Historiann

How long has it been since you heard someone called a “revisionist,” or heard someone muttering darkly about “revisionism” after a job talk or search committee meeting?  (For all of the non-historians out there who might still be reading:  “revisionism” was a charge thrown around a lot in the 1980s and 1990s by those historians who imagined that history is the pursuit of Unchanging Truth, and who were generally quite hostile to most of the new approaches to history since 1960 or so–social history, subaltern history, feminist history, queer theory–pretty much everything except political and intellectual history focused on DWEMs, that is, Dead White European/Euro-American Males.  Anyone who had different ideas or subjects in mind were called “revisionists,” which implied that we were doing Made-Up history, which was seen as an attack on the Unchanging Truth.)  I think it’s been nearly a decade since I’ve heard these terms in serious conversations. Continue Reading »

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Someone’s being mean to White House Senior Advisor David Axelrod!  But somehow, I don’t think quotations like this are going to get the bullies to leave him alone on his walk home from school.  In fact, I think the bullies are going to start wearing cleats from now on:

“I guess I have been castigated for believing too deeply in the president,” [Axelrod] said, lapsing into the sarcasm he tends to deploy when playing defense.

That’s right:  if you made a mistake, it was only that you loved him too much.  (Where does anyone get the idea that Democrats can’t take a punch?  Oh, I don’t know–the fact that they’re falling all over their fainting couches because someone “castigated” them.  With words!  Really mean ones, I guess.)

In an interview in his office, Mr. Axelrod was often defiant, saying he did not give a “flying” expletive “about what the peanut gallery thinks” and did not live for the approval “of the political community.”  [Ed. note:  Weak!  If you don't give a "flying" frack, then don't bring it up.]  He denounced the “rampant lack of responsibility” of people in Washington who refuse to solve problems, and cited the difficulty of trying to communicate through what he calls “the dirty filter” of a city suffused with the “every day is Election Day sort of mentality.”  [Ed note:  you have to govern with the Washington you have, not the Washington you wish you had, with flying multicolored ponies and cream soda in all of the fountains and in the reflecting pool of the Lincoln Memorial.]

When asked how he would assess his performance, Mr. Axelrod shrugged. “I’m not going to judge myself on that score,” he said. But then he shot back: “Have I succeeded in reversing a 30-year trend of skepticism and cynicism about government? I confess that I have not. Maybe next year.”  [Can we get red pop next year in the reflecting pool?  That would be pretty, and extra-delicious.]

I’m just stunned to learn, once again, that President Barack Obama’s team really did believe that he was the magically transformational politician they marketed during the primary and general election campaigns.   Continue Reading »

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These boots were made for kicking some a$$!

Hiya, folks!  Hecksapoppin here–it’s warm and clear here on the High Plains Desert, so I have to pitch hay while the sun shines.  Here are some ideas to keep you occupied while I’m out.

• Isis the Scientist writes about the “Mythical Sunshine and Unicorns of University-Based Child Care.”  We see those little chain gangs of toddlers and preschoolers on campus–they must be somebody’s kids.  Why not yours? 
• The Mohegans have elected Lynn Malerba, a woman Sachem, for the first time since the eighteenth century.  In my book, I argued that the Algonquian Indians had no tradition of female political leadership, and that the so-called “squaw Sachems” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were evidence of the stresses of colonialism on Indian peoples.  (And of course, having women leaders became further evidence in English minds that Indian peoples didn’t deserve political sovereignty.  Never mind Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Anne, of course.)
• It’s only March 6, but I think we already have our Mansplainer of the Month.  Of course, it makes perfect sense that one 40 year-old 14-page article probably would have changed my intellectual life.  How tragic for me that I missed this Rosetta Stone!  All is lost!  I’ve submitted my resignation letter to my department Chair already, and will go dark here at Historiann.com as of midnight Sunday.
• A former No Child Left Behind advocate changes her mind and decides that testing kids to death isn’t teh awesome:  Continue Reading »

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Howdy, friends:  GayProf has posted part III of our conversation this week about American History and the mysteriously vanishing Latin@ presence therefrom.  Go read!  Comment!  Argue!  Enjoy!   (If you need to do the homework first, here’s Part I, and here’s Part II of our discussion.)

Have a great Friday.  For those of you who are sliding into Spring Break–have fun, and travel safely (if you’re traveling at all.)  For those of you who aren’t–well, it’s almost spring for all of us in the northern hemisphere, so buck up!

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Good morning, friends!  Today’s post is part II of GayProf’s and my radical subversive plot to ruin American history!  (Part I was over at Center of Gravitas yesterday.)  Enjoy–and please leave your thoughts in the comments below:

Historiann:  As a Coloradoan now, it’s interesting to note that there have been two articles published in The William and Mary Quarterlyin the past fifteen years urging the de-centering of “colonial America” from the Atlantic littoral and recognizing that there is an early American history west of the Appalachians, west of the Mississippi, and west of the Rocky Mountains (not to mention South of the Rio Grande and North of the St. Lawrence.)  In “Why the West is Lost” (WMQ51:2, April 1994), James A. Hijiya decried the absence of western history from most American history textbooks, and the relentless focus on eastern history and Anglophone people.  Claudio Saunt’s cartograms in “Go West:  Mapping Early American Historiography” (WMQ 65:4, October 2008) illustrate the eastern bias of early American history, and he notes that much of this was probably due to the fact that colonial historians were and are still trained in eastern U.S. universities near lots of local archives and libraries with colonial records, making it easy to do local history and call it early America.  (Saunt also says that if American historians bothered to learn Spanish, they’d find a wealth of records in Spain, Mexico City, and in western local archives, and I can assure you that there’s lots of exciting things to be found in French archival sources in Quebec.  But, as we all know, it’s just pi$$ing up a rope to insist that American historians learn another language!) 

