Historiann

I hope you are all staying nice and warm this New Year’s Eve.  I am on Eastern Standard Time, for a change, so I just might stay awake long enough to ring in the new year. . . in Nova Scotia, or maybe Newfoundland.  Anyway–stay warm and toasty, wherever you are, and have a happy new year.

My New Year’s Resolution?  I want to wear more practical, G-rated clothing.  What’s your resolution?

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Hi, friends!  I hope you’re enjoying a lovely holiday and/or winter vacation.  Several of you have e-mailed me or left questions in the comments here on the blog about whether the lecture I recorded for C-SPAN, “A Pair of Stays,” would be archived or available as a podcast.  The answer to both questions is yes, so here are the relevant links:

• You can order up your own personal broadcast by clicking here, and then clicking the link under “video playlist.”
• You can also find the audio-only podcast on the C-SPAN website here.
• And finally, I’ve been told that it will be here for free on i-Tunes, but it doesn’t look like it’s been released yet.

 

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Can you believe it? Susan actually sent me a cake! It’s her orange-scented fruitcake, and we are having a hard time keeping it whole until tomorrow.

Merry Christmas to those of you who keep the feast; to those of you who don’t, enjoy the short lines at the movies today! Although I am by faith a profane scoffer, I enjoy a little choral music at Christmas time, old-school style. 1441 style, that is: it helps me get in the mood to cook a turkey and toast some walnuts. Here’s the King’s College choir singing The Holly and the Ivy. Continue Reading »

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Well, friends, la famille Historiann has had a very good year and we have a lot to be grateful for, the first thing being that none of us was injured or killed by firearms.  I hope that all of you are happy and safe too, and that if you’re traveling, the winter snows blanketing the Rockies to the midwest aren’t causing you too much trouble or grief.  (We are envious–there were breathless reports of snowsnowsnow!!! coming last Wednesday, but here in Potterville, we got nuthin’ but a little dusting that blew away before noon.)

If you have a few spare (or sleepless) moments over the weekend, here’s a round-up of recent news and views that I thought you might find interesting:

• Thank you, Jeffrey Toobin, for reminding us what a revanchist creep Robert Bork (1927-2012) actually was.  I was growing tired of reading all of the sanitized obituaries and the commentaries by so-called “liberals” who had deep, deep regrets about the way Bork was treated in his confirmation hearing.  You’d think a big, tough conservative guy like Bork would be glad to stand up for his pro-segregation, anti-Civil Rights, antifeminist writings and judicial record, wouldn’t you, and take whatever licking he got as a proud conservative?  According to Toobin, no recent SCOTUS nominee in recent years has so richly deserved a borking as Bork.
• Paging Tenured Radical:  how ’bout a book club on Bork’s Slouching Towards Gomorrah (1996), like we did with Terry Castle’s The Professor?  It would be good for your history of modern conservativism courses, and fun for me.
• Fiscal Cliff Notes:  Rutgers University historian Jennifer Mittlestadt writes that although many liberals may be rooting for the military spending cuts that will go into effect if we fall off the “fiscal cliff,” we need to look at the details hidden in the proposal:  “Folded into the current military spending cuts is a neoliberal agenda to privatize and outsource the retirement and health care benefits of military personnel and their families. Americans may consider these proposals of minimal concern, and of interest only to military personnel, veterans, and their families. But their implications reach far wider: they are part of a comprehensive neoliberal plan to privatize virtually all government social welfare programs and entitlements.”
• Deconstructing white manhood:  Bloggers Werner Herzog’s Bear and MPG (“Unofficial thoughts about discrimination, racial sight, and race”) have some interesting contributions to make to a problem that Respectable Negro Chauncey DeVega has tried to highlight this week, too, given the demography of mass-murderers like Adam Lanza.  Continue Reading »

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You can see me lecturing to my HIST 358:  American Women’s History to 1800 students from this semester on the politics of early American women’s underwear (srsly!) on C-SPAN 3, American History TV, this weekend.  I’m on Saturday 8 p.m. EST/6 p.m. MST, again on Saturday at midnight/10 p.m., and Sunday at 1 p.m./11 a.m.  If (like me) you don’t get C-SPAN 3, it streams online over the weekend, too.  I also throw in some bits about the 600-year old bra, John Paul Gaultier, and Madonna into the lecture, just for laughs.

(Amazingly enough, there is a blog called Eighteenth-Century Stays, where you can see more photos like the one’s I’ve borrowed here, as well as other examples of both eighteenth- and seventeenth-century stays, with instructions for how to make them yourself.)

How did I get interested in early American undergarments, and why on earth do I think this is an appropriate subject for an undergraduate student lecture?  Continue Reading »

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They’re really great for the gun business.  From today’s Denver Post:

This weekend set a record for all single-day background check submittals in Colorado for potential gun purchases, according to Colorado Bureau of Investigation officials.

The first day after news of one of the worst mass shootings in America, when a gunman killed 20 children and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., requests to buy guns in Colorado surged.

A total of 4,154 background checks were submitted on Saturday, said CBI spokeswoman Susan Medina. Those figures topped the previous greatest number of background checks on Black Friday this year, when 4,028 were processed. Continue Reading »

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Tenured Radical:  Teachers are not soldiers, which recounts her own experience during a campus “lockdown” in May of 2009.

Chris at Historicus:  Religion in Schools Wouldn’t Prevent Mass Shootings, in which he comments on Mike Huckabee’s inane analysis and offers a look at the real history of American civic and political life before institutionally-led prayer was banned in schools.  Two Buck Huck upped the ante over the weekend, BTW.  According to Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon,  “There you have it. It wasn’t a mentally ill lunatic with easy access to military grade weaponry that caused one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history. It was “abortion pills,” iPhones, evolution and homosexuals.”

Joel Achenbach at the Washington Post, on the life of the murderer of Newtown, Conn:  “Slowly, amid rumor and misinformation, a picture of the killer is emerging, and it is dismayingly familiar. Adam Lanza was yet another young, withdrawn, middle-class male who for some unimaginable reason graduated from his adolescence as a mass murderer.”

Some readers have taken issue with my previous post, and I welcome your frank evaluations.  As a feminist blogger, I was reluctant to write about the questions I have about parenting, gender, and in particular the strangely enabling relationship I have seen among some mothers and their teenaged sons in the past 15 years or so Continue Reading »

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Over the past few days, I’ve been gratified to see and hear some in the news media start talking specifically about how all of these killers are men–most of them young, overwhelmingly white and also overwhelmingly socially isolated.  Inspired by this comment from Susan, I wondered this morning how many mothers and fathers of hypothetical 20-year old daughters who 1) had problems with school, 2) live at home, 3) don’t go to college and don’t have a job, and 4) are as completely isolated as this murderer appears to have been would not have sought some kind of counseling or mental health evaluation for their child?

I do not mean to engage in victim-blaming here (of the murderer’s mother).  My question is an honest one, and it jibes with a concern I’ve had for a long time about the different standards to which boys and girls are held by their parents.  Recently, it has struck me that daughters are held to much higher standards than sons are–higher behavioral and academic standards–and that this in the end has benefited girls.  This is one reason why I think we see women in the majority among college students and M.A. students in the U.S.  Continue Reading »

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There are six fewer of them who will show up for work on Monday.

The principal and a school psychologist were killed while running towards the gunman, while a 27-year old first-grade teacher’s body was found shielding her students.

All of the adults murdered yesterday were women.  I want to hear more about their heroism.

 

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