The Tenured Radical is Offered An Oral History Methodology Tutorial

Today at history camp I had a wonderful conversation with a person famous in some radical activist circles starting in about 1965, a woman who is now almost seventy, very pretty, with graying hair, a keen mind and a gentle expression. Part way through the conversation I asked whether I could talk with her at some point about the many interviews I want to do for a book that engages radical feminism in the 1970's and '80's. Since my first book was about Violent Criminals, some of whom were alive but refused to be interviewed (one said she was afraid she might be arrested again, and this was about sixty years later) I know that there are both ethical standards outlined by the Oral History Association that one must adhere to, and there are circumstances in which one needs to be doubly thoughtful about being responsible to participants in an oral history project.

"I realize," I said, "that FBI surveillance, and the constant fear of arrest back then must make people very wary of being interviewed, even to this day. And of course, recalling divisive struggles within feminism may be something people are reluctant to do because they will also have to recall the pain of those struggles. I mean," I babbled on, intending to show how thoughtful and professional I intended to be, "As I understand it from other historians, a lot of people are still really traumatized by the FBI raids that surrounded the search for New Left fugitives, and the ways their communities were violated and torn apart by suspicion. And I wonder," I continued, "given that they have been hurt by outsiders in the past, if you could give me advice on how best to approach people."

There was a moment of silence. "Well," said my new radical acquaintance said, "You should tell them to get over it."

The Radical Goes to History Camp

Many years ago, when I first started rowing, I experienced this phenomenon where it gave me -- and my fellow novices -- the greatest pleasure to learn to row, and then to to talk about rowing all the time. We would go to talks at Zenith, and then later at the post-talk reception we would talk about rowing; we would go to dinner at each other's houses, and other guests would silently push a pea around the plate while we talked about rowing; and it got so bad that when we walked into a room at Zenith, people would say things like, "Oh, here comes the rowing team." We just thought they were silly. At the end of the summer, we all headed up to the Master's Nationals in Syracuse, and agreed that it would be such a relief to talk about rowing all week without people interrupting us.

Well, I now get it that probably had something to do with endorphins, and talking about rowing kicked off something in our brains that made us feel good. So why, since I have been a historian for nigh on twenty-five years, am I so jazzed up to be at history camp up at the Schlesinger Library, talking about, listening to, or researching United States history after 1968? About twelve hours a day?

I don't know -- but it sure feels good. Thank you, Nancy Cott.

Historypalooza! Maryland Attic Gives Up Its Treasures, Journalist Goofs

The Associated Press reports that:

a Maryland family's massive collection of letters, maps and printed bills has surfaced in the attic of a former plantation, providing a firsthand account of life from the 1660s through World War II.

"Historians are used to dealing with political records and military documents," said Adam Goodheart, a history professor at nearby Washington College. "But what they aren't used to is political letters and military documents kept right alongside bills for laundry or directions for building a washing machine." A picture of Adam decorates this post.

The papers will eventually go to the Maryland State Archives. Head archivist Edward Papenfuse notes that:

The collection also includes notes on an aspect of slavery historians know little about: the practice of renting slave labor to neighbors and plantations farther south.

"Scholars have not paid a great deal of attention to it, but this is something that helps recreate and draw back together the lives of these people who were considered chattel," Papenfuse said.

This is very exciting, particularly for those most immediately involved, but it also points to two interesting popular misperceptions about the historical profession.

One, pointing to Goodheart's comment (which was undoubtedly more complex) is that established archives primarily concern military matters and the formal political sphere, that documents from which we write social and cultural history are few and far between, and that such evidence is unlikely to be found in the collections normally used to write "traditional history." That has never been so, particularly in Southern history, but really in any field, so I find this a rather shocking little piece of misinformation. The selective quotation of Goodheart also suggests that writing about an entire world, and not just those things recorded by Great Ones, will be a real breakthrough for historians. Also not true, not since before Ulrich B. Phillips mailed all those burlap bags full of antebellum plantation documents back to Yale prior to World War I as agricultural freight (see the work of John David Smith if you want to know more about collecting and archival practices among this generation of professional historians, particularly An Old Creed for the New South: Proslavery Ideology and Historiography, 1865-1918. And a book soon to be finished by me.)

The other misperception, and we are going to assume Papenfuse was also taken out of context by this journalist on the history beat, is that if it is not general knowledge that slaves were rentable property, scholars must not be aware of it either. Also not so: for the last two decades at least the complexity of slavery as an economic arrangement has been a major focus of new work, and that includes a lot of research on how enslaved people were hired out or permitted to hire themselves out. Slave narratives, and the WPA oral histories also routinely refer to these arrangements. I cannot help but think that what Papenfuse must have meant was that Maryland, as well as other states in what Barbara Jean Fields has famously called "the middle ground" (we might include Delaware and New Jersey here, but Maryland is a special case because the mix of slave and free labor had settled into a unique system, and it did not elect to stay in the Union without some pretty dramatic persuasion) are greatly understudied and that this new archive might bring scholars who study slavery back to Maryland.

Which would be right. It will, thank heaven. Congratulations, Marylanders: the graduate students are on their way.

And Now For Something Completely Different: Save The Earth Instead of Working On Your Book

Tired of throwing away bags of unused, unopened catalogues every week? Tired of wondering when the unending cycle of wasted paper will bring us to our knees as a culture? Tired of getting mail addressed to "Mr. Potter," just because you ordered a men's shirt from Eddie Bauer six years ago? Tired of working on your book????

I was.

Have you asked yourself, "What can I do to stop this horrible waste of our earth's resources? Should I even carry them back to my recycling pile, or should I leave a bag permanently by the front door so I can just walk them out the curb on trash day? Should I make an appointment for transgender surgery so that my sex and my catalogue salutation will be the same? Does anyone really buy electric nose hair clippers, and would they be useful in a department meeting? Should I break my manuscript up into three or four articles, return the books to the library, wipe my hard drive and throw the rest of the damn thing away?"

I have thought such things.

Then I discovered: Catalogue Choice!

Yes, you have catalogue choice. You can log on, set up an account, and day by day, as these useless catalogues come in the door, you can take them up to your study and instead of having sad thoughts about landfills and your scholarship, you can log in every hour or so and have Catalogue Choice expunge your address from a merchant's files. For free.

Offer not valid in Canada, Ukraine, North Korea or Myanmar. Cookies may be deposited on your computer to subscribe you to another set of catalogues altogether. Offer not valid for graduate students desperate to finish the dissertation before taking a job September 1.

What Would Natalie Zemon Davis Do? A Few Meditations on Women's History and Women in History

How might Natalie Davis have responded to the recent flap-a-roonie sparked by an obscure English blogger? With dignity, humor and razor sharp intelligence, that's how.

At Cliopatria, Ralph Luker has chided said blogger for ducking in and out of a fight he started. Speaking from experience, I would say that new bloggers do make mistakes, although I'm not sure that Rusticus would agree he made one. He may be uncertain, though. The posts and the blog itself go down periodically, only to reappear with the same ideas, sometimes framed differently, but sometimes not. For a brief period Mercurius Rusticus was up but closed to all but invited guests, perhaps because a group of female Picts waving scythes and staves (and I might add, only recently have Picts, male or female, been welcome in the profession at all because they are prone to such behavior) had gathered outside his office. With this I sympathize: I had a Pict problem myself a while back, and it took months to untangle.

Luker, my colleague and fellow Cliopatrician, notes that this discussion is:

a missed opportunity, because underlying MR's bitterness and snark were some issues that ought be discussed: 1) in what ways, if any, has the growth of women's history broadened and deepened our understanding of history? 2) has its growth drained resources from other fields of historical inquiry and negatively affected the careers of male historians? and 3) person for person, have female historians been as productive as their male counterparts? (I have heard the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese make the argument that they have not.)

