Maybe ze could carry on on Facebook? (I don’t know how that works.)

How shortlived was that?

My graduate students yesterday, after reading Richard White’s Remembering Ahanagran and that forum in the June 2002 JAH were to the contrary enamored by the notion of connections between the self and the historian’s subject. I wonder if this is more of a conceit for historians of the very recent past (19th & 20th C historians), rather than for those of us whose work ranges into the early and premodern past. But to argue against seeing or looking for deep psychological or personal reasons for choosing our subjects has an almost 12-step recovery-like logic, right? We’re either in recovery or in denial.

While my self presentation is pretty conservative, I don’t think my ideas are. But one of the reasons I’m a historian is that I don’t want to “narrate [my] own jagged hatreds, betrayals, sexual passions, and ugly experience.” Without denying the way my experience shapes my work, I’m writing about people in the past, NOT myself. If I did that, I’d be writing memoir, not history.

And I have an ambivalent relationship to the establishment: sure, I have job security (gained at the age of 50+) and a decent salary. But for someone with almost 30 years of experience and a Ph.D., I don’t think I’m paid *that* much. I’m cheering on Occupy Wall Street, though I’m not occupying it myself. And as an educator, I’m simultaneously trying to give my students (first generation, many quite poor and from immigrant families) the tools to succeed in our society while also giving them critical lenses with which to think about it.

Thanks for the insight. I read the Onion piece as biting satire, and wholly missed the genteel politeness.

But, perhaps, what is quite sad is the way that certain really rather boring things are seen as rebellious: swearing, fucking. Dude, that’s rebellion when you’re fifteen; when your 30/40/50 etc it’s just sad. Especially because sex as a rebellious activity becomes increasingly difficult as an adult, unless you are hurting lots of people, and why is hurting people cool? I think people who think sex is rebellious just aren’t getting enough sex.

I think rebellion should be about challenging ideas and challenging norms; and some of us peeps with conservative lifestyles write books that challenge the status quo, reshape what is known etc. Do I need to be angsty with too much eyeliner for this to count? To that I say: fuck off.

Science conventions have both! AHAHAHAH!