Historiann

I always thought that was a rather overused cliché.  Until yesterday, that is.

Way to halt the deflationary drain-circling whirlpool that we’re drowning in!  This is a measure uniquely Democratic (as in, the product of the Democratic Party) in that it’s completely superficial and won’t address the real problem, but is guaranteed to pi$$ off yet another important Democratic constituency!

Awesome!  (Are you clapping louder?  Tinkerbell will die if you all don’t clap louder!)

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Yesterday, the Denver Post ran a story that dared to suggest that someone other than teachers are responsible for students’ educations.  Apparently, one Denver high school is doing the obvious–engaging parents in their childrens’ educations.  (Good for them!)  But how did this Thought Crime get into a major media outlet, especially one that has so vigorously promoted school “reform” schemes premised on the precarization of teachers’ professional lives? 

Much of the talk around educational reform has focused on the role teachers play in students lives, all but ignoring another big player: parents.

One Denver high school is changing that narrative, creating a multi-school system that empowers parents with the goal of getting more students into college.

Antonio Esquibel, principal of Abraham Lincoln High School, is using money from a three-year federal school-improvement grant to build a collaboration with its feeder schools — CMS Community School, Godsman Elementary and Kepner Middle School.

How does this amazing new theory of education work?  Continue Reading »

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Catalina reconsiders

This Monday morning, I thought I’d draw your attention to a new blog run by some librarians and archivists who write about workplace issues and are standing up for professional standards and against the casualization of academic labor.  And, it’s got a great name:  You Ought to Be Ashamed (or Eating Our Young.)  Check out “Why You Should Always Ask for More Money” by Catalina, who tells a sad tale of her first job offer and her attempts to negotiate a better salary:

Shortly after finishing library school, I interviewed for a great position with an archive associated with a religious organization.  The interview went really well, I liked the supervisor, and everyone was cool with me not going to church.  Just an hour after the interview, as I was boarding my plane, I got a call offering me the job.  Sweet, my first job offer!  All is flowers and sunshine until they mention the starting salary is $32,000.  Even right out of school that number was way too low for me to move across the country for, but on the call they mention the details can be negotiated.  I get on the plane, go home, and after much debate decide I really liked the position and if I can get them up to $36k I’ll take it.  It’s not like I became an archivist to get rich.

Despite this being my first salaried job offer ever, I was ready to negotiate and get the money.  My school had an active career services department and a few months ago I had attended a salary negotiation workshop.  I knew how to tell a potential employer I was worth more, how to ask firmly but nicely, and that if they couldn’t raise the salary to ask about relocation or conferences.  I call the supervisor back, tell her I’m really excited but the salary is on the low side.  Immediately, before I can talk about how much I want or why I deserve it, the supervisor offers me $35,000.  Looking back, it’s obvious that was how much she was authorized to give me, at the time I was completely thrown as the script I rehearsed in my head didn’t have a scenario for “they offered me money before I say anything.”

In a far less articulate way than planned, I manage to convey I was actually hoping for more, which is inline with the market, my skills, blah, blah.  Supervisor says she needs to check and will get back to me.  She calls me back, can’t do it, $35k’s the max.  I think about it, decide it’s close enough to what I wanted and that I’ll accept, but that I am going to use the tip from that workshop to see if I can get that extra $1,000 in relocation or a trip to SAA.  I ask for that, supervisor tells me she has to check and will call me back.  Finally, she calls back and let’s me know that based on my high concern for salary I’m probably not the candidate they wanted and that they are rescinding the job offer.  Bam, ask for a trip to SAA and lose a job. Continue Reading »

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Sarah Palin

Don’t miss Michelle Goldberg’s analysis of the feminist history in Sarah Palin’s new book, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag.  Apparently, it gets worse after the diabetes-inducing title.  I agree with Goldberg that “[i]n some ways, it’s a good thing that Sarah Palin calls herself a feminist. It means that, even among conservatives, women’s equality has become a normative position, the starting point for debate. It means that feminism has gone from something that the right wants to destroy to something it wants to appropriate. That’s progress, of a sort.”  This is indeed a new development–Phyllis Schlafly’s days are over, for now, and it would be even too intellectually dishonest for Palin to pretend that feminism had nothing to do with shaping the possibilities of her political career.