I might add to Ralph's observation that Betsy, as her intimates called this intelligent, accomplished and hard-edged scholar, also lost a lot of friends (men and women) not because she became a neocon in her final years (which she did) but because such opinions had little basis in fact and seemed only designed for self-promotion. But Ralph's point about a missed opportunity echoes a question, asked by a certain Mouse: "would you consider doing a post on some of what you consider to be the highlights of achievements by women historians, and/or in gender history, in the past few years? Why does the Berkshire conference matter?"

Well, it would take too long to really do it right, but let me give it a shot.

Let me begin by turning to Davis, who answered questions about her own innovations in the field in a 1988 AHR Forum. It is one of the most lucid essays I have ever read, and responds to Robert Finlay's counter-reading of Davis's path-breaking interpretations of well-known evidence in The Return of Martin Guerre, a foundational work in the fields of early modern history and women's history. I -- and others in my department, male and female - teach Martin Guerre and the subsequent debate for two reasons. One is because Davis is able to demonstrate, by telling a story, a methodological approach to recovering history that then illuminates so many other aspects of the world in which it is situated. This is something that historians of earlier periods do so well, and since most of our students go on to do modern, or even recent, history as majors, it is a good opportunity to make them aware of some basic rules, and debates, over the nature of evidence. But in doing so, Davis also uncovers a story about how women who lived in a world governed by fathers, brothers and husbands made choices that allowed them to survive and prosper. And she points to the importance of understanding communities as places where various hierarchicies of power, whether gender, age, or status, were not fixed but negotiated through the actions and choices of individuals. In other words, not only does Davis "recover" the story of a woman, one principal task of women's history, she uses that as a path to recover a better history of men, and to illuminate what it meant to be human in a particular world.

My point is that illuminating what it means to be human is what women's history does, but as it happens, humans come in different bodies that engage universalisms (for example, what it means to be "human") differently. By including the "other humans" -- whether those other humans are women, slaves, workers, colonized subjects, children, the common soldier, or what have you -- historians working on the so-called margins illuminate the world of the humans who have traditionally been at the center of historical research. Women's history is part of that task. And women are more likely to do it than men at present, although that is less and less true.

But the other thing that the Davis-Finlay exchange demonstrates is how to argue in a civilized way. Of course, they had editors, and bloggers don't. But Finlay avoids an error that some historians, young and old, would do well to contemplate: do not use a machine gun when a .22, carefully aimed, will do; and be respectful of other people's achievements even when you question their findings. Similarly, Davis avoids an error by not over-arguing or becoming defensive; and by illuminating a point of genuine disagreement about scholarly method while elaborating on why she thinks she is right.

I'd like to come back to this question of history's focus on "being human" (although historians of the environment and other non-human fields might have something to say about this, since things have a history at the same time as that history can't be disentangled from the history of human thought about them.) But "being human" is not just a vacant (or as feminist scholar Ann Snitow would say, "unmarked") category that allows us to go on and assemble "the facts" in a neutral way. History has always been highly (perhaps too) attendant to and embedded in nationalism. And let's look at the role race has played in historical writing -- whether we are talking about the long historiography of Atlantic World slavery, colonialism and various forms of conquest; the Anglo-Saxonism and regionalism of early United States and English historians; or the efforts to locate the origins of modern nation-states in long, pre-modern pseudo-racial histories. And of course, we might also point to the long-standing ignorance by historians of politics that occurred outside the formal political sphere that has now fortunately been relieved.

So one might say that "women's history," and the history of gender that emerged from it, is no different from any of the projects that have sought to mark unmarked categories, except that it was brought into the university by women. And, more properly by feminists. As a field that, in its professionalized form was inherently attached to the bodies of women who struggled against prejudice, "women's history" challenged and changed history in three important ways: by fighting for the recognition of female practitioners as scholars and professionals; by allowing historians as a group to simply know more by extending professional archival practices to the history of women; and by changing what historians knew about major historical transformations such as industrialization, war, emancipation, and state formation. But women, disproportionate to their numbers and often working to support a great man (can we say "Michelet?") have dramatically influenced what counts as history, and that is part of what they celebrate and perpetuate when they gather. For a useful introduction to this, and to the ways that historians' wives were a hidden part of the publishing enterprise, see Bonnie Smith's long publishing record, and particularly The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.)

Those not interested in the history of "women" might yet attend usefully to the fields that this history has created in its wake, principally studies of maleness, and masculinity; and to fields previously unmarked by gender. War and international relations are two related fields that, in today's world, we might usefully revisit. Drew Faust's books on the Civil War (companion volumes really, if you read her work chronologically from beginning to end), skillfully deploy what Joan Scott famously called "gender as a category of analysis" to ask fresh questions about an historical event that is perhaps more thoroughly excavated than any other, certainly in American history. And scholars like Patricia Hill, Leila J. Rupp and other scholars influenced by the history of women and of feminist thought, male and female, have asked new questions about the history of foreign policy, still mostly male-dominated.

I could go on, but I won't: as I said, never over argue, and know that you are losing your audience in the blogosphere for every additional paragraph you write. But as to why the Berkshire Conference matters: well, that's a longer story, but I have some human responses to that. One is that, while male scholars have historically valorized independence and objectivity, it is simply the case that often through participation in professional organizations, men formed networks that excluded women for decades, and that those networks sustained their scholarship and marginalized the scholarship of women as not "good enough." For an example of this, which I will make a subject of another post, see Deborah Gray White's new collection, Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower, which details the struggle to establish the history of black women as a field, and the struggle of black women to establish themselves as inherently worthy of consideration as intellectuals by men (black and white) and often other women (white.) And as we all know, Deborah Gray White wrote the first book ever about African-American women in slavery, having been told repeatedly that there was no history to write. Sensibly, she wondered how that could be and the rest was -- well, history.

One of the themes that leaps out of the collection is how professional organizations put otherwise isolated black women in contact with each other, to exchange work, initiate collaborative research, and mentor each other. Professional organizations always matter and, as many of the methodological panels at the Berks underlined, they help us review the field, figure out where it is fraying at the edges, and guide us either backwards to scholarship we need to reconsider or forward to the next stage of our inquiry.

But I would close with two points: contemporary feminist organizations are not about the "exclusion of men," nor is women's and gender history surviving because its numerous critics have been mysteriously silenced. It has gained the purchase it has in the profession because it persuades and corrects. Indeed, in this way I am a great believer in the market. Scholars and educated readers buy, teach, and read the books that persuade them. When women pried their way into the academy (which often meant prying themselves out of full-time mother- and wifehood first), despite discrimination, they prospered. And they prospered principally because men -- who still overwhelmingly dominate the profession and at least in the United States get jobs out of proportion to the percentage of men who earn Ph.D.'s - were persuaded, and continue to be persuaded. They taught us, mentored us, voted for our tenure, put us on editorial boards, elected us president of national organizations and so on. Whatever struggles women still face, we are here to stay, and in all fields.

Cross posted at Cliopatria

News Flash: Feminist Bookstore is Not Dead Yet!

I have been alerted by Plain(s) Feminist that Amazon Bookstore, of Minneapolis, MN, which was slated to go out of business due to the general demise of independent book selling, will stay open after all! "I was just at Amazon this afternoon, and - they are not closing!" PF writes. "Two longtime customers are buying the store, so it will remain open."

Next goal: progressives occupy the White House!

This great feminist institution will survive after all, thanks to the thoughtfulness and generosity of community members who have made a leap of faith. So to celebrate, go visit them and buy a book.

As Catharine MacKinnon Would Say, "Are Women Human?"

