Tuesday Found Objects: What You Need To Subpoena From My Zenith Computer Today

I was hanging out this morning using my university computer to download BDSM pornography and order Angela Davis posters (paid for out of my research account, of course) when I decided to take a break and check up on what my other radical colleagues were doing.

They've been busy!  So without further ado:

• The Facts, Ma'am.  Jon Wiener, from his perch at The Nation, asks:  "What does it take to become the target of this kind of attack?"  Wiener points out that Cronon is "not Bill Ayers," but a self-avowed political centrist who published "a simple fact" that Republicans in Wisconsin did not want revealed:  their close ties to a group that drafts union-busting legislation and creates public relations strategies for passing that legislation. This fact, Wiener argues, "disrupts the Republicans’ explanation of what they are doing in Wisconsin. They say the new law there ending collective bargaining with public employee unions is an emergency response to this year’s fiscal crisis." However, "the goal is not to protect the little guy in Wisconsin but rather to help the big corporations that fund Republican operations."  Read the whole article here.  

• It's Being A Professor Who Thinks That Is The Problem.  One issue that we need to resurrect is the neo-liberal charge that tenure promotes the prolonged employment of "dead wood" professors.  Clearly, it is Cronon's failure to become dead wood that has made him notorious and, as it turns out, dead wood profs aren't the ch!cks and d00ds that some right-winger wants to light up after all.  No, no: some poor, defeated old sot, shuffling off to class with a tattered little set of notes after a nip too many turns out to be our ideal scholar.  Tony Grafton, that guy you saw flying by your office window in a red cape, and with a big "H" on his scholarly chest, nails it in the New Yorker blog when he reminds us that, unlike politicians, historians are responsible for researching and relating the truth, and the truth sometimes hurts.  As Grafton concludes, "the Republicans seem remarkably fragile. A professor writing a blog post gives them the shivers. It’s a good thing they chose politics, and not the kind of career where the going can really get rough. Professors, for example, teach their hearts out to surly adolescents who call them boring in course evaluations and write their hearts out for colleagues who trash their books in snarky reviews. These Wisconsin Republicans may never have survived ordeals like that. Happily, Cronon has been toughened by decades of academic life. He’ll be blogging—and teaching and writing—long after Wisconsin voters have sent these Republicans back to obscurity."  

(Which reminds me that I have students standing around my office door growling in a menacing way and shaking pitchforks at me as a reminder that I should be using my Zenith computer to get their grading done right now!)  OK, one more:

• Yes, Historians Actually Care About The Rights Of All Working People.  Eileen Boris is in the business section of the HuffPo this week, which you probably missed as you were clicking through to the ads for package tours to Cuba.  Boris asks us to celebrate Women's History Month and commemorate the Triangle Factory Fire by reminding ourselves that the vast majority of working class women, and men, are no longer employed in an industrial workplace.  While guaranteeing the basic employment rights of household workers are becoming the subject of new legislation, Boris points out, "one group of household laborers remains apart -- those paid by governments to care for needy elderly and disabled people. The California proposal explicitly excludes In Home Supportive Service workers, the type of worker whose omission from federal law the Supreme Court upheld in 2007 and the Obama administration has yet to rectify through new labor regulations. Meanwhile, Republican governors, as in Wisconsin, are eliminating collective bargaining for home care workers. An irony of current struggles might be that these public employees end up with fewer rights and poorer conditions than those who labor for individual housewives." 

As Women's History Month draws to a close, we at chez Radical admit that we have done little to celebrate it, so here's my proposal:  I would like to nominate Bill Cronon as an Honorary Woman.  This is one of the few awards available to historians that he has not received, and I think it is time.  Do we have a second?  Thank you, Historiann!  All in favor?

The aye's have it!  Sorry, Wisconsin GOP.  You lose again!

Let's Run Away From The Girls! And Other Strategies To Make History Relevant To A Twenty-First Century Liberal Arts Education

Did Linda Kerber, Emily Rosenberg, Penny Von Eschen, Elizabeth Borgwardt, Nancy Cott, Joan Hoff, Marilyn Young, Ellen DuBois, Mary Dudziak and Mary Frances Berry die when I wasn't looking?*

I was a little concerned about this when I picked up my New York Times this morning and saw that none of them were quoted in Patricia Cohen's article, Great Caesars Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing? I guess they just weren't answering their phones yesterday when they weren't called.

