Historiann

Eugene Genovese is among the most famous American historians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  A working-class Brooklyn kid with Italian immigrant roots and former Communist, his application of Marxist theory to the history of American slavery was pathbreaking and remains important.  A lifelong outsider with a chip on his shoulder, his professional calling card has been that he is a notoriously difficult guy to get along with.  He was perhaps equally famous for marrying Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, another historian originally trained in French history who became (like him) a prominent historian of the American South, and of southern women in particular.  She was by his account in Miss Betsey:  A Memoir of Marriage (ISI Books, 2009) nearly a saint in her patience and caretaking of him, besides being the better teacher, better citizen, better Catholic, and tougher agent provocateur of scholars of all intellectual and political stripes. 

Now, I know what those of you who know who Eugene and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese are might be thinking:  this is going to be hiliarous!  After all, they are perhaps the closest things to neoconservative historians aside from Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Fox-Genovese’s unique brand of feminism (and attacks on ”radical feminists”) are legendary.  But I think you should prepare yourself for a largely positive book review.  Continue Reading »

9 Comments »

Telling Histories:  Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower, edited by Deborah Gray White, features autobiographical essays from prominent African American women historians that reflect on their careers, their tenure battles, and their struggles to invent the field of African American women’s history at the same time as they were forced to fight to make and preserve spaces for themselves within the historical profession.  I blogged about this book briefly two years ago, but just this week finally sat down to read it.  (Consider this my slight contribution to Women’s History Month blogging.)

It is good to be reminded of how new the field of African American women’s history is–the contributors to this volume were born in the 1940s-1960s.  They are people we know and work with, and they are truly a pioneer generation.  White’s introductory essay does a brilliant job of highlighting the awesome challenges of professing black women’s history from inside a black woman’s body: 

Educated African American women believed they had to overcome their history before they could do their history.  Yet the nature of the history they sought to overcome was so embarassing and demeaning [of racial, class, and sexual exploitation and abuse] that it kept them from engaging that history in all but the most indirect manner.  It was not by choice, therefore, but by necessity that we came late to the historical profession.

White and her contributors explain the many struggles that black women faced as they began to enter the profession in the 1960s and 1970s– Continue Reading »

13 Comments »

Kevin Drum offers an interesting short history of right-wing populism and its rise after the election of Democratic presidents since the 1930s over at Mother Jones (via RealClearPolitics.)  He writes:

When FDR was in office in the 1930s, conservative zealotry coalesced in the Liberty League. When JFK won the presidency in the ’60s, the John Birch Society flourished. When Bill Clinton ended the Reagan Revolution in the ’90s, talk radio erupted with the conspiracy theories of the Arkansas Project. And today, with Barack Obama in the Oval Office, it’s the tea party’s turn.

.       .      .      .      .      .      

[S[hared tropes [of these movements] include a fear of “losing the country we grew up in,” an obsession with “parasites” who are leeching off of hardworking Americans, and—even though they’ve always received copious assistance from business interests and political operatives—a myth that the movement is composed entirely of fed-up grassroots amateurs. Take, for example, this description of Pam Stout, the star of a seminal tea party profile written earlier this year by David Barstow of the New York Times. After Obama took office, he writes, “Mrs. Stout said she awoke to see Washington as a threat, a place where crisis is manipulated—even manufactured—by both parties to grab power. She was happily retired, and had never been active politically. But last April, she went to her first tea party rally.” Compare that to the description of Estrid Kielsmeier in Suburban Warriors, Lisa McGirr’s history of ’60s-era right-wing activism in Orange County, California.Kielsmeier, a resident of my hometown of Garden Grove (my mother acidly recalls PTA meetings at my elementary school as hotbeds of John Birch Society activism), was a homemaker who ran the local gubernatorial primary campaign headquarters of ultraconservative oilman Joe Shell against Richard Nixon in 1962: “Her baby played in a playpen next to her desk while Kielsmeier participated in what she later called her first real involvement in politics. ‘Up to that time…it was education and just kind of…networking, really.’” Continue Reading »

23 Comments »

Come and git it!

