Autobiographical
- "Protect your hands! You work with them," poster (silkscreen) by Robert Muchley for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518513/.
- "Be careful near machinery," poster (woodblock) by Robert Lachenmann for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, ca. 1936–1940. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518717/.
- "Work with care," poster (woodcut) by Robert Muchley for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936 or 1937. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/92517365/.
- "Failure here may mean death below – safety first," poster (woodcut) by Allan Nase for the Federal Art Project, WPA, Pennsylvania, 1936 or 1937. Repository: Library of Congress PPOC, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/98518429/.
- "Backyards, Baltimore, Maryland," black and white photograph by Dick Sheldon for the Farm Security Administration, July 1938. Repository: The New York Public Library Digital Collections, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/ba309cea-94b2-4288-e040-e00a18066c61
- My mother enjoying flowers and the arrival of spring at Weston’s Farm in Freyburg, Maine.
- Slabs of granite in the woods next to the upper section of Diana’s Baths.
- A view of the water and granite at Diana’s Baths.
- Sand dunes in Barnstable, MA. Was taking a break after driving to Cape Cod to see my wife, my son, and my son’s family.
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Now there is the similarly conceived Enzyklopädie deutscher Geschichte. ↩︎
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There was also the extremely helpful and systematic Imperial Germany: A Historiographical Companion, edited by Roger Chickering (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996). ↩︎
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What is an ISSN?, ISSN International Centre. See also the Library of Congress’s explanation of the ISSN, last updated February 19, 2010. ↩︎
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See, for instance, Mareike König, “ISSN für Wissenschaftsblogs—mehr als nur Symbolik?," Redaktionsblog Hypotheses, March 10, 2016, which is as revealing as it is informative. ↩︎
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See Hannah Birkenkötter, “Blogs in der Wissenschaft vom Öffentlichen Recht: Ein Beitrag zur Erschließung neuer Formate,” in Formate der Rechtswissenschaft, ed. Andreas Funke and Konrad Lachmayer (Weilerswist-Metternich: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2017), 117–39. Thanks to Alexandra Kemmerer for bringing this piece to the attention of my colleague Kerstin von der Krone. ↩︎
Too many clocks around here that need resetting after a time change, and I forgot that someone born a few decades before me might be using any one of them. Open question whether we’ll make it to her appointment on time.
Not a bad drive, but still something of a forced march from the White Mountains to the great city that hosts the institutions under attack by Felonious Husk and his young fascists. Am finally lying in bed, but my body still thinks it’s in a moving vehicle.
I’m streaming my mother’s church service to her in the living room. On a Facetime call, my three-year-old granddaughter asked what this service was. I referenced circle time, which she immediately understood. Preschool for the win.
I plainly have a cold. On a video chat, my granddaughter reported that she had a lot of boogers in her nose too.
It was a treat to see my granddaughter and other adults in her life this weekend.
Besides marking a massive mob attack on the Capitol four years ago, this date reminds me of the early signs of the coronavirus pandemic a year before that and of my parents' tumble down the stairs in that same period, my father landing on my mother. That’s also when I finished writing “Blogging Histories of Knowledge in Washington, DC,” meeting with my coauthor in Frankfurt a.M. via FaceTime from a hotel room in North Conway, NH.
I had to relocate to NH for eldercare 20 months after that. That means I’ve lived up here for 40 months now, though I still haven’t got used to all the changes. Except for becoming a grandfather—that part has come easy to me. My grandchild is a joy.
My mother has been watching her church service online so she can hear it. That means I hear parts too. And I can see what’s happening on the desktop I’m streaming to the TV with. Different vibe today. Pastor began by inviting people to settle, to be present, to allow themselves to have their feelings. I also saw more people in attendance than is often the case. The service emphasized themes such as inclusion, compassion, and justice, the last term describing something very different from the hypocritical, moralizing, vengeful God that I despised and rejected in my youth. If I had a religious bone left in my body, this place could be one point of connection with the local community.
One of the 8-inch M110 self-propelled howitzer crews I served on in the mid 1980s was majority Puerto Rican. If I recall correctly, two of us were white, two Black, and six Puerto Rican. I feel richer for having had such experiences than the orange role-playing garbage man will ever be.