Tradition, as you guessed even before reading the article, would be represented by diplomatic, military, economic, constitutional and intellectual history. These fields a, the article asserts, are being crowded out of university history curricula by (you've guessed already, haven't you?): the history of gender, and that other feminized field, cultural history. "Job openings on the nation’s college campuses are scarce," Cohen writes, "while bread-and-butter courses like the Origins of War and American Foreign Policy are dropping from history department postings. And now, in what seems an almost gratuitous insult, Diplomatic History, the sole journal devoted to the subject, has proposed changing its title."

Horrors. Change the title of a journal to reflect changes in the field? What else must the profession endure?

Aside from what you have already noticed -- that "tradition"="quality"="what you really need to know to live in the world" -- the association of "tradition" with "male" is sealed by the fact that not a single woman is quoted in the article, not even women working in the fields in question. Because, you know, once you add gender or race to your inquiry, you aren't really in those fields any more. Tu comprends, mon chou?

In case you are still in doubt as to the destructiveness of women's history to the profession at large, you have the helpful graphic pictured at left which demonstrates (without the appropriate gross numbers) that women's history is eating the profession alive. And then, to provide appropriate pathos about the extinction of men from the historical profession, there is a lonely little petunia in an onion patch, a first-year (male) grad student whose name is being withheld by me out of mercy, who whimpers that he feels "a bit like the last woolly mammoth at the end of the Ice Age. 'Being a young historian in this field is thus a rather lonely and sobering experience,' he wrote, adding that some historians treat his chosen specialty with 'genuine derision.'”

Do we have any doubt that these monsters are -- women? No, we do not. Because why else would you ask a first year graduate student in any field for his or her opinion before consulting any one of the distinguished women in the fields in question?

Naturally, it is the permissiveness of the 1960s that is to blame for this travesty, not to mention the pervasive cultural rot that allowed women into the profession in the first place:

The shift in focus began in the late 1960s and early ’70s, when a generation of academics began looking into the roles of people generally missing from history books — women, minorities, immigrants, workers. Social and cultural history, often referred to as bottom-up history, offered fresh subjects. Diplomatic historians, by contrast, generally work from the top down, diving into official archives and concentrating on people in power, an approach often tagged as elitist and old-fashioned.

Over the last three decades the number of history faculty members at four-year institutions has more than doubled to 20,000-plus, said Robert B. Townsend, assistant director for research at the American Historical Association. Yet the growth has been predominantly in the newer specializations, spurring those in diplomatic, military, legal and economic history to complain they are being squeezed out.

In 1975, for example, three-quarters of college history departments employed at least one diplomatic historian; in 2005 fewer than half did. The number of departments with an economic historian fell to 31.7 percent from 54.7 percent. By contrast the biggest gains were in women’s history, which now has a representative in four out of five history departments.

The closest we get to women who actually teach in any of the fields under question being asked for their opinion is a quote from Anthony Grafton, who is now officially dubbed an Honorary Woman for trying to make this point, even though it didn't affect the reporter's perspective a jot. His perspective that these fields are not gone but have "shifted focus" is immediately countered by two other scholars for whom only "tradition" will do:

....critics like David A. Bell, the dean of faculty at Johns Hopkins University, argue that traditional diplomatic and economic history are still the specialties that are best suited to deal with America’s problems today.

Simply giving everyone a place at the table is just not affordable in an era of shrinking resources. “I’d love to let a hundred flowers bloom,” said Alonzo L. Hamby, a history professor at Ohio University in Athens (n.b.: note reference to the famously destructive Cultural Revolution that gutted intellectual institutions in the People's Republic of China), but “it’s hard for all but the largest departments or the richest.” In his own department of about 30 faculty members, a military historian recently retired, triggering a vigorous debate over how to advertise for a replacement. (A handful of faculty members had the view that “military history is evil,” Mr. Hamby said.) The department finally agreed to post a listing for a specialist in “U.S. and the world,” he said, “the sort of mushy description that could allow for a lot of possibilities.”

You mean like gender?

**************************************

*And these are just the Americanists. Lord only knows how the female Europeanists are faring in these days of want and strife. Phone home girls!