A blogger who goes under the pseudonym of Mercurius Rusticus has taken it into his head to declare the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians (as well as all fields of study related to women rather than "humans") marginal, faddish and irrelevant: read about it here. The passage where he heaps scorn on this trendy organization (that first convened in 1930 as a small group of women responding to male exclusion from the professional activities of the AHA, and which held its first major conference in 1973), has been called to our attention by a post at Cliopatria (and folks, it's a news item, not an endorsement, so if you do visit, do me a favor and don't trash the messenger.) Rusticus writes:

"It is difficult to think of anything more depressing than a conference of female historians or more irrelevant to the future of the discipline of history. None of these figures has ever appeared in any work on early modern history that I have ever read or is likely to figure on any reading list I see. Historians are and should be concerned with the past of humanity, with men and women, old and young alike: being female is not a prerequisite for such studies and women's history like the histories of gender, sexuality and the family is a transient, ephemeral phenomenon."

I guess I have two responses to this. The first is, "Jane, you ignorant slut." The other is, if women historians in large groups depress you, seek treatment. Also, you need to read more -- like, a lot more.

But instead of visiting Miss Mary Rusticus to express outrage, dig this: it's really great that women historians, not to mention historians of women, gender and sexuality, are so well established that -- although our intellectual concerns do sometimes make us the object of derision by people who know very little about what we do -- such a comment appears to be a transparent attempt by a new blogger to get some attention. And it's also really great that many of us, whatever our trials may be, have a lot of good allies, colleagues and intellectual companions who are women and men and who support our work and use it to inform theirs.

Okay Rusticus -- you got our attention: now write something interesting that tells us something about what you do know.

And as for the women historians of early modern history, who also write about women, gender, and the family, if you want to start your reading, I have three words for you:

Natalie.
Zemon.
Davis.

Here Come the Brides: Only 48 More States To Go

Despite the Radical's lack of conviction that marriage will deliver the goods when it comes to equal rights (or eternal happiness for that matter), no ideology prevents me from acknowledging that today is an historic day in California. Gay marriage is legal, thanks to the dedicated efforts of a vast number of people who have organized stubbornly for decades, and to the California Supreme Court. To quote from the decision, which goes into effect at 5:00 today little late for the eastern news cycle, but smack on for the Central and Pacific time zones):

In defending the constitutionality of the current statutory scheme, the Attorney General of California maintains that even if the constitutional right to marry under the California Constitution applies to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples, this right should not be understood as requiring the Legislature to designate a couple’s official family relationship by the term “marriage,” as opposed to some other nomenclature. The Attorney General, observing that fundamental constitutional rights generally are defined by substance rather than by form, reasonsthat so long as the state affords a couple all of the constitutionally protected substantive incidents of marriage, the state does not violate the couple’s constitutional right to marry simply by assigning their official relationship a name other than marriage. Because the Attorney General maintains that California’s current domestic partnership legislation affords same-sex couples all of the core substantive rights that plausibly may be guaranteed to an individual or couple as elements of the fundamental state constitutional right to marry, the Attorney General concludes that the current California statutory scheme relating to marriage and domestic partnership does not violate the fundamental constitutional right to marry embodied in the California Constitution.

We need not decide in this case whether the name “marriage” is invariably a core element of the state constitutional right to marry so that the state would violate a couple’s constitutional right even if — perhaps in order to emphasize and clarify that this civil institution is distinct from the religious institution of marriage — the state were to assign a name other than marriage as the official designation of the formal family relationship for all couples. Under the current statutes, the state has not revised the name of the official family relationship for all couples, but rather has drawn a distinction between the name for the official family relationship of opposite-sex couples (marriage) and that for same-sex couples (domestic partnership). One of the core elements of the right to establish an officially recognized family that is embodied in the California constitutional right to marry is a couple’s right to have their family relationship accorded dignity and respect equal to that accorded other officially recognized families, and assigning a different designation for the family relationship of same-sex couples while reserving the historic designation of “marriage” exclusively for opposite-sex couples poses at least a serious risk of denying the family relationship of same-sex couples such equal dignity and respect. We therefore conclude that although the provisions of the current domestic partnership legislation afford same-sex couples most of the substantive elements embodied in the constitutional right to marry, the current California statutes nonetheless must be viewed as potentially impinging upon a same-sex couple’s constitutional right to marry under the California Constitution.

As I understand it, Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon will lead things off, as they did in February, 2004. Next up: a decision from the Connecticut Supreme Court, probably this summer. And now that all those progressive California organizers have time on their hands, can we start on universal health care?

Note: Picture at left was downloaded after the most famous lesbians in the United States put on the old ball and chain today -- again! Mayor Gavin Newsome is in attendance. Do you think it will last?

Day 1 at the Berks: Let the Receptions Begin

Today was reception after reception after reception, since most of the action doesn't start until tomorrow. We were received at 4:00 by Feminist Studies, where longtime editor Claire Moses stood up on a table and recounted for all of us the history of the journal and the history of the journal's presence at the Berkshire Conference: it went on for a while, and occasionally the babble of the crowd would get too loud and someone would tell everyone to hush so we could listen to Claire's speech. Part of what was being said on my side of the room was several of us realizing that we had had our first articles published in FS. So lost was I in that nostalgic moment that I admit I didn't hear much of the rest, except that the editors have very beautiful notebooks with designs from old FS issues on them that they are selling at the conference. They are also making the entire run of FS available on the internet, which is very fabulous. Part of the talking problem is that Thursday evening at the Berks is always more or less where people find each other, confirm dates for later in the weekend, say hello, exchange information about their vital signs, how many parents they have left and whether they got tenure/a job/married/pregnant/a book contract.

Claire was still up on the table when I left. I was more than anxious as to how she would get down, because I know I wouldn't be able to get down from a high table with my knees in the shape they are, so I beetled off to the Town Hall Beer garden with my entourage instead and left the worrying to others.

After dinner, there was a plenary on "The Changing (?) Status of Women in the Historical Profession." Can we say "glass ceiling?" I won't recount the details, but suffice to say that the Radical ran into the author of the AHA's Lunbeck report at registration earlier in the day, and she didn't plan to report good developments in the three years since her findings were published. And I am not so sure that the issue is entirely a question of women being hired, but rather what the conditions of labor are after you are hired. Practically every woman I talked to over the age of 45 -- including the author of the Lunbeck Report -- was either serving as a department chair, or getting ready to serve as a chair, or doing some other administrative job.

But there is some good news, news that I have known about for a while. A group of scholars associated with the Berkshire Conference have organized in the past several months to collect a rather large sum of money to endow an article prize named for Mary Maples Dunn, godmother to the Radical (true), colonial historian and authority on William Penn, former professor of History at Bryn Mawr College, former President of Smith, former Director of the Schlesinger Library, former acting Dean of the Radcliffe Institute, and -- with her husband Richard Dunn -- former co-executive officer of the American Philosophical Society. The endowment was announced at the end of the panel and -- astonishingly, since it was all over the internet and many people had given money, including my mother, who was Mary's grad school roommate at Bryn Mawr, hence the godmother thing) -- the secret had been successfully kept from Mary! This is because, as she explained to me, she does not spend her time reading everything available on her computer screen as I do. The fundraisers were all over the various early American listserves and networks so the jig would have been up if Mary were a blogger. At the dessert reception afterwards (co-sponsored by the Berks, the Coordinating Council of Women Historians, the National Collaborative for Women's History Sites, and the Western Association of Women's Historians) she was still a little bowled over and very happy.

Finally -- before bed -- because an old graduate school buddy is running that committee, I also know who won the Berks annual article prize. But that would be telling, wouldn't it? Come to the opening ceremony and keynote tomorrow at Ted Mann Concert Hall to find out.

Crossposted at Cliopatria.

Berkshire Conference: The Radical Registers

After a rough day in the archives of the University of Minnesota Women's Studies program (eight boxes in five hours -- do I rock or what?) where I ran into Berks secretary Laura Lovett, I floated over to Registration in Willey Hall Atrium, where things are working like clockwork. There I ran into Historiann and one of her program co-chairs, Susan Amussen, who tells me that she has just been appointed a full professor in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts at UC-Merced.

This is, of course, the Radical's life goal: to get a job in a Warm Place before she retires.

