better. The main character, Mma Precious Ramotswe, “a traditionally built woman,” is the most likeable character I’ve encountered in years. She’s a real woman with real problems, but with rare strength and courage, as well as a fine zest for life. This sounds like a cliche, but I am loathe to go into details for fear of spoiling plots. You can find out more on the author’s website, if you want.
I am almost done with the fourth. Now I have to take a break again, because we’re missing the fifth and sixth, and I don’t want to go straight to the seventh, which we have. Apparently there’s an eighth out now too.
By the way, I enjoy reading mysteries not just for the mystery, but for the milieu they usually reveal to me. Indeed, these books would have been a disappointment if mystery was all I had wanted. The stories are all about the characters and their world in Botswana. Along the way Mma Ramotswe and her assistant, Mma Makutsi, deal with a variety of cases and moral questions.
Presidential Campaigns and Leadership
Hillary Clinton likes to talk about her years of experience and how she will be ready for office from day one, should she win the Democratic nomination and then make it all the way to the White House. If she wins the nomination, I’ll vote for her, but I’m not buying the argument that Obama has not demonstrated some good leadership skills. Take, for instance, his and Clinton’s respective presidential campaigns, which are non-trivial operations. Obama emerged from Super Tuesday in a dead heat with Clinton and then managed to bring about an impressive string of consecutive wins. Clinton, by contrast, has slipped. In Friday’s Christian Science Monitor, Linda Feldmann writes,
What happened? On Clinton’s part, her straits represent a massive failure of planning and organization, analysts say. Her campaign operated on the assumption she would have the nomination effectively locked up with the 22 contests on Feb. 5, and it spent accordingly. The lack of a Plan B has left her scrambling for cash and organizing late in the post-Super Tuesday contests.
This situation says something significant about Clinton’s and Obama’s respective leadership skills. Now if only Michelle Obama would stop saying that her husband is the first reason she ever had to be proud of her country.