Historiann

Can I choose "none of the above?"

Howdy!  Hellsapoppin’ here.  While some of you in the East may be shoveling yet more snow today, we in the West have got more than a few stalls to muck out today, and a lot of fences to mend.  Here are some items for your delectation and consideration:

• National Politics:  What’s up with our Transformational President?  Well, not his approval numbers, that’s for sure.  Jonathan Last offers an analysis that says it’s the Clinton primary voters who jumped off the bandwagon first, and looks at the recent election results in Virginia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts from that perspective.  Michael Lind writes that the Republicans have nothin’–but that won’t stop them from winning because of Dem fecklessness, diffidence, and/or incompetence:  “Buyer’s remorse is what the voters should feel when they vote for a party that promises a bold reform agenda and then acts between elections as though it were a lobby for the financial industry. But wait — which party are we talking about here?”  Meanwhile–there are open rumblings about the incompetence of the Chicago bubble that appears to have been more effective at getting President Obama elected than they are at governing.  (H/t RealClearPolitics.)
• Local Politics:  Our new U.S. Senator, Michael “Never Won a Single Vote” Bennet is sinking like a stone against Republican front-runner Jane Norton, and even against Weld County D.A. Ken Buck.  (OK, so they’re only Rasmussen and DailyKos polls, but wev–that’s all we’ve got.)  Gee–who ever would have predicted that it might be a craptastic idea to crown this guy Senator?  Meanwhile, a guy who actually ran a few successful campaigns and won a lot of votes is now in the lead to replace Gov. Bill “The Family Guy” Ritter.  Go figure!  Historiann might be voting Republican for the first time in her life come November–unless Andrew Romanoff wins the D primary, and even then, I might vote Republican anyway.  Why should I reward bad behavior by all of the d00dly d00dz who think they run this state?  (Of course, we’ll have to see how Norton and Buck play their hands, too.)
• Literature:  Leonard Cassuto considers J.D. Salinger’s Bartleby-like retreat from literary celebrity, and predicts Continue Reading »

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Hi, kids–I’m deep into a juicy new book in my field all day today and finishing prep for my seminar tomorrow, but if you’re looking for diversions, I’ve got a few for you:

• What if Holden Caufield grew up and turned into Howard Zinn?  Hilobrow gives us the hillarious results.  This is the smartest and funniest thing I’ve read all week on the deaths of both historian Zinn and creepy recluse J.D.Salinger on Wednesday.  Via Old is the New New.
• Dopey Educrat Arne Duncan says about New Orleans:  ”we had to destroy the village to save the village.”  Now, all we need are 9,999 more hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes to take out the rest of school districts across the U.S.!  Never mind the loss of life–what about the children?  Hey, “progressives”:  how many of you would be jumping up and down and screaming if Margaret Spellings said “I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. That education system was a disaster, and it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that ‘we have to do better,’”  hmmm?  (How long do you think it will be before we start reading the “after a promising fresh start, New Orleans schools have underperformed since being rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina” stories?  Three years?  Five?)
• Here’s an idea:  how’sabout we find a U.S. Secretary of Education who has spent at least 10 years teaching in an elementary or high school classroom?  Continue Reading »

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Howdy, friends!  Sorry to have gone silent for the past few days–last week was the first week back to classes, and then I spent yesterday in bed all day long suffering from “nervous exhaustion.”  (Well, I slept a lot, and tested negative for everything else, so what would you call it?)  Poor Dr. Mister is on call this weekend, so in between his usual clinic hours and hospital duties, he stopped by to check on me every couple of hours.  (House calls sure are handy–they help make up for his busy schedule and inability to go on sabbatical with me. . . almost!)  Fortunately for him, I was a pretty easy patient because I was usually asleep.  I take pride in being a low-maintenance patient.

Anyhoo:  today’s letter from the mailbag comes from a young historian who has questions about book reviews and the role they might play in his budding career:

I am in the middle of my first year as a new assistant professor.  I am writing to ask you a few questions about writing book reviews.  I have read the instructions posted on the leading journals in my field–submit your vita or fill out our form and so forth.  Here are my unanswered questions: 1) Including a careful reading (or two?) of the book, approximately how much time does a book review take you to compose?  2) How many book reviews do most assistant professors complete in a year? 3) What is the process of saying no to a book review, or would this decision shut the door forever with the journal I turn down? 4) To what extent do academic-political considerations factor into your reviews?  That is, is there a risk in writing an especially negative review early in my career–even if the book warrants it?

