Historiann

Yes, I know:  what a predictable headline.  But, it was irresistable!  Today’s blog post is a letter to all of the single college ladies, especially those of the heterosexualist persuasion.  Thanks to reader Indyanna and Tenured Radical for alerting me to this, and asking me to weigh in!

Dear undergraduate women,

You may have heard all of the buzz about the “new math” on college campuses where women undergraduates outnumber the men.  I’m here to tell you that this is a manufactured “problem.”  I went to a women’s college, where undergraduate men were outnumbered by 100%.  Even if you include the co-ed college with which we had a cooperative relationship, the numbers were approximately 70 to 75 percent women to 30 or 25 percent men.  And yet, this “imbalance” rarely came up as a topic of conversation.  There were women who always had boyfriends.  There were a lot of women who had girlfriends.  (Some had both boyfriends and girlfriends.)  And yet, most people–male and female alike, bi and gay as well as straight–were unattached:  interested in romance, but more interested in the other things that we did in college.  Some of those things were intellectual–but only some were.  Other things were artistic and creative, others were journalistic or political, and of course, a lot were just plain silly.  (For example:  menthol cigarettes, diet Dr. Pepper mixed with rum, streaking on the green or skinny dipping in the tiny fountain in the cloisters, and reading Walt Whitman and Radclyffe Hall, just to name a few examples.) Continue Reading »

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Maybe procrastination has saved me again?  I was going to buy a brand-new, decked-out Prius this winter until the news broke that the 2010 Priuses are going all HAL on people.  Creepy.  Maybe it’s not such a good idea to make machines that think they’re smarter than us?  Every time I get a new computer, I have to spend hours deselecting everything that Microsoft has automatically preselected for me without my consent, from the damned “grammar check” to the display of my folders, etc.  (I miss my Macs!)

Maybe I’ll go ahead and give my old car that oil change that’s 3 months and 1,500 miles overdue, and wash it for the first time in 10 months, since it looks like I’ll be driving it for a little while longer.  (I’ve been known to go for oil changes just once a year, or every 8 or 9,000 miles!)  Its tires are worse than bald, it looks like someone must be living in it, and it smells like a fart, but aside from the driver’s side front and rear windows not going up and down as they should, the thing has really given me zero mechanical trouble in the eight years I’ve owned it.  (And it was 4 years old when I bought it–so it owes me nothing, not even windows that go up and down when I press the button, especially considering my chronic neglect and/or abuse.) Continue Reading »

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(Via The Daily Beast.)  “I want my daughter to live in a world where everyone’s decisions are respected.”  Good on you, Sean James and Al Joyner. 

It’s like I always say to my women’s history students:  Continue Reading »

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A friend of mine submitted an article to the Journal of the History of Sexuality early in the fall semester.  Within six weeks, he received two readers’ reports and a notification from editor Mathew Kuefler of a provisional acceptance if the revisions requested by the readers were made.  Over winter break, my friend revised accordingly, and found out by the middle of January that his article was accepted.  Total time from initial submission to final acceptance:  four months to the day.

Now, my friend’s article was pretty polished–it was originally sent out to another journal, which took more than a year to reject it on the basis of one reader’s report.  (Not cool.)  Still–kudos to Prof. Kuefler for his speed and efficiency, and kudos too to the readers who must have read and responded to the article in an extremely timely fashion.  Continue Reading »

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Here’s a good article from her series Winning Tenure without Losing Your Soul at Inside Higher Ed by Kerry Ann Rockquemore, “Balance is a Myth.”  Some of the commenters are angry or disappointed to hear this, but I think she’s right:

Most tenure-track faculty members I work with seem to believe that they can achieve harmonious balance in their lives during the tenure-track years. To me, this is a problematic expectation because the structure of tenure-track life is one in which there’s far more work to be done than time in any given day. Let’s be clear — if you have a stay-at-home partner who does the vast majority of household labor and child-care, you may be able to achieve balance in your life during your probationary period. But most of you are juggling multiple roles and care-giving responsibilities above and beyond new course preparations, heavy teaching loads, multiple service assignments, and ever-increasing research expectations. And you’re often doing so with little social, financial, technical, and/or professional support in your departments, as well as varying in levels of assistance at home. In this context, the expectation of a balanced life seems just plain unrealistic. I’m not saying this is the way things should be, but unfortunately this is often the way things are. And when we operate in the world according to how things should be, we can end up feeling like one of my mentees, who recently confided: “trying to achieve balance is just one more thing I feel like I’ve failed.”

Right on.  “Balance” as a goal in life always seemed too fuzzy and Oprah-esque to me anyway.  Continue Reading »

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Sock it to me!

You’re a busy professional looking to diversify your skill set and to secure another income stream.  (Or, that’s probably how you’d describe yourself in jargony self-important business resume language.)  So, “[i]n this time of job insecurity, the question may have occurred to you: Should you consider part-time teaching as a way to improve your finances and expand your career opportunities?“  After all, “[t]he need for part-time professors, known as adjuncts, is high right now. Education is one of the few areas of the economy that has been expanding, partly because so many of the unemployed are returning to school.”