In the Berks registration packet, there is sad news for feminists everywhere: the oldest independent feminist bookstore in North America, the Twin Cities' Amazon Bookstore Cooperative is having a going out of business sale: read about it here. Of the many virtually unwritten histories of feminism and GLBT life is the story of bookstores as cultural and political sites, for feminists and for GLBTQ communities. Any takers out there?

A Long Day's Journey Into Minneapolis: A Pre-Berkshire Conference Review

Why am I always going to Minneapolis? We are talking five times in the last twelve months, all for different reasons. And why is my travel karma so bad that I am once again hanging out in an airport, delayed for three hours, and wrecking my afternoon plans for a bonus trip to the archives? Is it because of Minneapolis, or is it because the United States is, in general, so screwed up that we have become the Soviet Union of the twenty-first century? Or is it just Northwest Airlines? If it is NWA, then at least they had the grace to apologize: I am in possession of twenty dollars worth of free food coupons, a coupon for an in-flight drink of my choice, a coupon for $25.00 off my next trip on Northwest (fat chance -- oops! I'm going to Minneapolis again in July!); and a coupon for $1,000 free airmiles.

So good on you, Northwest. When was the last time any of us got a coupon from George W. Bush, much less an apology for the illegal war in Iraq and an economy that is in a Humpty-Dumpty type situation? I didn't even get the stinking $600 tax rebate because, as a college professor, I'm too rich! Well, yay. I'm working on too thin this morning. With my first NWA coupon I purchased a fruit cup instead of the more tempting, and perhaps near-lethal in its fat and sugar content, Cinnabon.

In any case, I am on my way to the Fourteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, where there is much fun to be had (here's the right link, Historiann: the WiFi connection is so feeble here in the airport that I can barely save, much less surf the net, but I figure I owe it to you because you guys put together such a great program.) Part of the fun will be be my roundtable: look for Tenured Radical to be appearing with Leslie Harris, Barbara Balliet, Jocelyn Olcott and Donna Gabaccia. It's Saturday at 4:00, and we will be discussing the current state of feminist theory and the practice of history. If you don't want to come see me, come see them. But Tenured Radical readers are commanded to introduce themselves at any and all opportunities, particularly if they are pseudonymous bloggers who wish to reveal themselves in the strictest confidence.

Never been to the Berks before? Here are answers to a few commonly asked questions:

Is the Berkshire Conference run by a small group of people who constitute "The Little Berks," and who hold meetings every year in cute little inns?

Yes.

Is this group exclusive?

No. Consider yourself invited to the fall meeting if you are a member. Become a member if you are not. One or both of these acts will get you appointed to either the book prize or the article prize committee if you aren't paying attention. I swear. After that, your rise in the organization will be swift.

What happens if I come to the spring meeting of the Little Berks and find a trillium?

Traditionally, the rest of us buy you a bourbon.

Did Professor Kathi Kern really get a Ph.D. from NYU?

No, she did not; because of family circumstances, she was forced to attend the University of Pennsylvania. However, at a moment in time when the New York University mafia was rising in the organization, it adopted her as a provisional NYU alum, intellectual companion and fashion advisor. She is in part responsible for who we are today, and so she became a made woman after the appropriate rituals were completed.

What are these rituals?

If I told you, I would have to kill you.

Did a certain Tenured Radical once jump into the swimming pool fully-clothed after a particularly boisterous Saurday night Berkshire Conference dinner?

No, I removed my cowboy boots first. However, seconds before hitting the water, I realized that I had failed to remove my glasses, which I was unable to find at the bottom of the pool because -- I can't see without my glasses! Fortunately, a colleague from Rutgers was able to point to them with the pool net while laughing uncontrollably, and I was able to retrieve them after several dives.


Is there a tri-annual get-together for Estelle Freedman's graduate students at the Berkshire Conference?

Yes, usually at the Saturday night dinner, although since I am not one of them, I can't say for sure where it is for 2008. If I can get hold of one of the group pictures this year, I will publish it (with their permission, of course.) It is perhaps one of the most concrete evidence of the success of women in history, and the history of women, that there is. So send me one at tenured*dot*radical*at* gmail*dot*com, and it will go up next week.

Is this the only conference with a dance?

Yes, we think so. Can you imagine all those guys at the Society for the History of American Foreign Relations dancing with each other? I thought not, although it would certainly change the public perception of the historical profession if they did.

Now I'm off to get a sandwich with one of my other coupons......see you there! Eventually.

Why Is It So Hard to Write in This Neighborhood?

Well, the proximity to my television set -- where an entire season of The Tudors, recorded when I had no time to watch it, doesn't help. But that's not something we can send to our friends at the Neighborhood Block Watch, is it?

And it isn't the heat, because we put in the air conditioners yesterday.

No -- the reason it is so hard to write in this neighborhood is our latest petty crime: siphoning gas. Not so petty, if you think about it, with gas in Shoreline topping $4.20 a gallon in some places. And sometimes, when those who need the gas more than we do pop the tank cover, the car alarm goes off. More considerate thieves are simply drilling a hole in the gas tank, thus bypassing the alarm system, but risking self immolation. I'm also pretty sure that the car exploding in the driveway won't do the house much good.

The only thing that will ensure safety and the quiet atmosphere necessary to write, I think, is to simply leave a can of gas at the end of the sidewalk for whomever needs it.

Historians! Come On Down

When I saw the headline for this story in today's New York Times ("Now Professors Get Their Star Rankings Too"), I immediately assumed it was another article about the Radical's least favorite marketing tool disguised as a consumer advocate for students. But no: it was about the Social Science Research Network, a site that can be joined for free and where research -- refereed and self-published -- is distributed. According to author Noam Cohen, SSRN has been around since 1994, and the downloadable documents "include pensees, abstracts, informal arguments, rough drafts and working papers, up to the finished products you might find in academic journals." There is also a page that lists the site's top authors, although the owners say that producing stars is not one of their main objectives. Yet rankings there are, and we bloggers do particularly well, shamelessly self-promoting individuals as we tend to be, since we helpfully provide links to our work whenever possible.

But where are the historians at SSRN?

Although one might legitimately dispute whether history is a social science (I prefer to think of it as an interdisciplinary field rather than a discipline myself), history is not represented on the site's index as a searchable network, although historians may be hiding in some of the other categories. English and American literature, Classics and Philosophy are represented, however, and they are not social sciences at all.

So what's the deal history colleagues? It's rare that we find ourselves to be outpaced by Philosophy and Classics in the creation of audiences -- and by our friends in English Departments too! Despite the claims of conservative pundits that literary scholars are rotting the academy from inside out while the rest of us stand helplessly by and watch, they have a harder time getting published, finding full-time employment, and being taken as seriously as they should be as public intellectuals than virtually any other category of scholar (except perhaps philosophers and classicists -- new translation of the Iliad, anyone?)

Other than the fact that these three fields are under siege and have nothing to lose (as well as everything to gain) by trying to reach a mass audience, my favorite theory as to why we historians have fallen behind in seeking out a broader readership is that historians have a particularly vexed relationship to the popular. On the one hand, the masses as well as the classes often pursue history as a leisure activity and a hobby, which makes it possible for a few historians to distribute their work far more broadly than other scholars can. David McCullough, Jill Lepore, and Jonathan Spence, for example, reach a national market with their scholarship, in part because educated readers love history and in part because they are great writers with an eye for a story that needs to be told. On the other hand, how many times, dear history colleagues, have you seen a group of otherwise sensible people turn up their noses at the information that a forthcoming scholarly work will appear under the imprint of a quality commercial publisher that most authors -- nay, those with the upturned noses -- would kill to have a contract, much less a check and marketing plan, from? Vile commerce is perceived by us as inherently suspect, and we ensure scholarly virtue through a refereeing process that controls distribution of work, delays projects for years and ensures that the manuscript will only speak to a narrow audience. An insistence that the only good work has been heavily vetted through our current refereeing practices may be a mistake, much as soliciting the criticisms of others does contribute to producing good work (although it doesn't always, I'm afraid, as cases where flawed research has slipped through to publication or to a prize demonstrates.) In its current form, it may be a fetish that is doing us more harm than good, and may be something that our professional associations need to review to take advantage of an atmosphere of intellectual vigor offered by electronic and other forms of mass publication.