Ever yours,

Assistant Professor Andy

Dear Andy,

You seem to take book reviews awfully seriously–not that that’s a bad thing.  It’s always good to hear from an Assistant Professor who is thinking about the big picture, and about how everything he writes is part of a strategy for building a national or international reputation.  Book reviews are a very important service to the profession, so you should think about how they will reflect on you as a professional.  I’ll answer your questions in order from the perspective of a fellow historian.  (Commenters from other disciplines should feel free to add on or offer different, discipline-specific advice.) Continue Reading »

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One of my Winter Break reading pleasures was Jennifer Baszile’s The Black Girl Next Door, a memoir of growing up in Palos Verdes, California in the 1970s and 1980s as the youngest daughter of the only black family in her neighborhood, and one of only a handful of African American children and teenagers in her schools.  This title piqued my interest for a few reasons:  first, I should say that I met Baszile through a good friend and had friendly conversations with her when she was at Princeton in the 1990s, although I doubt she would remember me.  She was training as an early Americanist there, another point of common interest, and wrote a fine dissertation on colonial Florida using French, Spanish, and English-langage sources.  Finally, she’s just a year younger than me, so I was interested in a memoir by someone in my generation who wasn’t the son or daughter of a famous writer or other celebrity–someone who got a book contract because she had an interesting story to tell, and she tells it well, with evocative details and striking originality.

Baszile’s experience introduces us to a rich and important subject, the first generation of African American children to be raised in integrated schools and neighborhoods.  Her book is especially poignant as she develops and explores the breach that separates her sister and her from her mother and father, who had grown up in segregation in Detroit and Louisiana, respectively, and who strove to live the American integrated dream for their daughters’ sakes.  But there are troubling silences when, for example, racist graffiti was sprayed on the street in front of their house and a cherub on a fountain in their yard is painted black.  Young Jennifer wants to talk to her father about this and to ask questions, but knows somehow that questions won’t be welcome, just as she knows somehow that putting on a wig and glasses and performing a pantomime as her “country granny” for white neighbor children one afternoon won’t be applauded by her parents the way it was by her white friends. Continue Reading »

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I’ve been looking for this for the past decade–a copy of Thomas Dixon, Jr.’s The Leopard’s Spots:  A Romance of the White Man’s Burden, 1865-1900 (New York:  Doubleday, Page & Co., 1902).  As many of you probably know, it was the first in Dixon’s “Ku Klux Klan” trilogy, an awesomely racist masterwork that was enormously popular with white Americans.  The second novel in the trilogy, The Clansmen (1905) became the basis for D. W. Griffith’s movie, The Birth of a Nation (1915).  The Leopard’s Spots is Dixon’s retort, fifty years after the fact, to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), only this time Tom isn’t a slave but rather a poor white Southern man whose family is victimized by black men, and Simon Legree isn’t a wicked Southern overseer, but instead is a white liberal who abets the political ambitions of black men during Reconstruction.  (The source for the above information, as well as a detailed plot summary, is available at Documenting the American South.)  Continue Reading »

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UPDATED BELOW

Many of you are probably making your holiday gift lists, and checking them twice, and I’m guessing that some of my smarty-pants readers are interested in gifting (or being gifted) some of this year’s best new titles, in both fiction and non-fiction.  Well, here’s a funny coinky-dink, courtesy of reader Kathie who tipped me off last month:  all of the very best books this year were written by men!  It isn’t just the STEM fields anymore, girls–apparently, we are clearly inferior at every professional and artistic endeavor:

• In “Why Weren’t Any Women Writers Invited to Publishers Weekly’s Weenie Roast?” The Green Lantern Press writes, “Publishers Weekly recently announced their Best Books Of 2009 list. Of their top ten, chosen by editorial staff, no books written by women were included. Quoted in The Huffington Post, PW confidently admitted that they’re “not the most politically correct” choices. This statement comes in a year in which new books appeared by writers such as Lorrie Moore, Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Rita Dove, Heather McHugh and Alicia Ostriker.”  (Who??)
• Publishers Weekly explained, “We ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz. We gave fair chance to the “big” books of the year, but made them stand on their own two feet. It disturbed us when we were done that our list was all male.”  But–we didn’t give it a second thought, beyond this odd acknowledgement of the bias of our list!  (Which implies somehow that in years before, when “gender and and genre” were not ignored, the ladies were the beneficiaries of some kind of literary affirmative action.)  Boys rule, girls drool!  Let’s take a closer look at that top 10 list, shall we? Continue Reading »

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Here’s an example of the delusions of the so-called “left,” from none other than Garry Wills.  Apparently, the great Progressive Messiah is now revealed to be the Pied Piper:

There was only one thing that brought [Barack Obama] to the attention of the nation as a future president. It was opposition to the Iraq war. None of his serious rivals for the Democratic nomination had that credential—not Hillary Clinton, not Joseph Biden, not John Edwards. It set him apart. He put in clarion terms the truth about that war—that it was a dumb war, that it went after an enemy where he was not hiding, that it had no indigenous base of support, that it had no sensible goal and no foreseeable cutoff point.

