July 3rd 2009
Another round for all of my friends!

Posted under: happy endings

gayprofglass1This summer, I’ve had the opportunity to meet up with some new friends in the blogosphere–although in most cases it was our first meeting, it felt more like meeting an old friend because of our on-line conversations on each other’s blogs.  Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar took me out to lunch at a fabulous vegetarian restaurant in L.A., Another Damned Medievalist consented to hang out with some of my crazy Baa Ram U. colleagues when she came to Colorado recently, Dr. Crazy drove through miles of road construction to meet with me last week in Ohio, and this week GayProf  served up a few cocktails from his shaker and even cooked dinner for me at his house!  (Here’s a photo of the little prezzie I bought him for his birthday, so if you’re ever in Midwestern Funky Town you can ask him to mix you up one of 7 classic cocktails, since you can see he’s got the recipes and the necessary equipment!)  This blog has connected me with other bloggers and commenters I might never have run across in real life, and I’m so grateful to hear about your different experiences and perspectives.

I’ve also had the opportunity to see a lot of old friends in the last few months.  I really appreciate having old friends more and more.  I’ve moved around a fair amount in my adult life, but there are people in most regions of the country where I know I can hitch up Old Paint and pick up with them like I never moved away.  Thanks to all of you who have met me for lunches or coffees, or who have hosted me in your homes in California, Ohio, and Michigan over the past several weeks–I’m really glad you’re all in my life, and I’m grateful that many of you read and comment here regularly, since it keeps us in touch! Continue Reading »

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July 3rd 2009
The Road to Wellville

Posted under: American history, the body, women's history

sojournertruthgrave

Sojourner Truth's grave, Oak Hill Cemetery, Battle Creek

I visited Battle Creek, Michigan this week, for the first time since I was a child.  I’ve wanted to return ever since I read Nell Painter’s Sojourner Truth:  A Life, A Symbol (1996), when I learned that Battle Creek was Truth’s home for the last decades of her life.  (Truth had also lived in Northampton, Massachusetts–another progressive nineteenth-century American town.)  So we skipped the “Cereal City” sideshow, and went straight to the Oak Hill Cemetery, where we found Truth’s grave, marked by the stone on the left, and the historical marker on the right.  She’s in a fancy neighborhood of this necropolis–right behind C.W. Post’s mausoleum, and across the road from the whole Kellogg clan.

Because of the close associations between protestant evangelical denominations and nineteenth-century reform movements, Battle Creek’s history is inseparable from its history as the birthplace of Seventh Day Adventism, founded by James and Ellen White (1827-1915) in the 1850s.  They’re called co-founders, and James was a preacher and publisher, but it seems that it was Ellen’s visions and writing that were much more foundational to the philosophy and direction of the SDA church.  She is in fact remembered as the central prophet of their denomination by SDAs.  The SDAs were unusual for rejecting not just tobacco and alcohol but also meat–so they were vegetarians in addition to abolitionists and proponents of dress reform (and, of course, observed Saturday as the Sabbath.)  The SDA health regime was foundational to Battle Creek’s world-famous Sanitarium.  Ellen White quite literally made Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who usually gets all of the credit for turning Battle Creek into a fashionable health spa destination with his Sanitarium; it was she who recognized Kellogg’s promise and sent him to medical school.  Fun trivia fact:  Morningstar Farms, which makes all kinds of frozen meatless treats and meat substitutes, is an SDA company named after a mission/schoolhouse steamboat founded by a son of the Whites, who went South after the Civil War to evangelize and educate newly emancipated African American children. Continue Reading »

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July 2nd 2009
Dr. Str!pper T!ts, I presume?

Posted under: Bodily modification, Gender, technoskepticism, the body

NOTE:  This post was edited from an earlier version.  My apologies for those of you who might have come back here in the past few hours and found this post had temporarily “disappeared.”
Here’s one for all of the laydees out there in Historiann Nation:  Have you ever considered elective cosmetic surgery?  Now, don’t panic:  because of my natural beauty, enhanced only by vigorous exercise and protected vigilantly against the sun on the high plains desert by SPF 30+ at minimum, I’m certainly not considering “having some work done.”  I’m just wondering if educated, successful women such as yourselves have either thought about plastic surgery or have had it done. 

The reason I ask is that I have heard stories recently about highly successful professional women (that is, in professions nowhere near the entertainment industry) having serious plastic surgery–as in, massive breast implants and obvious facelifts.

Continue Reading »

37 Comments »

July 1st 2009
It’s so easy to find common ground in the “debate” over forced pregnancy when you’re a man!

Posted under: American history, Gender, jobs, the body, wankers, women's history

reallyuglybabyNothing, and I mean nothing, is more reassuring to a woman with an unwanted pregnancy than hearing two men debate whether or not to pay women to carry their pregnancies to term.  Who better to make these important policy decisions?  Don’t miss the part in which Steven Waldman of Beliefnet suggests  to Will “Is it Wrong to Murder an Abortionist?” Saletan that they pay pregnant women a whole one thousand dollars to deliver the baby, and then in the next minute wonders if that would set up “perverse incentives” that would encourage women to get pregnant just to collect that whole one thousand dollars! 