Crossposted at Cliopatria

What To Do When Surrounded By the Patriarchy? Or, Rethinking Conference Hell

A reader who I will descriptively dub "Feminist Guy" (as sie has not given permission to use hir name) writes:

Dear TR:

Thanks for the post on AHA tips and tricks--- the AHA has been one of the major Old Boys' Clubs, but feminists (female and otherwise) have found their own ways to network there, and this is a great development. But there are still plenty of smaller subfield conferences where this isn't the case -- with attendance being dramatically tilted towards Old White Straight Guys. (In fact, I'm attending one as we speak--- let's call it Little Patriarchy Conference.) If you've never been to a particular conference before, you might not even realize this imbalance until you're already checked
into the hotel.

What's a junior, feminist-trained scholar to do when blindsided by a conference like this? How can/should women who find themselves at LPC react, and how do they/we build connections or scholarly community in an alienating environment? How can/should feminist guys work to undermine or counteract the patriarchal social dynamics of LPC? When at LPC, surrounded by senior scholars who don't use gender, race, and class as basic analytical methods, how do you know when to yank their testicles and when to save your breath? Most importantly, how does one find the pre/post-conference-day feminist network-and-critique sessions that must be going on somewhere?

Sadly, I'm sure that LPC 2008 won't be the last example of this sort of event. Thanks for any suggestions you can provide about how to handle the next one.

Dear Feminist Guy,

Well -- my first response is utterly churlish, which I acknowledge because you are a delightful person and limited contact suggests we will be friends despite my age and your youth: if you were where I think you were when you sent this question, what conference did you think you were signing on to when you decided to attend a meeting sponsored by a history association formed by a pair of notorious lapsed Marxist neo-cons, one of whom became explicitly anti-feminist in her old age? A couple who formed said association because they thought the American Historical Association had pandered to liberals long enough? I'm not saying this prominent power couple weren't smart and important, but progressive they had ceased to be, and the association has become, for the time being at least, a refuge for others in despair that political history will every recover from the discovery of race, gender and sexuality as categories of analysis.

Now this is not to say that one should only go to the places where like-minded people can be found; quite the opposite in fact. I would argue, for example, that a variety of politicized conflicts I have gotten into in the blogosphere have put me in dialogue (however difficult dialogue sometimes is to achieve with people who are trying to toss you under the nearest bus) with conservative academics and conservative non-academics, dialogue that has opened new paths for thought as I continue work on a project about late twentieth century politics. Dialogue with the patriarchy forces you to explain yourself. It can be fun, productive and sometimes produce moments of recognition with a person unlike yourself that can be thought provoking. This doesn't address the complexity of what you are describing, or the complexity of the intellectual interventions you are committed to, but consider it a bracketed plea for the benefits of intellectual difference, even when the people you are dealing with seem to be noxiously unreconstructed. I wouldn't recommend an unrelieved diet of it by any means, but two or three days a year is something to really take advantage of in my book. And really -- consider it training for engaging with your conservative students, many of whom will not be persuaded by your intellectual commitments but might be persuaded to engage constructuvely with you.

I would also say that one can often be surprised in a good way as organizations change over time and as your self-confidence grows: several years ago I gave a paper at the Southern Historical Association annual meeting, and found it to be a very different environment than the one I had experienced a decade earlier. There were more African-American scholars than at any other history conference I had been to; there were three queer panels; there was a fair amount of interdisciplinary work; and there was a lot of mingling between constituencies. At one queer panel I realized beatedly that I had sat down next to Eminent Elderly White Patriarchal Political History Man (with whom I had interviewed a great many years before when on the job market.) After reintroducing myself, I said, "EWPPHM, what are you doing here?" and he said brightly, "Well, I don't know anything about this field and I thought I should attend the panel."

In retrospect, I would say two things: the Southern has always had a progressive element that was somewhat obscure to me at an earlier stage of my career, so I think part of feeling less out of place was that I was older, more established and felt more secure in my capacity to recognize allies and engage differences on an equal basis. But I also think the Southern changed: as an organization, it made a huge effort to recruit more diverse scholars over time, and that was a process that was at least begun by people who were very much in the minority when they began that project. And they found each other by challenging themselves to go to the conference in the first place.

Finally, although I empathize with your sense of alienation, I think it is important to be where you are in any academic environment, even one that collides with things you believe very deeply as a feminist. It isn't always your responsibility to make interventions, and it isn't always necessary. If it is an environment that you are wedded to -- a department, for example -- you will need to decide what you are willing to invest in change, when that enhances your work, and when (as it unfortunately can) such efforts sap your energy and hinder your work. But I think listening to others rather than forcing them to listen to you is a good start for finding allies at a conference; I also think that making an intervention in a way that represents what you are opposing accurately and non-judgementally both notifies others that you are listening (and should be listened to) and allows potential allies who are impressed by you to want to be associated with you. But let me underline the following: allies can be found among the patriarchy too, even if those alliances are limited by inevitable disagreements. I have found over the past year that some people with whom I have had bitter political disagreements are extraordinarily likeable, often generous, people; and I have found over the course of a career that many scholars who don't privilege the intellectual categories I think are crucial can be good readers and interesting colleagues.

For the post to which this reader is referring, "The AHA for Dummies," click here.

The Return of the Radical: A Few Announcements

Well, vacation's over. That's the bad news. The good news is: vacation is about to begin! Yes, that time of year for which we all gave up the big bucks has arrived, the summer vacation. Of course, if you have an administrative job or two, as I do, there are always things to take care of over the summer: new faculty to get settled, post-docs to welcome, reports to write, searches to plan for, staff to oversee, budgets to finagle -- er, I mean close. But this time of year calls to mind why many of us chose this profession in the first place: intensive reading, whole days to spend writing, imagining the classes we will teach in the fall with perfect students in them who have not yet misunderstood us or done anything weird that takes days to unravel. And did I mention the reading?

I have a few things to do before leaving for the Fourteenth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, which is meeting in Minneapolis June 12-15, so I plan to get back into the swing of blogging slowly: when I was in France, I wrote in a journal like I used to do before I blogged, and shifting back is peculiarly difficult. But I'd like to take the time to establish a few things that my readers can expect from Tenured Radical in the immediate future.

I will be blogging the Berks, and everything will be crossposted at Cliopatria. However, normal blog rules apply: I won't write about anything that isn't already public, and I will assume everything said to me is in confidence unless I am told otherwise. In return, please do not pester me with your desire to be reassured that I am not revealing your secrets. Other than the blogger ethic, you have two assurances that I will not write anything that is overly snide, critical or revealing while blogging the conference. One is my relationship with Ralph Luker, the coordinator and conscience of Cliopatria: every blogger needs an imaginary editor in hir head, and Ralph is mine. The other assurance is that, having finished watching the first season of Gossip Girl on the plane (God I love the video iPod!) I am reminded of that maxim taught so well by example in the Zenith History Department: secrets are more valuable and precious when kept. This allows for the possibility of deploying them at strategic moments - or better yet, creating a lasting, if cynical, bond with another person by continuing to keep them.

Just kidding. You know you love me. xoxo.

I am reading for the American Historical Association's Beveridge and Dunning Prizes this summer. This is public information, but I thought I should remind my readers of this anyway, because my normal reticence about commenting on what I am reading will increase. Despite the fact that I will be reading dozens of books published in 2007, the widget to the left, "Tenured Radical is Reading," will only feature books published before or after this seminal year. I am too jet lagged still to know why I think this is ethical, but I do.