He said that he would not oppose war in general, but dumb wars. On that basis, we went for him. And now he betrays us. Although he talked of a larger commitment to Afghanistan during his campaign, he has now officially adopted his very own war, one with all the disqualifications that he attacked in the Iraq engagement. This war too is a dumb one. It has even less indigenous props than Iraq did.

Well, who was the fool for taking this “credential” seriously?  Continue Reading »

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It’s Thanksgiving week, so I thought I would reprise my Thanksgiving foods posts from last year.  Just in case you haven’t finalized your menu, here’s a retrospective of Thanksgivings past (and in the far distant past):

• “Thanksgiving blogging, part I:  ‘this depends intirely on the goodness of your fire,’” how to cook the bird, with tips for both the modern and colonial cooks.
• “Thanksgiving blogging, part II:  ‘beat all smartly together,’” a retrospective on various pumpkin and other winter squash pies and puddings
• And finally, for the thoroughly modern palate, “Thanksgiving blogging, part III:  recipe open thread,” which includes my favorite stuffing/dressing recipe.  I think I’m going to give Indyanna’s Crunchy Pear and Celery Salad” and Susan’s “Three-P” (pumpkin, sweet potato, and peanut) soup a try this year.  For vegetarians, don’t miss Notorious Ph.D.’s “Butternut Squash Lasagne“–I’ve got to try that next month once we’ve eaten through the turkey leftovers.

All this semester, I’ve been meaning to do some food blogging based on my re-reading of M.F.K. Fisher’s How to Cook a Wolf (1942), as a response to our current Great Depression, but frankly, I’ve been a little flummoxed.  (How to Cook a Wolf was written as a guide to surviving rationing and fuel shortages in the U.S. during World War II, but I thought it might contain some useful tips for economizing more generally.)  I must report reluctantly Continue Reading »

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UPDATED WITH LINKY GOODNESS BELOW

It’s probably already happened at your institution–university libraries are built at a certain moment in time with certain assumptions about the kinds of growth and collections storage they’ll need in the future.  Given the expanded role they’ve been expected to play in the past twenty years as sites that offer PCs, web access, and access to digital collections and databases, on top of the books and journals they continue to purchase and store, more and more libraries are moving to off-site storage for their older and/or less frequently used volumes.  (Baa Ram U. has off-site storage books that are usually delivered in a day or two.  It’s understandable–we’ve been here since 1870, so you have to have priorities.)

Syracuse University library had a plan to move half of their collection to a storage facility 250 miles away–and the faculty and students revolted Wednesday night (h/t Inside Higher Ed):

[M]ore than 200 faculty and students flocked to first public airing of the issue, a University Senate meeting. Some held signs protesting the proposal (one read “FREE BIRD”). Some spoke against the move on the grounds that library space had been misallocated while others questioned the need to ship the books so far away from campus. Faculty members delivered a petition against the plan signed by more than 100 humanities scholars, whose fields would be hurt more than others by the book relocation.

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Well, I loved them in spite of the stuttering insanity that gripped the mainstream media.  This little reminder is courtesy of Joan Walsh’s recent review of Taylor Branch’s The Clinton Tapes:

It’s always seemed to me no accident that the mainstream media began to lose its market share, its revenues and its respect in those years, when they slighted an embattled president’s worthy if controversial initiatives on Middle East peace, Bosnia, welfare reform, making work pay and building a U.S. social democracy, in favor of gossip about his character, his marriage, his taste in women and even the distinguishing characteristics of the presidential penis.

Against this historical backdrop of childish media snickering, the sharp, accomplished Branch comes off as a naif and even a rube in some of his stories, consistently flummoxed by the enmity among Washington media players, some of them his friends, as they savaged Clinton beyond proportion. He writes, bewildered, about a spate of vicious headlines at the end of 1996: The Times’ Abe Rosenthal accused the Clintons of “giving militant Islam its first beachhead in Bosnia,” while Maureen Dowd dubbed Clinton the trivia-obsessed “President Pothole” and the “Limbo President,” sinking ever lower. For good measure she added: “We pretty much know the Clintons did something wrong in Whitewater,” when in fact, 12 years later, we know no such thing. Wen Ho Lee at least got an apology from the Times; the Clintons are still waiting. (Clark Hoyt, is it too late to take that factual error up with Dowd?) Continue Reading »

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