UPDATED BELOW 

Hecksapoppin’, friends.  I’ve got too many irons in the fire, again.  Fortunately, other people are keeping the world-wide non-peer reviewed interwebs loaded with feminist news and views you can use: 

• First of all, Blake at Down and Out in Denver gives Rebecca Traister’s Big Girls Don’t Cry:  The Election that Changed Everything for American Women a rave review,and as promised, he’s loaned me his copy already.  Maureen Corrigan, my former proffie and Fresh Air’s in-house book critic, reviewed Traister’s book Monday and pronounced it “brilliant.”  I’m looking forward to reading it–but geez, why did her publisher make her tack on that ridiculous subtitle?  (Patriarchal equilibrium, much?)
• via Zuska, we learn about a new feminist blog by Chef Ginny W., “A Kitchen of One’s Own.”   She writes about the problem that in professional kitchens still has no name:  “It isn’t just that women in professional kitchens aren’t exposed to much feminism, it’s that active feminism is actually thought of — although no one I know would phrase it this way — as weakness. Saying that something is sexist and wrong is whining, is complaining, and is therefor weak and bad and something you especially can’t do if you’re a woman, and so already have to prove that you aren’t weak. Feminism — active, educated, considered feminism, not just a vague sense that women should have the same legal rights as men — is a liability. And yet feminism is exactly what’s most likely to provide any kind of solution to the problems we face.” So how’s that hopey-changey “postfeminist” bull$h!t working out for us, again?  Continue Reading »

6 Comments »

At least a dozen ways to stoopid, by Froma Harrop:

Bill Gates recently predicted: “Five years from now on the Web for free you’ll be able to find the best lectures in the world. It will be better than any single university.”

A year at a university costs an average $50,000, the Microsoft founder and Harvard dropout said last month. The Web can deliver the same quality education for $2,000.

Yet American colleges continue to float in the bubble of economic exceptionalism once occupied by Detroit carmakers.  American median income has grown 6.5 times over the past 40 years, but the cost of attending one’s own state college has ballooned 15 times. This kind of income-price mismatch haunted the housing market right before it melted down.

.       .       .       .       .       .       .       .      

As the father of a student at Kenyon College told me, “It’s like driving a new Corvette to Ohio every September, leaving the keys and taking the bus home.”

This reminds me of that old Calgon bath salts commercial:  internets, take us away!!!  So why does that father choose to do what Harrop implies is the economically irrational thing and continue to drive that Corvette every autumn to Ohio?  Gee, I wonder! Continue Reading »

30 Comments »

This is the first of the 2010-2011 academic year’s series, Excellence Without Money(a term coined by the b!tchez at Roxie’s World in their series on the high cost of not funding higher education.)  For the full archives at both blogs, click away on those links, darlings.

I’ve been doing a little thinking about the effects of the arguments we’re seeing everywhere about the high cost of higher education.  Complaints about the cost of college, and the rate at which it’s increased in the past two decades, are always a major part of the argument in the slew of books published recently urging major reform of American universities.  Strangely enough, none of these books suggest that the federal and state governments should once again subsidize higher education at the rate it did during the Cold War, nor do they advocate ripping out computer labs and IT departments, which are the two biggest reasons college costs more than it used to.  (From 1986-90, my “laptop computer” was a $2.99 multi-subject notebook that I bought at the beginning of each semester.  If you started college before the mid-1990s, I’m betting that that was your “laptop,” too.) 

Instead, their arguments boil down once again to attacks on the faculty–especially tenured radicals who absurdly expect to be paid a living wage for their years of education, work, and expertise.  Oddly, all of these books have chosen to ignore how universities have slashed the costs of faculty labor by turning tenure-track and tenured jobs into positions held by adjuncts, who are paid as little as $3,000 per course and are at-will employees.  Distressingly, because of some recent resignations and regular faculty on leave, my department is this year an adjunct-majority department.  (But because it’s been years since regular faculty produced more student credit hours than our adjuncts, so perhaps this is less of a milestone than I suggested in the previous sentence.  For several years, it’s my understaning that two popular lecturers in my department produced fully half of the entire department’s FTEs.)