This summer I will begin to accept, and answer, questions from the reading public. This is not normally something I do, despite my penchant for giving unasked for advice, in part because Dean Dad does it so well -- why compete with a clear leader in the field? But mostly I don't answer people's questions because of a peculiar and perverse personality trait I have: if someone asks me to do something specific it becomes a disincentive to do it, and I often don't. Hence that people have sent me good questions in the past and they have languished in my In Box. Conversely, when someone writes an utterly ridiculous and nasty anonymous comment I growl silently, "Game on, Anonymous 3:11!" and plunge into a pointless quarrel with someone I don't know. Other than the lack of vacations, this was yet another good reason why I couldn't become a lawyer: they would be hauling my client off to jail, and I would still be outside arguing with the security guard about my Swiss Army knife and the Second Amendment.

However intelligent people continue to ask me good questions. I have one sitting in my gmail account now that is perfect for next week's conference. Particularly in a summer where much of my creativity has to go into that boring old publish on paper thing, now is the time to begin taking advantage of other people's creativity if you ask me. So if you have a question for the blog, send it by email, and I'll do what I can.

Oh yeah -- and as for the commenter who noted acidly that I was going to Paris rather than sub-Saharan Africa on vacation: why would anyone -- radical or not -- vacation in a war zone rife with starvation, poverty, disease, and violent, free-booting militias who cut off your hands and feet? And what is the Harry Potter thing about? If only I were a wizard -- but alas, I am not. That's the other side of the family -- I'm one of the boring Potters.

Dispatch from Paris: Lunch With Victor Hugo

Okay, so I didn't really have lunch with Victor Hugo. But I did become exhausted in what proved to be a difficult search for the Victor Hugo Museum, and I had to pause at a boulangerie for a sandwich and a tarte pomme. More about that later. However, I am happy to report that so far la famille Radicale is well, and having a bang-up time. My French is holding up, and contrary to what everyone used to say when I was growing up about how French people were endlessly horrid to foreigners about their French, this is emphatically not my experience. Perhaps it is the intervening half century from Eisenhower leaving De Gaulle in the lurch in a certain Vietnamese valley, or perhaps everyone who told me this spoke even worse French than I, but it is downright fun to function en français, and I seem to be getting better at it day by day.

And, except for the fact that the q and the a are reversed on the French keyboard, and a few other notable features that make me realize that I am more of a touch typist than I knew, I have found a way to report from Paris. This internet cafe is right around the corner from the Pont au Double, where I am supposed to meet N. in 55 minutes. Today we experimented with untogetherness which, I realize at the end of the day, has the advantage of allowing you to share twice as many adventures rather than experiencing the same ones simultaneously. I wouldn't want to do the whole trip like this, but for today it's been fun.

Perhaps my greatest triumph has been finding La Maison Victor Hugo which is in all the guidebooks we have, but without an address. I suspect this is because the guidebook writers followed the helpful brown signs, as I did, and were promptly dropped by them about three blocks away -- as I was -- and they never found it. After four passes, and several people pointing me in the wrong direction, the mystery was solved: it is tucked away in a corner of the Place des Vosges, on the right as you enter from the Rue St.-Antoine side. There is a ragged little tricouleur marking the spot, which is hardly visible unless you are looking for it, which I was, because a gang of helpful gay Frenchmen told me to.

Anyway, if I were to write a guidebook to idiosyncratic French museums (of which there are many -- on Monday, I hope to visit a museum near Père Lachaise Cemetary which is totally dedicated to Edith Piàf, and is only open by appointment) this would be at the top of the list. It has several dozen busts of Hugo at various ages, an entire floor dedicated to oil paintings of his family, and an extremely large collection of newspaper cartoons that comment on his political activity over the years. One floor, where he actually lived, has some of his furniture and attempts to reconstruct his decorating style -- or rather, the decorating style of Mrs. Hugo, which was dark, dark, dark. But the best part, for my money, was the room of photographs of famous actors and actresses in costume for Hugo's plays, including a set of four featuring Sarah Bernhardt. There are also numerous photos of the sets built for Hugo at the Comédie Française, which are just astonishing in their depth and detail.

This evening we are going to try to get into some sacred music at St Chapelle, which may or may not succeed. But what I have discovered today is that with a museum pass, a carnet of Metro tickets in your pocket, and keeping a sharp eye out, you really can't lose here, particularly if you avoid some of the larger sights in the afternoon and head to really obscure memorials and museums, which then put you in the way of stuff that you couldn't plan for. Like the string section plucked out of an orchestra and dropped into the Metro stop at the Place de la Bastille that was playing selections from Debussy. Or the Vietnamese woman in the middle of an otherwise trashy market full of the same stuff from Guatemala you can buy in Shoreline, but who was selling rid and blue silk reversible robes for 20€ (bought one.)

OK: got to fly. Either sacred music or a bottle of wine on the Quai de la Tournelle, whichever seems easiest. Au revoir, mes amis: je reviens vite

I Love Paris in the Springtime

On May 20, 1927, at 07:52 in the morning, Charles Lindbergh -- not knowing that he would play a bit part in a book published by the Tenured Radical in 1997 -- took off from Roosevelt Field in Long Island, New York, flying "The Spirit of St. Louis" on the world's first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. He landed at Le Bourget Field in Paris at 22:22 the next day, as hundreds of Frenchmen cheered wildly and hoped that he would not try to speak French.

Strangely, the Radical herself will by taking off from JFK tomorrow -- although the plane will be piloted by a clever German employed by Lufthansa -- and landing in Paris the following day! And I am sure there are lots of French people who are also praying I don't test run my French on them. But you know what? They're out of luck.

Meaning -- unless I happen to fall into an internet cafe in either paris or Corsica in the next two weeks -- this blog is on hiatus until June 5.

Happy summer vacation!

A Queer Day in History: The Radical Celebrates Her Birthday By Revealing A Variety of Well-Known and Little-Known Facts About May 16

It is no coincidence that we wake up this morning and find that gay men and lesbians in the state of California have, once again, been permitted to marry legally, this time via a split decision of the California Supreme Court. This is an historic event that bitter, angry people at the grassroots in this odd western state hope to reverse by referendum, against mounting evidence that conservative heterosexuals in the United States care more about global warming, health insurance, the price of gasoline, and the failed war in Iraq than they care about Adam and Steve registering at "Tar-jay." One referendum activist I saw on the news last night was predicting that this movement would doom Obama in California, as conservative voters flooded to the polls to save the family.

Mary, please.

It is, however, a fact that May 16 is a truly magical day in the year for queer folk. For example, half a century ago today, on May 16, 1958, a baby was born in the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. Her parents peered at her skeptically, observing not only her big mouth but the rather pronounced and nimble fingers on both hands that suggested she might have a future as a....typist?

"Let's call her -- Tenured," suggested the mother, recovering from an intense two hours of labor and not thinking clearly, since she had anticipated being childless for a few precious hours longer.

"You've hit it," said the proud father, who was not really listening, but wrote it down on the form for the birth certificate people anyway. He had arrived just in time from upstairs where he was attending to other, less important patients, to whom he was previously committed because of the Hippocratic Oath and whatnot. "But I want to also name her after my favorite Aunt, who oddly, has been living with my other favorite aunt, her widowed sister-in-law and a librarian, for the last thirty years." The parents mulled it over silently, recalling Favorite Maiden Aunt's Wellesley degree, her life as a social worker at the Catholic Worker settlement on the Lower East Side of New York, her friends who plunged into the battle for Republican Spain in the 1930's. "I've got it!" the father said triumphantly. "Tenured....Radical!"

And thus was the Tenured Radical born and named, almost four decades before computer technology would create the cultural niche that would make her famous. Sure, in nursery school, tiny children would say, "What's tenure?" and the Radical would respond gravely, "I have no idea, but I shall commit myself to rectifying injustices done in its name one day." That is, of course, another story for another day.