The AHA for Dummies; or, A Guide to History's Oldest Annual Meeting Designed for the Novice Conference Goer

Is she in Heaven? Is she in Hell? That damned, elusive Radical!" (A cry often heard at conferences, originated by the Baroness Emmuska Orczy.)

This is just to say: if you are pseudonymous, anonymous or a lurker, I insist that you come up to say hello to me at the AHA. I would love to meet you. I can't tell you precisely where I will be at any given time, and the blogger meet-up is, I think, scheduled for a lunch I am supposed to eat elsewhere. But I can certainly be found at my own panel, Sunday at 11 (pray god it doesn't start to snow at 9 as it did in Atlanta a decade ago); and I can also be found at the interviewing workshop Tony Grafton has organized for Friday during the 9:30 a.m. session where, as I understand it, there will be role playing of various kinds. I am looking forward to learning a few things too, so come one, come all. In between, I can only specifically promise a sighting at the Radical History Review/CLGH reception on Friday night.

You'll recognize me. I'll be wearing black.

So instead of giving you a list of what I aspire to in the New Year (Item #1: "Diversify blog beyond posts that yank on the testicles of right-wing gadflies") or my ten favorite books of 2008, the Radical is going to spread a little light on how to function socially at the AHA. This is expressly aimed at those who either have never attended this meeting before, or who were so traumatized by their first AHA that they can't decide what shampoo to pack.

So here goes:

Please remember that we go to the AHA to socialize. Yes, there are panels, I know. God knows, I'm on one. And there are sometimes panels, or individual papers, that knock your socks off. But mostly we go to AHA to see friends and colleagues, hang out in those open bars in hotel lobbies and drink overpriced booze -- or worse -- a $2.00 glass of bubble water with a lime in it. We go to the AHA to go to dinner with our friends. We go to the AHA to hang out in the book exhibit, to go to lavish book parties held by the big presses, to go to receptions. Please do not forget this. You are now one of us and we expect great things of you.

This might cause the skeptical to think that the AHA has deteriorated as a primarily intellectual venue since its inception 122 years ago, but that is actually not the case. Almost from the get-go, it was an extraordinarily social event, where networks of men promoted each other's interests, and hired each other's students, all the while consuming vast amounts of cigars, rich food and booze. In 1912, for example, the conference committee scheduled a special train, with sleeper and dining cars, to go from Boston to Richmond, and at every major stop -- New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington -- more historians got on board and joined a huge party in progress, a party that ended with a pre-convention formal dinner -- served on the train. The dinner followed a grand tour of the battlefields outside the former Confederate capital, with genuine Confederate veterans available to tell of their heroic deeds first hand. And if you have done some work in the AHA archives, you will know that, for our founding fathers, planning the "smokers" (to which female historians were not invited --for their own good, dammit) and putting together the invitation lists was at least as important as putting together the program. In fact, one might argue that a major cause of the 1915 AHA insurrection was the fact that southern and western historians were not invited to the best parties, and they came to resent it.

So actually, we have always gone to the AHA to socialize. It is a tradition. And we are not going to let the side down this year. Particularly in Washington, where there is so much to do.

It is from this crucial piece of knowledge that all other knowledge flows for the novice conference attendee. To wit:

Good conference contacts are well-orchestrated conference contacts. There is nothing wrong with approaching people you don't know, or people you know only slightly, to solidify or initiate a relationship. In fact, I encourage it, particularly really famous people in your field. But you must imagine these as brief encounters, encounters that you will dominate and control. For example, when you are talking to someone of higher status than you (which if you are a graduate student is almost everyone,) watch that person's eyes as you are talking. At the moment those eyes start to drift over one of your shoulders, interrupt and say, "Oh jeez, I'm late for that meeting with my editor." Or, "I am supposed to be in a panel right now! So nice to see you!" Then bustle off. In other words: do not be a dump-ee, be a dump-er.

Watch out for your main chance. What do I mean by this? OK: scenario. You have arranged to go out to dinner with a friend in your grad school cohort. Suddenly you fall in with a fun group of people you have just met at a reception, and they invite you to go to dinner with them. Do you:

a. Say "I'm sorry, I'm meeting someone else for dinner," and beetle off;

b. Call your friend and say you have been taken ill and cannot go to dinner;

c. Say to your new acquaintances, "Gee I'd love to -- I am supposed to met a friend for dinner, but is it ok to add one more?"