Man–what I wouldn’t do for a whole one thousand dollars!  I think I’ll go get myself pregnant tonight!  Continue Reading »

14 Comments »

June 30th 2009
Nun dolls, the sequel

Posted under: American history, Dolls, art, fluff, happy endings, local news, women's history

dollnunsThe Michigan Historical  Museum in Lansing has a special exhibition called “Michigan Roadside Attractions,” which features a few samples from the Nun Doll Museum at The Cross in the Woods Shrine in Indian River (near Sault St. Marie, unfortunately–not really a day trip from Southern Michigan.)  How totally awesome is that?  Maybe we have a few clues as to why a vision of Mother Kewpie of the Sisters of the M-50 appeared in an antiques mall in Brooklyn to me yesterday…

Now there’s some early American history, and modern American history, that has yet to be told.  To the barricades archives, mes amies!

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June 30th 2009
“What about Women in Early American History?” In which Historiann and friends get up on their high horses and rope ‘em up good

Posted under: American history, Gender, Intersectionality, conferences, jobs, students, women's history

cowgirl3Howdy, cowgirls and dudes–here’s my long-overdue report on a conversation we had Friday afternoon, June 12 at the Omohundro Institute’s Fifteenth Annual Conference in Salt Lake City.  Called “What about Women in Early America?”it featured Karin Wulf of the College of William and Mary (and the book review editor for the William and Mary Quarterly); Sowande’ Mustakeem of Washington University, St. Louis; Andrea Robertson Cremer of Macalester College; and Historiann (natch.)

Wulf wore two hats as the chair of our roundtable, and as the person who shared e-mailed comments from Terri Snyder of California State University, Fullerton, who was originally supposed to join us on the panel.  (The Cali budget crisis waits for no woman!)  She opened the discussion by saying, “We may have had this conversation before,” and reminded us of previous conversations at the 2002 and 2008 Berkshire Conferences and at the Organization of American Historians’ annual conference in 2009.  (Regular readers here will remember too our discussions of Judith Bennett’s History Matters in March here and at Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar, Tenured Radical, Blogenspiel, and the wrap-up featuring Bennett herself, in which we aired a number of questions and anxieties many of us have about the future of women’ s history.) 

Wulf noted that among women’s historians in general, there is a “persistent concern. . . that in expanding [women's history] there is a diffusion” of interests that is leading us away from a focus on XX chromosome people.  In particular, she said that she perceives a decline in submissions of articles in women’s history at the William and Mary Quarterly and in the numbers of fellowship applications submitted to the Omohundro Institute that relate primarily to women’s history.  Finally, she said that the fashion for large-scale comparative, transnational, or neo-imperial frameworkslike Atlantic World and borderlands histories, with their neo-traditional focus on political and military history, may also play a part in creating these perceptions.  Continue Reading »

7 Comments »

June 29th 2009
Vintage (and creepy) dolls, Brooklyn, Michigan, June 2009

Posted under: American history, Dolls, art, childhood, weirdness

dollmenagerieI’m back in vintage doll heaven in Michigan–and by “heaven,” I mean “my parents’ garage and the local antique malls.”  (And by “antique malls,” I mean “somewhat better than garage sale stuff!”)  So here’s a selection of the fun, freaky, and just plain “why?” that I came across today in just one booth in one antique mall.  I apologize that some of the photos are a little blurry–I had to photograph some of these things through a glass case.  Abundant pleasures await you!  For example, next to the Eskimo doll is a Pepper doll with a crocheted dress in gold yarn with green trim.  Lots more, and more of the weird, on the flip!

  Continue Reading »

11 Comments »

June 29th 2009
Advice from one old liar to another

Posted under: American history, wankers, weirdness

Joseph Ellis was asked by the New York Times for his advice to Dick Cheney about the writing of Cheney’s memiors!  Yeah, right–because Ellis, the Walter Mitty of early American historians, is such an expert in creative autobiography?  I guess they would have asked Norman “Advertisements for Myself” Mailer, but he’s dead.  (Oh, yeah–and he was an actual veteran, not a fabulist who bragged about his exploits to generations of undergraduate women.) Continue Reading »

14 Comments »

June 25th 2009
Into the woods

Posted under: American history, childhood, happy endings

woodsMy memories of childhood seem to revolve around the woods–I grew up in a land of mixed fields and forests that were slowly being converted into the outer edge of a city suburb, and in the 1970s and 1980s, there were still large patches of forest surrounding my neighborhood.  Riding bikes with friends to the edge of the woods, and then ditching the bikes for a walk into the unknown was how I spent my summers from ages 8 to 12.  Visiting Ohio and Michigan again this summer has given me an opportunity to reconnect with this familiar landscape.  I live now in Colorado, which sounds more glamorous to most people, with its 14,000 foot peaks, sweeping vistas of the Rocky Mountains, powder snow, and cloudless blue skies, but I miss the woods and rolling hills of the North American East and Midwest. 

I’ve enjoyed some walks and runs in the woods lately, but I am amazed that I have found absolutely no evidence of children or teenagers hanging out there.  Back in the 1970s, running into teenagers in the woods was a large part of the pleasure and the danger of the woods for us younger kids.  Continue Reading »

16 Comments »

June 24th 2009
Do you like riding on the passenger side?

Posted under: Gender, jobs, women's history

54convertiblelightblueWe’re road trippin’–and with respect to Jeff Tweedy (”Hey wake up–your eyes aren’t open wide/For the last couple of miles you’ve been swervin’ from side to side“) this is just a quick post to let  you know that the great American midwest is amazingly lush and green compared to our High Plains Desert, and we even enjoy the humidity, too!

I had an interesting conversation over lunch today with a friend who’s a generation older than me–a classic Second Waver, who commented that it’s only women around my age (40) who have really benefited from Second Wave activism and reforms with respect to the working world.  She thinks that women who are even just 10 years younger are much more willing to mommy-track or otherwise not prioritize their careers. Continue Reading »

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