Seeing pictures of the crowds of Harris–Walz supporters at the Washington Monument in DC tonight is heartening. They make me feel at home. That’s where I stood for Obama’s inauguration in 2009 – and for Independence Day celebrations despite the post-9/11 security theater.
My brother and a friend of his took a short trip from L.A. to the White Mountains. They did his usual beating about the lake and woods where we grew up. I did a little chauffeuring, and our mom got to visit with them.
My 86-year-old mother went with us to Madison Boulder today. The 0.6-mile round trip gave her and her rollator quite the workout. “Us” today means my granddaughter, her parents, and both sets of her grandparents.
Workplace Safety Posters, ca. 1936–40
I am enjoying Depression-era workplace safety posters from the Works Progress Administration (WPA). They evoke a time when the power of government was effectively leveraged for good. If you live in the United States, there is a good chance you’ve encountered WPA building and infrastructure projects. One WPA program was the Federal Arts Project, which put artists to work. To get a feel for the diversity of programs this art supported, see the Library of Congress’s online collection.
Unfortunately, the WPA also built and helped staff internment camps for Americans of Japanese descent after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941. This part of the story underlines the negative potential of government power when racism shapes policy.
Besides the four posters that follow this text, I include a photograph of an alley behind a row of houses with tiny back yards in Baltimore. If you look closely at this image from the Farm Security Administration, you can see a WPA poster attached to an open door in the bottom left-hand corner. It is captioned “Stop accidents before they stop you.” The building itself appears to be part of a factory of some kind because only a door and a single big wall with windows is visible, visually distinct from the opposite side of the alley, where all the little houses are.
These posters remind me of the ongoing importance of government for writing, publicizing, and enforcing workplace safety regulations. They connect past concerns about workplace conditions to countless reports of workplace injuries and sickness in our own time. They also link to family stories past and present, whether handed down or forgotten, whether taught or ignored in schools, workplaces, and union gatherings.
My grandmother’s father was killed in an avoidable industrial accident in 1917 when she was six years old. The lathe he operated in a Cleveland factory had no safety guard, and then his luck ran out. He left behind six children and their mother, the oldest of them able to work. The sudden loss of this man represented a trauma that no one talked about in my childhood, and I only learned the barebones details from my mother this past year.
I often wonder if and how such trauma is passed down in other families, and why its causes are silenced or not. My mind goes there because I imagine that millions of Americans—from across the political spectrum—come from families with such experiences, even if these were not handed down from the past. And I wonder what, if anything, knowledge about these many pasts might do to change their attitudes today.
This thought ties in with the employers and politicians who fight government regulations and workers' collective bargaining. They strive to steal workers' freedom and dignity, all in the name of their own freedom. Part of this effort benefits from or fosters processes of families and communities forgetting or diminishing the significance of the workplace struggles and traumas in their own pasts.
Fortunately, good governance and organized labor seem to be making a comeback.
The drive down to DC last weekend threw out my back, so I haven’t been able to do anything down here. At least the great nephew I brought with me got a lot out of the trip. Tomorrow, three of us head to Cape Cod to see a younger generation of Stonemans, one not yet 3, and other extended family.
☺️ It is amazing to watch a tiny human, my granddaughter, develop language for herself.
Driving north on Rt. 16, I can still be surprised by the appearance of the White Mountains from a few hilltops between Wakefield and Ossipee. For a moment, today, I was even treated to Mt. Chocorua and Mt. Washington as the dominant figures in a stunning pattern of silhouettes that rose into the late afternoon sky. Chocorua was front and center, and Washington rose up behind it in a pairing that is impossible to imagine in Chocorua’s shadow, where I grew up, let alone in Mt. Washington Valley. where I am now.
Another Trip to Scarborough
It's a beautiful day over here in Down East Maine, where my mother is undergoing a two-part procedure while I wait outside. The picture here is of the waiting area wing of the surgery center on Maine Med's Scarborough campus.
(Photo by author)
Sign of Life
My last post was of snow and now August is almost over? Yikes!
After commuting thousands of miles between DC and New Hampshire since my father’s passing, I’ve spent the summer in New Hampshire. The marathon driving sessions wear on me, so I’ve been avoiding them.
The driving was because I haven’t found a good way to have my mother live alone for more than a few weeks at a time. I haven’t worked out a strategy for getting her help while preserving as much of her independence as possible. So I’ve been the help.