And this is but a single episode that marks May 16 as a queer holiday. Other events occurring on this queer day in history (hat tip) we might want to note are:

May 16, 1527, when Florence re-established itself as a Republic, having driven out the Medici for the second time, no less, along with their interior decorators, who kept insisting on Renaissance furnishings. The Medici were an extraordinarily queer family, whose periodic defeats only inspired them to greater feats of kitsch and camp. Among those who would begin to set the tone for gays and lesbians everywhere were Lorenzo the Magnificent, an avid art collector; Pope Clement the VII, who wore a dress and commissioned the Sistine Chapel from a girlie-man; and Catherine de Medici, the world's first successful domineering mother. She ruled through her sons Charles IX and Henry III of France, and was responsible for the St. Bartholomew's massacre in 1572, a large scale slaughter of ill-dressed Protestants with whom the French and the Italians had collectively and utterly lost patience.

On May 16, 1770, 14 year-old Marie Antoinette married the future King of France, who was fifteen and several years from being able to consummate the marriage. Needless to say, the Dauphine was mightily distressed. Although the act was finally accomplished, Louis never really took much of an interest in his wife or the French people, preferring the company of scientists instead. Soon Antoinette's attention turned to big hair (pioneering what would later become the "beehive hairdo,") decorating, and her ladies-in-waiting, particularly the princesse de Lamballe and the duchesse de Polignac. Marie Antoinette became, after her head was removed from her shoulders in an effort to stem her overreliance on credit cards, a great heroine for nineteenth century women who loved women but who had not been fully educated by sexologists to call themselves "lesbians."

On May 16, during the 1822 Greek War of Independence, the Turks captured the Greek town of Souli, and having read Homer, demanded that the Greeks become their boyfriends. The Greeks happily complied, as the Turks were so big and strong. Hence the phrase that allows queer people to respond to accusations of unnatural behaviour by saying pointedly, "What about the Greeks?" Anything Greek is a queer holiday for these and other reasons: if you don't understand this, read the collected works of Mary Renault (who was, by the way, also a lesbian.)

On May 16, 1836, Edgar Allen Poe married his thirteen year-old cousin Virginia. This was an act that would later be replicated repeatedly and in excess by a number of people in Arizona, Utah and Texas, causing periodic and exasperating shortages of pastel dresses in the American Southwest.

On May 16, 1919, Liberace was born. Why is he part of this post? "Staaahp it!" you shriek. Also in the arts, on this day in 1929, woman-identified-woman poet Adrienne Rich was born; and on May 16, 1947, lesbian feminist poet, scholar and essayist Cheryl Clarke was born and began to revolutionize African-American literary tradition on May 17.

On May 16, 1985, actress Margaret Hamilton, otherwise known as Miss Elvira Gulch (aka, the Wicked Witch of the West,) died in Salisbury, CT, after having successfully avoided houses falling from the sky for decades. She would make famous various phrases that are now indispensable to queer people in the United States: "Surrender, Dorothy;" "And your little dog too!" and "I'm melting! Melting!" Her cruelty to Dorothy Gayle would secure Judy Garland's status as a gay icon forever, and allow queer people to mutter to each other about Miss Mary Thing across the room who thinks she's hiding something, but is in reality droppping hairpins all over the house, "I hear he's a friend of Dorothy's...."

Obama Nation

Some of the most insightful discussions of race and gender in this year's endless contest for the Democratic nomination are in the May 19 edition of The Nation, which arrived at my house some time last week (why do magazines arrive long before the date on the cover? And how will future historians actually know when we knew the things in them, if the dates are wrong?) It is an excellent read, particularly if you would describe yourself as one of the following:

1. Someone who has already voted for Barack Obama, but without the enthusiasm that is seen on TV;

2. Someone who can't get a grip on all of the racial discourses colliding around this candidacy;

3. Someone who is firmly convinced that Hillary Clinton is the better candidate, but will slap herself around on election day and vote for Obama if s/he has to;

4. Someone who can't get a grip on what all the second wave feminists are up to, and why they are persuaded that the misogynistic atacks on Clinton (not, by the way, by Obama himself) justify voting for her, when in fact, she is not running on any women's issues, has publicly stated that she believes life begins at conception, and seems to think that war is, in fact, the answer.

I'm sure there are more categories, but these are the ones I have occupied. I was initially a category 3, but drifted into category 1 shortly before the primary in Shoreline; and I have always been a category 2 and an increasingly annoyed 4. Part of why I signed the Historians for Obama statement was to banish even the remotest possibility of not supporting the candidate I knew, in the end, I must support. An unexpected outcome of this has been to focus my attention on Obama himself, as opposed to the "process" -- which has become, largely because of the Clinton campaign and its supporters, mean-spirited and destructive.

Patricia Williams' regular column, "Diary of A Mad Law Professor" asks how we will "overcome the sad hypocrisy of our public discourse" about race that has emerged around the Obama candidacy in Let Them Eat Waffles. (Sorry: Nation non-subscribers will only get the first couple paragraphs.) And in "Race to the Bottom," Betsy Reed calls out second wave feminists like Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem for persisting in the decades-old nonsense that sexism somehow trumps racism as a marker of national dysfunction. This, of course, was a falsehood that was sutured to the women's movement by so-called "politicos" in the early 1970's, who believed that women would be the vanguard of social revolution in the United States. This was because they believed in the utopian idea that the category "woman" was so broadly diverse by race, class, region and ethnicity. There were two problems with this, the first being the flaws of vanguardist politics, and the other being despite the women of color who did rise to influence and power in the movement, white women like Steinem, Morgan, and Friedan continued to generalize their own condition in ways that occluded poor and woman of color critiques. As the Combahee River Collective pointed out in 1979, unaddressed racism in the feminist establishment was an ongoing part of black women's struggle. And guess who those people were? Morgan, Steinem......

But the most outstanding piece in the issue is Ta-Nehisi Coates' review of Shelby Steele's new book, A Deeper Black, in which he takes the opportunity to explain in lucid, brilliant prose what it is that the mass public is just not getting about "the blackness of Barack Obama." As he writes:

It is an identity that asserts itself without conscious thought. It has no need of marches and placards. It rejects an opportunistic ignorance of racism but understands that esoteric ramblings about white skin privilege do not move the discussion further....Obama's blackness is like any other secure marker of identity, subtle and irreducible to a list of demands.

Coates also informs us that Obama's favorite character on The Wire was Omar, "the coal black anti-hero who prowls the streets of West Baltimore toting a shotgun and robbing drug dealers." Yes! I am finally won over! Omar is my favorite character too! And by the way -- he is also unapolegetically gay. I wonder why Coates didn't mention that?

Oh never mind. I have learned to love Barack Obama at last.

What Bush(el) Have They Been Hiding This Woman Under?

I don't know -- maybe it is just the contrast to George, but I think Laura Bush's capacity to do an intelligent, straight to the point press conference on a moral and humanitarian crisis is impressive. Not only did she get all the issues on the table about the dictatorship in Myanmar and its inability -- unwillingness? -- to care for the people of the country formerly known as Burma, either before or after the cyclone that devastated the major rice growing region of an already lean country this week, but she didn't even threaten to obliterate them. Oops -- that wasn't George -- that was another politician who promises that her regime will alter the current course of American foreign policy.

Have the Republicans considered....naw. Wouldn't work.

Kentucky Derby Coda: Farewell to Eight Belles

Those who know the Radical well also know that she is a handicapper, and loves great horses. Derby Day -- and the day before, the Kentucky Oaks and its undercard, are practically national holidays in the Radical household. Although we did not plan it this way, we also live right around the corner from the off track betting parlor, so there is a whole racing community at my fingertips. Yesterday I cleared a large sum at the Oaks, and went into today's races very optimistic: indeed, financially, it has been a successful weekend, with enough winners to cover and surpass inevitable bad picks and funky trifectas.