However, Palin is all wet when it comes to American history in general, and as Goldberg explains, feminist history in particular:  she claims Elizabeth Cady Stanton as a devout Christian–a woman who once said that “[y]ou may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded women,” and who wrote her own version of the Bible.  (Truly, this is more laughable than the people who try to re-claim Thomas Jefferson as a godbag.)  Palin repeats the flimsy lie that Susan B. Anthony was anti-abortion, and she repeats the distortions of Margaret Sanger’s work and career by claiming that she advocated “Nazi-style eugenics.”  (She cites the esteemed historian Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism on Sanger.)

Of course this is idiotic, but no one who buys or reads Palin’s book really cares about actual, factual feminist history.  However, I don’t think it’s impossible to write an intellectually honest history of feminism from a libertarian or conservative point of view.  Continue Reading »

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When I read Zuska’s comments about Science Cheerleader, I thought Science Cheerleader had to be a parody.  Apparently it’s not–but it is in fact a total joke, because (for example) it suggests that “What Everyone Needs To Know To Be A (sic) Science Literate” is the cheerleaders from the Philadelphia 76ers in spangly bras and short-shorts reading the words of an actual physicist.  The actual physicist does not don a bra-top and short-shorts and read the science concepts himself.  I wonder why not?  Maybe because he understands that it’s never a mark of status to appear publicly in a state of undress?  (In my period and field, for example, the only people portrayed as unclothed are enslaved people–and they’re almost never represented as wearing clothing at all, whereas 17th and 18th century portraits of white people are more portraits of clothing than of individuals.  Clothes make the man, indeed!)

Anyway, back to science.  Zuska writes:

Okay, let’s play what if. What if the Science Cheerleaders are responsible for making just one girl stick with her science & math classes – isn’t it all worthwhile then?

Let’s say the Science Cheerleaders do keep one girl in advanced science or math classes, but make three other girls feel like they have to pornulate themselves in order to be 21st Century Fembot Compliant While Doing Science, and make five d00ds feel like it is perfectly okay to hang up soft porn pictures of sexay hawt babes in the lab and harass some colleague because hawt science women WANT to be appreciated for being sexay and smart! – is it still worth it?

She then goes on to describe an effective outreach program she worked with to get more girls, especially girls who would be first-generation college students, into STEM fields.   Continue Reading »

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Grill and smoke setup

UPDATED BELOW, with “turkey pr0n!”

Thanksgiving day 2010 was clear and very cold–and the sun at this time of the year never reaches into our North-facing backyard.  But Fratguy and Geoff were undeterred–they(respectively) smoked and grilled two 12 or 13-pound turkeys yesterday, and both were delicious.  On my morning run, I saw another family deep-frying a turkey in their driveway.  Parts of our town smelled smoky, although I don’t know if that was due to other grilling or smoking turkeys, or just fireplaces.  It was difficult to sort out the smoke scents.

The grilled turkey was done a lot faster than the smoked turkey, which turned out to be a big plus at 2:45 in the afternoon, when the gang was hungry and all of the sides were ready.  (Smoking stuff when it’s only 27 degrees outside makes it difficult to keep the temperature up.  One can understand why it was the southeastern United States that invented barbecue culture, and not the northern woodlands.)  I was glad to learn of the American turkey’s origins–and, finally, what a “guinea fowl” was, via this informative article by John Bemelmens Marciano!  And if you’re wondering as I did,  yes–he’s the grandson of Ludwig Bemelmens, the creator of the Madeline books. Continue Reading »

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Detail with woodcut from "The Rebels Reward," (Boston, 1724)

The distinguished historian of early New England David D. Hall has an op-ed in the New York Times today, “Peace, Love, and Puritanism,” that is another rehabilitationist view of the English puritans who founded Plymouth and the Massachusetts Bay Colonies in the seventeenth century.  I don’t argue with anything he says, as he’s mostly arguing against the joyless, censorious stereotype of puritans most Americans carry around in their heads, thanks to Nathaniel Hawthorne and H. L. Mencken–but I find his discussion of the “first thanksgiving” a little incomplete. 