<<GayProf rushes to read articles in the WMQ so he doesn’t sound tragically uninformed>>
 
I think it’s quite telling that Hijiya’s article spurred a lively, often defensive, sometimes congratulatory, and sometimes patronizing response from early Americanists and western historians later that year (“‘Why the West is Lost,’ Comments and Response,” WMQ 51:4, October 1994), while Saunt’s article has been greeted with silence.  (So far, anyway.)  This appears to be a trend I’ve observed in the historical profession in the past decade or so.  Maybe because the debates over “the canon” and multiculturalism were sometimes overheated in the 1980s and 1990s, we all seem to have a policy of détante.  No one will call us names or accuse us of ruining the historical profession these days–they’ll just ignore us.  (We’ll see–on blogs, anything can happen!) Continue Reading »

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This week,  inspired by his post a few months ago about the politics of always presuming that Latino/a history in American history is a “new” issue, GayProf and I have cooked up a series of posts that will reveal our Marxist feminist Latino/a Reconquista schemes for hemispheric domination! We put the panic in Hispanic, I tell ya.  Part I is over at Center of Gravitas–follow me over there, and discuss amongst yourselves!

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All the world is waiting for you, and the power you possess

In your satin tights, fighing for your rights, and the old red, white, and blue! Continue Reading »

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Photo of Paul Krugman and Robin Wells by Tina Barney

No kidding!  See Larissa McFarquar’s portrait of Krugman in The New Yorker:

Krugman went to Yale, in 1970, intending to study history, but he felt that history was too much about what and not enough about why, so he ended up in economics. Economics, he found, examined the same infinitely complicated social reality that history did but, instead of elucidating its complexity, looked for patterns and rules that made the complexity seem simple. Why did some societies have serfs or slaves and others not? You could talk about culture and national character and climate and changing mores and heroes and revolts and the history of agriculture and the Romans and the Christians and the Middle Ages and all the rest of it; or, like Krugman’s economics teacher Evsey Domar, you could argue that if peasants are barely surviving there’s no point in enslaving them, because they have nothing to give you, but if good new land becomes available it makes sense to enslave them, because you can skim off the difference between their output and what it takes to keep them alive. Suddenly, a simple story made sense of a huge and baffling swath of reality, and Krugman found that enormously satisfying.

Awesome!!!  It’s all so simple!  Never mind why only certain people were enslaved, and others weren’t; never mind how slavery made ideological sense as well as economic sense to the architects of slavery; never mind what the lives and deaths of the enslaved were like; never mind how masters maintained their dominance even in the face of a massive enslaved majority of people.  It’s all just so much simpler when you look at it as an economist!  You know that old joke about economists:  “Sure it works in reality, but will it work in theory?” 

The paragraph above, about mid-way through the article, helps explain Krugman’s description of his political quiescence through the 1980s and 1990s: Continue Reading »

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Katha Pollitt, in an article called “Whatever Happened to Candidate Obama,” writes this (emphases mine):

I’m still glad I supported Obama over Hillary Clinton. If Hillary had won the election, every single day would be a festival of misogyny. We would hear constantly about her voice, her laugh, her wrinkles, her marriage and what a heartless, evil bitch she is for doing something–whatever!–men have done since the Stone Age. Each week would bring its quotient of pieces by fancy women writers explaining why they were right not to have liked her in the first place.Liberal pundits would blame her for discouraging the armies of hope and change, for bringing back the same-old same-old cronies and advisers, for letting healthcare reform get bogged down in inside deals, for failing to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan–which would be attributed to her being a woman and needing to show toughness–for cozying up to Wall Street, deferring to the Republicans and ignoring the cries of the people. In other words, for doing pretty much what Obama is doing. This way I get to think, Whew, at least you can’t blame this on a woman.

Now, I’m actually sympathetic to Pollitt’s viewpoint that “at least you can’t blame this on a woman.”  If we had elected Hillary Clinton President of the U.S., I’m sure she’d be getting even less credit for things that had gone well and even more blame for things that had gone poorly than President Barack Obama.  But–did Pollitt or anyone else proofread this paragraph?  As my professors used to say in cultural studies seminars in the early 1990s–there’s a lot of ”slippage” here.

I’m sure everything will be so totally different when we have that perfect, unassailable, totally awesome female Presidential or Vice-Presidential candidate!  Instead of that unstable freak Victoria Woodhull, or the dangerously radical Shirley Chisholm, or that crooked, incompetent Geraldine Ferraro, or that unserious, stupid ”Caribou Barbie” Sarah Palin, or that old b!tch, Clinton.  (Or, as Pollitt calls her instead, “Hillary,” in a column in which she never refers to President Obama as “Barack.”  Not once.)  Continue Reading »

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Here’s hoping you’re not working “on spec” today.

“Let’s get into trouble, baby!”  Continue Reading »

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