Maybe that’s a good thing, even if it often feels like I’m treading water. During my father’s final months, everything had to be about him. Now I’m able to take the time to work out my mother’s specific needs, even as she works out the business of living as a widow after more than sixty-five years of marriage.
Besides, a health issue has come up that we have to deal with.
(All photos by author)
The Old House and Barn
My brother took the above photo on his trip to New Hampshire last month. It’s the old barn at the house we grew up in, viewed from a dirt road. Below is a picture he took of that house. It was badly in need of paint nine years ago, when my parents sold it, but it looks like it’s in good shape now. The biggest maple tree out front had to be cut down, but the smallest one isn’t looking so small anymore.
To Everything There Is a Season
It feels strange to be back home in DC after nine months away in rural New Hampshire. And I’m driving back up next week for my father’s memorial service—driving because flying sounds like a terrible option these days.
My father was able to live at home for most of these past months. Facilitating that was a two-person job, mine and my octogenarian mother’s. During his last month, he went from hospital to rehab, which I thought might become long-term care, but his old body had other plans.
Fortunately I already knew his wishes, so all three of us were on the same page when it came time. He was at the hospital when we switched him over to hospice care, a small hospital in the White Mountains, and the staff was brilliant.
My son made it up the last week, as did my sisters and one brother-in-law. Even my brother, who I hadn’t seen in thirty years, flew in. On one of the last days the old man could speak, a nurse told him he was lucky. “I know,” he replied.
So it goes.
Early last fall, during a drive down to a different hospital to pick up my father, my wife called me. Our first grandchild was coming. And then another call: she was there.
New Hampshire Winter
In-home and residential care options for octogenarians have become extremely limited in these trying times, so I’ve been spending the last quarter of 2021 at my parents' in the White Mountains. This will continue into 2022. I miss DC, but it’s not like I can take advantage of the city’s rich research and cultural resources during this never-ending pandemic.
Photos taken in North Conway, New Hampshire, by author.
Organizing and Communicating Historical Knowledge: Some Personal Observations
First published on History of Knowledge, February 3, 2017
In my initial academic encounters with Germany in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one of the things that impressed me was the availability of handbooks as well as specialized encyclopedias such as Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. The textbook series Oldenbourg Grundriss der Geschichte was a new experience for me.1 Each volume offered a concise, chronologically organized survey (with key terms in the margins for rapid orientation), followed by a substantial historiographical discussion and bibliography. At the time, I did not appreciate the massive effort behind such compilation and systematization efforts. I just found these tools were quite practical for orienting myself in a given historical subject. Why didn’t we have such useful tools in the United States?
Nowadays, it seems pretty clear to me that the difference had to do with how academic projects are organized and funded, and how their merits are perceived when hiring decisions are made. Perhaps, too, there is something in the academic culture that sees particular value in such projects, although I have no idea how one would separate such possible cultural predilections from the institutional organization of scholarship generally and of the discipline of history more specifically.
I do know that my doctoral advisor’s approach to reading lists for our comprehensive exams at Georgetown University in the mid-to-late 1990s was unusual in the history department there. Roger Chickering gave us a massive bibliography for research purposes along with a so-called canon (read: very long list) of the texts that he expected every PhD student to know or at least know about.2 For my reading in Soviet, Imperial Russian, modern French, and modern British history, I had to write up my own reading lists, sometimes with suggestions by the professor, never with the ambitious, perhaps Sisyphean intention of producing a canon.
Roger Chickering, of course, is both product and producer of the American academic landscape, and he has deep ties in the German one too. The above example, however, is not meant to suggest that his approach was in any way related to its proximity to German academic culture. Instead, I mention it in order to underline what I sense is an additional reason for the (to my mind) weaker handbook culture in the United States, at least among historians. Such systematization is hard and its desirability not clear.
The nice thing about this blog is that it does not require massive overhead, although it does seem to have some institutional support. Nor must an entire handbook be conceived and created before anyone can use the knowledge being gathered and produced for it. The blog simply grows over time (since 2011) and can respond to new concerns and concentrations with tweaks to its categories and tags.