Well, why not?  You’ve got something to offer.  “[b]ecoming a teacher can be rigorous and time-consuming,” but really–anyone can do it, especially if you’re aiming for post-secondary ed, where we’ll let anyone teach!   ”[A]t the college level, part-time teaching is a realistic option for some professionals. Postsecondary schools are often willing to be flexible about academic credentials in return for real-world expertise.”  But, “[y]ou may not want to pursue teaching part time, however, if your motivation is mainly financial. The pay for adjunct professors is usually low, and the work can be challenging. Still, the nonmonetary rewards that come with teaching can be substantial.” 

Since the job is so fun and rewarding, and anyone can do it, you won’t mind the low pay now, will you?  Think about the children!  Plus, anyone can do it.  Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to mix up a Harvey Wallbanger and warm up the TV set–Laugh-in is on tonight.  Continue Reading »

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Hi, kids–I’m deep into a juicy new book in my field all day today and finishing prep for my seminar tomorrow, but if you’re looking for diversions, I’ve got a few for you:

• What if Holden Caufield grew up and turned into Howard Zinn?  Hilobrow gives us the hillarious results.  This is the smartest and funniest thing I’ve read all week on the deaths of both historian Zinn and creepy recluse J.D.Salinger on Wednesday.  Via Old is the New New.
• Dopey Educrat Arne Duncan says about New Orleans:  ”we had to destroy the village to save the village.”  Now, all we need are 9,999 more hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes to take out the rest of school districts across the U.S.!  Never mind the loss of life–what about the children?  Hey, “progressives”:  how many of you would be jumping up and down and screaming if Margaret Spellings said “I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. That education system was a disaster, and it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that ‘we have to do better,’”  hmmm?  (How long do you think it will be before we start reading the “after a promising fresh start, New Orleans schools have underperformed since being rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina” stories?  Three years?  Five?)
• Here’s an idea:  how’sabout we find a U.S. Secretary of Education who has spent at least 10 years teaching in an elementary or high school classroom?  Continue Reading »

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A stranger's just a friend you haven't met!

Because of Homostorian Americanist’s recent correspondence with a silly high-schooler who was fishing for someone to do her homework, reader Nervous Ned writes in to ask, “ What is the appropriate way to contact another professional historian and ask hir to participate in a panel as a chair or commenter?”  This is a great question–it’s something that lots of us are doing these days, because of all of the calls for papers that emphasize transnational this and comparative that.  The odds are that crafting a panel these days will require reaching far beyond one’s sub-field.  Ned explains his problem:

I have been working with a couple of other people to assemble a comparative, modern history panel for the next American Historical Association annual meeting. Myself and another panelist are junior faculty at distinctly un-prestigious state schools. The third panelist is a grad student.  We did not personally know any prominent scholars with a reputation for working on [the nominal topic of the panel], so we decided to e-mail scholars whose work we admired and thought would be able to critique our papers. The Grad Student offered to email a couple people because she had met them tangentially at a conference. These did not pan out, so I emailed a scholar I admired who had written about [this field] in [my area of geographical expertise].  But after reading your post on student XXXX and hir insistent e-mail pestering I realized that we may have acted inappropriately, by emailing senior faculty and associate professors out of the blue.  

Is there a good way to go about talking to scholars you are not acquainted with and asking them to help you out with your panel or work, especially for someone like a grad student or junior faculty member who is not really well connected? More importantly, I have not heard from the person I emailed.  I probably should have worked the grapevine and gotten some sort of introduction, but its a little late now. Should I apologize? 

Signed, 

Nervous Ned 

Dear Ned, 

Apologize???  For doing your job and also helping to mentor a graduate student?  Continue Reading »

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J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye and a few short stories and novellas, died on Wednesday.  The eulogizing of the author, who was more famous for his Bartleby-like retreat into seclusion and literary non-production in New Hampshire, illustrates a problem that we’ve discussed here before about the gendering of literary fiction. 

Last night, All Things Considered did an extensive two-part obituary for Salinger, in which they interviewed American literature professor Andrew Delbanco to explain Salinger’s importance in American literary history.  Then in a more personal story, “What Salinger Means to Me,” Allan L’Etoile (a teacher at the all-male Gonzaga College High School in Washington, D.C.), and writers Shalom Auslander, Rick Moody, and Adam Gopnik all praised the unique voice of Catcher protagonist Holden Caufield, and place him alongside Huck Finn and Nick Carraway as a memorable voice in the American literary pantheon.  (Are you sensing a theme here?  For example, Eliza Harris and Ellen Olenska aren’t on that list.  Neither are Hester Prynne nor Daisy Miller, although they were imagined by male writers.)

I guess no women writers or scholars have any opinions whatsoever about Salinger’s work worth considering–not even the writer, Joyce Maynard, who was Salinger’s lover when she was eighteen years old and Salinger was in his 50s.  Continue Reading »

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UPDATED BELOW

Howard Zinn died yesterday.  I never read much of his work, but I admired his career a great deal–the linked obituary is a nice rundown, but hilariously, it identifies Camelot lapdog Arthur M. “history goes in cycles” Schlesinger Jr. as a “liberal historian.”  Zinn was a “polemicist,” as Schlesinger called him–but then, aren’t we all?  It’s just that some of us are timid polemicists, and some of us are bolder than others, and Zinn was a bold, combative person.  (He was literally combative–the obituary linked above says that he got his head bashed in by police at a Communist rally when he was 17, and he was in the Army Air Corps during World War II.)

I never met Zinn, but curiously, our paths crossed in a distant way in-between my freshman and sophomore year of college.  Here’s the story of my brush with (the correspondence of) greatness:  Continue Reading »

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