The correct answer is: c. There are some people who I have subsequently become fast friends with who I originally met at a conference dinner where I was included at this last minute, either on my own or through someone else.

Imagine what you will say when, at a reception, someone asks you what your dissertation/book manuscript is about. Now remember, they do -- and they don't -- really want to know. For some people this is a sincere question; for others, it is a default question when they don't know what else to say to you. Because you can't know which it is, you must attend to two main rules.

a. Be able to say it in a sentence, and not as if you are in a job interview, but as if you are in a social situation. Don't, for God's sake, drop your eyes to the floor, take a big gulp of air, and say something really complicated and long. I repeat -- it's a party. For extra points, relate your work to the other person's research interests.

b. Do pay attention to whether your new friend's eyes light up (indicating genuine interest) or whether this person's affect remains unchanged and flat (indicating that it was only a polite question.) Proceed accordingly.

Do not, for God's sake, save money by not registering. This is what we call a false economy. Why? Because the book exhibit is the center of the action. The book exhibit is where you go when you have time to kill. The book exhibit is where presses throw parties for fabulous authors and their fabulous friends. With free food and free wine. The book exhibit is where you are most likely to find a scholar you want to meet, temporarily cut off from her glittering herd, and vulnerable to a swift introduction. To wit:

a: "Professor Hofstadter, I just wanted to say hello. I'm a student of your old friend X at Prestigious University, and she is always recommending your work to me."

b. "Professor Radical, I just want to say that I love your blog! How do you put up with the trolls? Yes, I'm in Shoreline for a year on fellowship. You know, I am working in an archive you probably know -- oh, you don't? Well, sure -- if you are interested, we could grab some coffee back in Shoreline."

c. "Professor Dunning, I just finished your book on Reconstruction -- yes, I really enjoyed it, but don't you think you were a teeny-weeny bit hard on the freedmen? Of course, who am I to say -- you know, Dr. Phillips gave a talk at Big State U. and he couldn't say enough about you."

Invite yourself to parties. I once invited myself, as a newly minted Radical, to a great party where I found a Famous Historian happily nestled in a bottle of bourbon, and he offered to take me back to the Smithsonian and show me John Dillinger's penis. Although I declined, this is definitely one of my favorite conference memories, as it was followed by an hour or so of witty repartee with one of the most fun historians alive. Take points off if you view this encounter as sexual harassment, since I was at the time writing a book that involved John Dillinger. And it was really funny. And it is a long standing rumor that the Dillinger member resides, preserved in formaldehyde, in the Smithsonian.

This is how you find the parties: first of all, smokers will be advertised on the lavish message boards. But many are not advertised. If someone mentions a party you have not been invited to, consider yourself invited. It goes like this:

Historian: "maybe I'll see you later at the Michigan Party." (Remember; this is an exit line, and this person does not specifically want to meet you at the party.)

You: (who know nothing of this party) "Oh yeah, I'm definitely planning on it -- where is that party again? I left my book upstairs."

The Radical will, of course, be blogging the AHA -- I hope on a daily basis, depending on what kind of pressure social life imposes. Anyone who wants to see conference blogging to die for should check in to Flavia immediately. Flavia's dry wit is appealing no matter what it is aimed at, but this series of three posts had me giggling until my forehead hurt.

And check out this spoof of MLA program materials. Hat tip to Margaret Soltan at University Diaries. It is one of the best grad student capers I've seen since the JUDY! fanzine.

GREETINGS FROM HOTLANTA

Even though this is an anonymous blog, I think it is dumb to disguise where I am traveling and it gives me less to write about. So -- I am in a bed and breakfast in the Inman Park neighborhood of Atlanta. I chose this location for two reasons. One is, much as I love research, I vacillate between whether a faceless hotel is more desirable because of its precious anonymity, or whether an inn of some sort is better because you can actually be in a neighborhood and not eat at strip malls or worry about the bacteria in the carpet. You would think inns would be a slam dunk. But no. The problem with inns is having to talk to the innkeeper and the other guests (more on this later.)