The problem with these articles–aside from their one-sided arguments that somehow faculty are the big piggies at the trough, not the NFL and NBA farm clubs (a.k.a. the “football teams” and the “men’s basketball teams”), not CEO-level multimillion-dollar salaries for university presidents and football and basketball coaches, and not the luxury condominiums that now pass for stadiums and dormatories–is that they’re written by upper-middle class journalists and writers who all attended and sent–or aspire to send–their children to the top 5 or 10 percent of the most selective, and usually private, colleges and universities.  Now, if the only universities you’d consider sending your children to cost $30,000-$55,000 a year, your world is very different from the world the vast majority of Americans inhabit.  But these are the people who are driving this “debate” in the op-ed pages of the New York Times and your local newspaper.

Take look at Baa Ram U.’s fee schedule for the 2010-11 school year, where tuition and fees are still less than $7,000 a year.  At an average courseload of 10 3-credit classes per year, that’s less than $700 a class.  How strange that the low cost of higher education in universities like mine doesn’t drive the debate!  Continue Reading »

39 Comments »

To paraphrase Sally Field when she won her Academy Award:  “They like me!  They really like me!”

I’ve been dying to tell you about this for more than 18 months now, but I’ve been waiting for the publication of Women’s America:  Refocusing the Past (7th edition) to announce that editors Linda K. Kerber, Jane Sherron DeHart, and Cornelia Hughes Dayton have included a substantial excerpt from chapter 4 of Abraham in Arms in this latest edition of their American women’s history reader. 

I’m especially pleased about this, not just because Women’s America is one of the top two women’s history readers*, and not just because I’m in the company of leaders in my field like Sara Evans, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Mary Beth Norton, Jennifer Morgan, Carol Karlsen, Carol Berkin, Annette Gordon-Reed, Sharon Block, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and Jeanne Boydston, not to mention Dayton and Kerber themselves.  I’m also especially thrilled because they picked a chapter about women that I was particularly proud of, and which has gone largely unremarked upon by my reviewers, most of whom have been military historians who are much more interested in my chapters on guys and guns.  (Go figure!  They have all reviewed the book favorably, for which I am truly grateful.)  I wrote what I thought was some pretty interesting women’s history too–and I’m so gratified to know that top scholars in my field like Kerber and Dayton find value in my work.

From the editors’ introduction to “Captivity and Conversion:  Daughters of New England in French Canada,” p. 103:

Ann Little’s essay introduces us to the geopolitics of the second half of the colonial period.  Protestant England and Catholic France, along with their independent-minded Indian allies, engaged in a succession of imperial wars involving North American territory from the late seventeenth century through the Seven Years’ War of 1756-63.  In 1700, English settlers far outnumbered the 15,000 French soldiers, missionaries, fur traders, and habitants(farmers) clustered chiefly in settlements along the St. Lawrence River.  However, the English occupied only a narrow sliver along the eastern seaboard, while the French claimed authority (and established mutually adventageous relations with native groups) from Louisiana to Canada along the Mississippi River and around the Great Lakes.  It was not at all clear if one European power (France, Spain, orEngland) could gain ascendancy over the continent as a whole.

The author takes us on a detective’s journey to recover the voices of and find out what happened to the children, teenagers, and grown women who were captured from New England towns and farms in wartime raids by Abenaki allies of the French.  Continue Reading »

27 Comments »

I got my copy of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom from the mail carrier just minutes ago.  I’ll let you know what I think about it once I’ve read it, since I know some of you are also FranzenFans.

Meanwhile, upon Mamie’s recommendation a few days ago in our discussion of Jennifer Weiner’s and Jodi Picoult’s critique of the American literary establishment , I’ve been reading Nina Baym’s classic essay, “Melodramas of Beset Manhood:  How Theories of American Fiction Exclude Women Authors,” American Quarterly 33: 2 (1981), 123-139.  Dandelion made the same point that Baym elaborates on in her essay about American literature:  “In my reading, it seems the bulk of American literature deals with main characters individuating and separating. Since it’s ‘selfish’ for women to individuate and separate, the bulk of American literature doesn’t involve women. If women writers are writing stories about women’s lives, then, they are, by definition, not going to be writing literature.”