Hall asks, “Are our present-day values and practices aligned with the historical record, or have they been remade by our consumer culture? Is anything authentic in our own celebrations of Thanksgiving?”  There’s a lot of American history he skips over in the nearly 400 years between 1621 and 2010.  English New Englanders observed both “solemn day[s] of fasting and humiliation” as well as feast days irregularly, not just upon the harvest.  Fasts were usually called for by local clergy to atone for the community’s sins that (according to their communitarian logic) may have resulted in a military loss, and feasts were called to celebrate a military victory over the Indians, or later, the French.  Both fasts and feasts were opportunities to reaffirm tribalism, of a world view of us versus them.  The history of fasting and feasting in the English communities of New England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should be written in blood–both blood in the sense of kinship ties, and in the sense of the shedding of outsiders’ blood in war. Continue Reading »

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Here’s a flashback from the 1980s of that upbeat young fella Ed Grimley, a character played by Martin Short on both SCTV and Saturday Night Live.  This excerpt is not just a Thanksgiving skit, but also a takeoff of Rear Window, starring Ed Asner as the murderous neighbor.  (“You’re a dead man,Grimley!”  Oh, Mr. Grant!)

“That’s a pain that’s gonna linger, there’s no question about that!”  Ed Grimley has a lot to teach us about being thankful:  Continue Reading »

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I’ve had some private requests for more food blogging, now that Thanksgiving is nigh upon us and those of you who haven’t ordered or purchased a turkey yet may be S.O.L. if you don’t get to it soon.  But, quite frankly, I’m a little frazzled this year.  I’m laboring away on an essay that’s (at this point) a week overdue, and will need the rest of this week to make it shine. So this is what would probably be on the Thanksgiving menu at Chez Historiann this year, if I could get ‘em.  (There’s probably a mouldy old box down in some forgotten fallout shelter, don’t'cha’think?  It seems like the kind of fake food that would be as good today as it was on the day it was manufactured.)

Did Don sign off on this?  (H/t to Assistant Professor Andy for the funny link, and to Fratguy for the funny line.)  Isn’t it interesting to see what became a children’s novelty processed food marketed to mothers as though it were a perfectly nutritious thing?  (Actually, when you look at the box, it’s not far from the way that energy bars are marketed today.)  Back in the day, mothers used to tell their children what they’d eat, not the other way around, which is why advertising aimed at children now emphasizes the pleasure, the coolness, and even the rebellion of consuming a particular food item. 

As for Thanksgiving:  Continue Reading »

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Roxie, an unusually prolific dead wire-haired fox terrier, has some great advice for those of us who labor under the burden of administrative “efficiency.”  She suggests that efficiency is a two-way street, and has some great advice for tenured faculty who are seeing their departments adjunctified as well as for adjuncts and junior faculty.  We must, as the Canadians say, work to rule.  Ignore that urge to volunteer for more uncompensated work, and resist pointless service bull$hit.  Here are her “Faculty Tips for Surviving in the Age of Excellence Without Money:”

Refuse to take on independent studies. That won’t really hurt students, who tend to take independent studies as much for the sake of scheduling convenience as to satisfy a burning desire to conduct research that couldn’t be undertaken within the context of a regular course. Special note to the untenured: You should say no to independent studies under any and all circumstances. They are major time sinks. You get no credit for them, and they take away from the already limited time and energy you have available for the work that will matter come tenure time. The clock is ticking! Say NO!

Refuse to take on service roles that feel pointless and don’t advance the cause of shared governance. Example: Conducting merit reviews in years when there is no merit money. The argument has always been that you do the reviews anyway so that the money can be awarded retrospectively on that magical day when the bronze turtle out in front of the library turns into a pot of gold. Bull$hit. Conduct the review if and when the funds materialize. Stop wasting our under-compensated time in the meantime. Continue Reading »

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