The other reason I chose to eschew the faceless hotel is that this particular B & B is within walking distance of the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library, and also within shot -- either by foot or by MARTA -- of Little Five Points, about six blocks of New York's Lower East Side transplanted to a Dixie metropolis; downtown Atlanta; and Decatur. Decatur is very gay, and I like to visit gay places wherever I travel. And yes, I am doing research at the Carter Library, so if you don't know who I am already, fly to Atlanta, drop by, and find out.

Of course, everyone I meet in Atlanta is stunned that I did not rent a car, something that I never did on any research trip for either of my first two books except once, when I was working in strange repositories all over Dallas, which has no public transportation whatsoever. If Atlantans are stunned by my desire to walk, something only the poor do in southern citites, I am stunned that everywhere I go I am stepping all over the Confederate dead which there are rather a lot of on this side of the city. This, in turn, doesn't seem to bother the natives in the least. About three blocks from where I sit now, Atlanta was defended --badly -- by the Confederate General Hood (a dear friend of Mary Chesnut's, as it happens.) Instead of hightailing it up the Decatur road toward the coast where he might have saved himself many casualties and, in the end, might have spared the city destruction, Hood instead stood his ground, lost the battle, retreated back into Atlanta, and helped Joe Johnston burn it down. I knew this already in the abstract way that historians know things -- having read Sherman's "Memoirs" and read/seen Margaret Mitchell's "Gone With The Wind" -- but it was a different thing entirely to be standing in a park that is about the size of a square city block and read a sign that informs you that 6,700 secesh and 3000+ Union troops died on that very spot and it only took a couple hours.

As a northerner whose work flirts with southern history (ocasionally I pose as a southern historian at conferences, but put me in a lineup with folks like Jacquelyn Hall and Pete Daniel and I look peaky) I am constantly ending up in Dixie in some archive or another, and this is definitely one of the most southern places I come. The research trip I documented on this blog last fall was in North Carolina -- Durham, to be exact, and while there are parts of the Carolinas that feel very southern, Durham is not one of them. Or more precisely, the Duke University campus is not one of them. Here in Atlanta it feels very southern everywhere, something that is merely underlined by markers documenting the war -- it's a perfectly groomed look well-to-do white women have, and a southern accent that most people have whatever their race, gender or class. And then there is the history -- the So-and-so plantation house, burned in 1864; the Martin Luther King Memorial. I suppose you get used to your own local history, wherever you live, and other folks' history is only in books until you go and touch it. Or maybe it's just that I am easily moved by history: whenever I am in D.C., I always go visit the Constitution just for old times' sake.

Anyway, to get back to the reasons *not* to stay in a bed and breakfast -- it's the innkeeper and the other guests, who can interfere with one of the great joys of being on a research trip: Being Alone. Eventually, someone always asks me what I do (N says if I would just answer "Rowing Coach!" or "Sales!" they would shut up and move on to the next guest.) When I say I am a historian, and a historian of the modern United States to boot, everyone wants to talk history around the breakfast table in that History Channel kind of way. Sometimes people have even seen me on the History Channel, which means I then have to talk about that Famous Person I wrote my first book about. And let me say -- when you do United States political history everyone wants to know what you think of whatever the President is up to, regardless of what is happening or who the President is, and, nowadays, they want to know what I think about how the war in Iraq can ever possibly end. It's exhausting. Even more exhausting than sorting through the many memoranda that Presidential staff types send each other so that I can collect all the many puzzle pieces that will need to be jiggled together to write a book. And actually, I could talk about archives forever. But no one ever wants to talk about the archive. They want to talk about how much they hated their history teacher in high school. Or how much they love World War II. Or if J. Edgar Hoover was gay.

Ah well. Since you brought up history, did anyone but me read about our pal Anthony Grafton, blog commenter extraordinaire, in a New Yorker Talk of the Town piece about the Athanasius Kircher Society? Anyway, go read it, because it appears Tony is a leading member of the Kircher Society, which will puzzle you because it sounds so very odd, but actually I have concluded, given what little I know about Tony from his books, that he must be writing a book about Kircher. If you have read The Footnote this will seem like a logical explanation to you too. If you haven't read The Footnote, do so, even if you don't like history as much as Tony and I do: it's short and fun and you are either on spring break or close to it and you need something good to read, don't you?