But as many of you probably already know, today's Kentucky Derby ended on an extraordinarily sad note. Eight Belles, the only filly in the race and the runner-up, had to be euthanized after breaking her forelegs; this may have happened as she was trying to slow down after she crossed the wire, or her ankles may have started to crack as she was straining to catch Big Brown. In other words, as many horses do, she hurt herself fatally trying to win the race. For those of us who love thoroughbred racing, it is a fact of the sport (much as young men becoming paralyzed, crippled, or congenitally concussed, is a deeply regrettable but not uncommon feature of football), but it is heartbreaking all the same. She was a love of a horse, and our sympathies here at Tenured Radical go out to owner Rick Porter, trainer Larry Jones and all the filly's people at Fox Hill Farm. Second guessers will say she should have run yesterday in the Oaks, the fillies race, but if it was going to happen, it was going to happen: thoroughbreds are delicate and over bred creatures, and when they step wrong it is catastrophic. Replacing all dirt tracks with synthetic surfaces could be a big step to making this a sport that is safer for the animals and the jockeys. In Europe, where all races are run on turf, they have many fewer injuries and fatalities.

Eight Belles is seen in this picture in the Honeybee, under Ramon Dominguez. She was ridden today by Gabriel Saez, who won the Oaks yesterday on Eight Belles' stable mate Proud Spell. Here's the story about today's tragedy in the Guardian. I think that we can only be happy that the accident was decisive, and that she wasn't subjected to medical intervention for months like poor Barbaro.

And After Giving You a Bad Grade, I'll Sue Your Sorry Ass

Well, this answers the question of why those claiming to be dissatisfied customers of mine ("Yeah, I was in that class and I think you suck too") need to vent anonymously about this post, rather than discussing our pedagogical differences in office hours. Apparently, at Dartmouth, classroom conflict has reached such a pitch that a teacher is suing her students. I had not realized that there are dimensions of my vast power to dominate others that I have not yet activated.

OK, seriously: I'm sure there is more to this than meets the eye, and both teacher and students have clearly run off the rails in what appears to be a Lord of the Flies situation. But I think the department chair and this woman's senior colleagues may have some explaining to do as to why there hasn't been a mentoring intervention at an earlier date. Things like this don't just happen suddenly, in one class, one semester. Do they? Enquiring minds want to know.

Thanks to my fellow Zenith bloggers for this tip. You might also want to go to University Diaries for several typically incisive posts offering commentary on and extra links for this sad little tale of a classroom run amok: the full story actually reads like one of those movies with Bruce Willis where a city bus full of children and old people has been taken over by terrorists and is careening through the streets of a city completely out of control while the mayor and the chief of police negotiate with an insane dictator. Except with email.

You know, here's a rule of thumb for you: when you can't decide how to respond to a typical academic problem, whether it be with a student, a colleague, or the university administration, ask yourself: what would Margaret Soltan do?

Charles Tilly, May 20, 1929 – April 29, 2008

I just learned today that historian and sociologist Charles Tilly died on April 29, 2008, of lymphoma. He was 78 years old and will be greatly missed.

Chuck was one of the great intellects of our time: as importantly, he was endlessly excited about ideas, a scholar who was an indefatigable teacher, a man who not only taught you how to do history, but encouraged you to find your own new ways to do it. While I wouldn't call him a radical (because it is too reductive -- he was so much more than that), he was the exact opposite of a conservative, an interdisciplinary thinker who believed that knowledge production could evolve as fast as the human mind could accomodate new paradigms and new ideas. He encouraged his students to find new things to think about, but more importantly, to find new ways to think. As a teacher he was generous to a fault, and he had a quiet but firm disdain for academic pettiness and cruelty, that rarely manifested itself in open conflict with a scholar behaving badly, but rather in redressing the wrong done by showering kindness, and whatever resources he had available, on those who had been subjected to the most common forms of departmental and institutional abuse.

I first heard of Chuck when I was a Yale undergraduate: I was an English major who took history courses for fun. Taking history classes was simultaneously a great leisure activity and an intellectual activity, since at that moment Yale probably had a fistful of some of the best lecturers ever gathered in one place at the same time. One of the hippest of them was John Merriman, whose class on the French revolution people used to revisit year after year just to hear the lecture on Robespierre. John was also famous for throwing keg parties for his students at the end of the semester, and at one of them we had a long talk about his great teacher at Michigan, Charles Tilly. John said if I ever had the chance, I should study with him.

Some years later I was in graduate school at NYU and one of those things happened that can more or less derail your Ph.D.: my advisor and mentor, Albert U. Romasco, died suddenly, about a week before my general exams, and there was no one who was either intellectually appropriate or interested enough in me to take over my dissertation. They had to hire someone else, and it was going to take time. But then -- as if there really is some pattern to life if you can only discern it -- Chuck and Louise Tilly came to the New School, right up the street, and one of their former colleagues from Michigan who was on my committee suggested I go up and talk to Chuck about my research because we had some interests in common.

So I did. And the only thing that was misleading about that advice, in retrospect, was that since Chuck was interested in everything, with whom would he not have interests in common? Furthermore, I didn't know that at that moment in time you got Chuck and Louise as a package, and that once you fell into their orbit you never really left. You became part of this network of astonishing people with capacious intellects who came in and out of town, moving through offices that were a hive of activity, research and ideas. Looking at something I had written one day, Chuck said, "Theda Skocpol is coming through next week -- let's have her take a look at it and pick her brain." Chuck ran a proseminar on the state which was my principle intellectual context during my final years in graduate school: one fall, in the first meeting, I walked in and sitting around the table were E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, Bridget Hill, and Eric Hobsbawm. The Hills and Thompson remained for a month; Hobsbawm, who was particularly helpful in talking to me about my research on social bandits in the Great Depression, stayed for the semester, and then came and went for the next several years.

I mean really -- imagine being a graduate student writing about social bandits in the twentieth century United States, and someone drops Eric Hobswbawm in your lap. It's like Christmas for historians.

This post is only a snapshot of what Chuck did with his life: there is a universe of scholars out there who would tell you similar and different stories. If I could characterize his pedagogy, I would say that he believed in bringing smart people together and creating an atmosphere where ideas could flourish. He taught me to think big, and he taught me to take risks. He taught me the difference between scholars who were capable of rigorous, useful criticism and people who criticized others just to make themselves look smarter or more important. And he taught me to believe in my own intellect, that ideas that didn't make sense to others would, in time, when the ideas had developed sufficiently that my readers could finally grasp them. Once we were sorting out a problem in a dissertation chapter, and he persuaded me that something I wanted to write about was just a diversion from the argument the chapter needed to make. Reluctantly, I agreed: I pulled those pages out, crumpled them up and flipped them into the trash can. Chuck got up and walked across the room, pulled them out of the trash and handed them back to me. "Never throw an idea away," he said "Whatever took you there once, will take you there again." And he was right, of course: the pages I had discarded became an article on the labor gun molls performed in criminal gangs in the 1930's.

So I now tell my students the same thing.

When you ask Chuck's students -- and there are so many of us -- you will hear stories about teaching, about research (he once dumped a bunch of documents on my desk and said, "Would you take a look at this? I can't figure out what to do with them, but I think you can"), about teaching people to have faith in their own instincts, about generosity. You will hear stories about his capacity to listen, and about his boundless respect for others. Most of all he encouraged his students to think big: to make comparisons, to examine patterns that extend over centuries, to imagine grand theories and write about them, to challenge orthodoxies, and to make history matter. He brought people together, was generous with his friendship, his time and his ideas. And I have a strong feeling that, were he peering over my shoulder now, he would say, "Alright, that's enough about me. It's your work that is important today. Isn't there a drawerful of research you need to get to now? So wind up this blog post and get back to your book."

For Lee Bollinger on Charles Tilly, click here; for the New York Times obituary click here; and for Chuck's predictions about how history would unfold, written in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, click here. This essay is crossposted at Cliopatra.