I bring this up because I was struck by a recent post on the francophone blog Germano-Fil, a Franco-German production. The post is entitled “Recherche bibliographique en France et en Allemagne” and contains a wonderfully useful list of resources, the kind I would like to have had when I was studying German history. This list would also fit in one of the more traditional handbooks, but it is on a blog and can be accessed easily via the site’s category links, which act like a table of contents. Does such a detailed resource even exist in English for the study of German history? Hard to imagine.
There are other German websites that mirror the old handbook and encyclopedia culture more closely in that they are the products of specific research grants, and they begin with a structure, like a book, instead of waiting for a structure to emerge, as is possible on a blog. In its current iteration, German History in Documents and Images (GHDI), a German–North American project, is organized in chronologically bounded volumes, each edited by a different historian (or team of historians).
Another site, Historicum.net, is a cross between a reference work and a reference library for students of history. Such an undertaking, of course, requires substantial institutional support, at least that is the impression I get from the extensive content, not to mention the logos of the project’s sponsors—the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Universität Köln, and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek.
Docupedia-Zeitgeshichte also recalls a multivolume handbook with a correspondingly large editorial team. Like on GHDI and Historicum.net, Docupedia’s articles contain no tags or links to establish connections across entries. Instead, each piece reads like a traditional handbook article. In other words, the enterprise comports with the traditional research and writing practices of professional historians.
I have been thinking about blogs in terms of academic cultures for another reason as well. The above-mentioned blog has an ISSN, an identifier for periodicals. My encounters with academic blogs in the past decade or so have not involved this kind of identifier. Yet a number of academic blogs in Germany, at least blogs with some sort of institutional support, not to mention all blogs on the Hypotheses portal, are now using the ISSN. Why?
According to the international organization behind this numbering system, “The ISSN role is to identify a publication,” thereby preventing possible confusion with similarly named publications, for example. But this “digital code is without any intrinsic meaning.” The ISSN contains no “information about the origin or contents of the publication,” and, most importantly in the present context, “it does not guarantee the quality or validity of the contents."3 Nevertheless, on the blogs I have been encountering, this number appears to be about making the web publication look more serious or legitimate. In Germany at least, but maybe further afield, the ISSN can apparently make blogs accessible to library catalogs, as well as to an international open access directory called ROAD; however, it is hard to escape the impression that for blogs, the ISSN is more about gaining recognition.4 Academic culture might be a factor too.
Academic cultures with a long and deep history tend to influence the ways in which new media formats are used. Blogs, for example, offer the advantage of speed. One can put pixels to screen and share one’s thoughts almost instantly. Gatekeepers are practically nonexistent. Instead, it is up to bloggers to make clear who they are so that readers can judge for themselves the worthiness and reliability of the blog. In my view, these factors constitute advantages, but they can leave scholars uneasy, steeped as they are in a specific academic culture. Thus, some blogs take on the forms of more traditional academic publications.
See, for example, the impressive and seemingly well-funded Verfassungsblog: On Matters Constitutional, whose posts often even include a DOI, a tool to ensure the long-term availability of a piece, even in the face of changing hyperlinks or dying websites.5 Aside from longevity, this approach might have the merit of making it easier for scholars to include any substantial blog posts they write on their curricular vitae. On the other hand, DOIs would seem to entail a prohibitive amount of extra work for many of us, perhaps militating against the rapid communication of ideas and research results that a blog can make possible.
Many research blogs give me the impression that their authors understand blogging and peer-reviewed journal publications as complementary. The former allows faster publication as well as more provisional and personal writings, but it in no way precludes developing one’s blogged thoughts further toward a peer-reviewed article or book. Conversation can also occur more easily in the blog format, since a response to one blog post can be written and published in a matter of mere hours or days, if that long. The benefits of such speed and interaction would seem to outweigh any need to “legitimize” a blog by adding the trappings of a more conventional periodical.
None of these observations amount to a specific argument or program, but I thought they might be worth sharing in the context of a blog about knowledge. Self-reflexivity should be part of any scholarly undertaking. Moreover, some of our contributors might be new to or skeptical about blogging as a form of scholarly communication and knowledge production.
On the Metro
All DC area residents have complaints and even horror stories to tell about the Metro. Since introducing it to children in the family from out of town, I’ve started looking at it with fresh eyes.
Grafenwöhr 1983
A younger historian on Facebook called this picture a “Nice primary source of the late Cold War!” I don’t know what that makes me, the guy in front, but I decided to share here too.