Baym writes about the rewriting of the literary history of the early Republic that will sound familiar to those of you who have followed my comments on American literary fiction and criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  (Which is to say that I’ve been influenced by Baym for decades, not the other way around, surely!)  In short, twentieth-century literary critics pushed aside the authors of the first wildly popular American novels like Susannah Rowson (Charlotte Temple, among others) and Hannah Foster (The Coquette) in order to crown Charles Brockden Brown the first real author of the American novel.  (Now, late eighteenth century novels aren’t the most readable relicts in all of literary history, but Charles Brockden Brown is widely known as the most unreadable of all early American novelists.)  Baym explains:

[I]n his lively and influential book of 1960, Love and Death in the American Novel, Leslie Fielder describes women authors as creators of the “flagrantly bad best-seller” against which “our best fictionists”–all male–have had to struggle for “their integrity and their livelihoods.”  And, in a 1978 reader’s introduction to an edition of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Sydney J. Krause and S.W. Reid write as follows:

What it meant for Brown personally, and belles letters in America historically, that he should have decided to write professionally is a story unto itself.  Americans simply had no great appetite for serious literature in the early decades of the Republic—certainly nothing of the sort with which they devoured. . . the ubiquitous melodramas of beset womanhood, “tales of truth,” like [Rowson’s and Foster’s books.]

There you see what has happened to the woman writer.  She has entered literary history as the enemy.  The phrase “tales of truth” is put in quotes by the critics, as though to cast doubt on the very notion that a “melodrama of beset womanhood” could be either true or important.  Continue Reading »

9 Comments »

Srsly?

Check out this protest by some writers of the coronation of Jonathan Franzen by the American literary establishment as the next Leo Tolstoy:

This time around a couple of best-selling female writers, Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Weiner, have tweeted their disdain for what they see as critical fawning over Franzen’s new novel, Freedom.

Weiner has even come up with a phrase to describe her feelings: Franzenfreude.

“Schadenfreude is taking pleasure in the pain of others,” Weiner says. “Franzenfreude is taking pain in the multiple and copious reviews being showered on Jonathan Franzen.”

But her angst is not just about the book — or even about Franzen himself.

“It’s about the establishment choosing one writer and writing about him again and again and again,” Weiner says, “while they are ignoring a lot of other worthy writers and, in the case of The New York Times, entire genres of books.”

So why Franzen, and not (for example) Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, or Barbara Kingsolver?  Gee:  I wonder!

“It’s just interesting to sort of stack them up against a Lorrie Moore or against a Mona Simpson — who write books about families that are seen as excellent books about families,” Weiner says. “And then to look at a Jonathan Franzen who writes a book about a family but we are told this is a book about America.”

Now, I really liked Franzen’s The Corrections, and I asked for Freedom for my birthday this year.  But Picoult and Weiner are absolutely correct.  As I have argued here before American literary fiction has no room for women.  Continue Reading »

52 Comments »

Over Ten Million Served:  Gendered Service in Lanugage and Literature Workplaces is a new book edited by Michelle A. Massé and Katie J. Hogan that raises two old questions:  1) Why don’t academic workplaces value service and honor it in career advancement to the degree it should be, and 2) How is this undervaluing of service implicated in the gendering of service as feminized (and therefore volunteer/underpaid/unrewarded) carework?  A brief interview with the editors is at Inside Higher Ed today.

These conversations about service are like conversations about the weather, in that everyone talks about it all of the time but no one does anything about it.  In our current state of crisis on university faculties–with the adjunctification of the profession in the past twenty years plus our soon-to-be double-dip recession–are we likely to finally do anything about it now?  Or are we even less likely, because of the state of overall economic crisis?  My sense is that few of us feel motivated to go that “extra mile” in the face of rescissions, cutbacks, salary freezes, and even furloughs.

For those of you interested in thinking about our state of crisis in American universities more generally should see the reviews by Tenured Radical and Jesse Lemisch at New Politics of Higher Education: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids – And What We Can Do About It by Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus.  Apparently, liberal arts professors who make $100,000 and spend only 6 hours a week in the classroom, take sabbaticals, and conduct research (the nerve!!!) are as much of the problem as running farm clubs for the NBA and the NFL and CEO-sized salaries for university presidents and other administrators.  (Does anyone ever say that football coaches only work three hours on Saturdays in the fall, because that’s when their teams play?  I never hear that for some reason, yet here we have the familiar accusation that if professors aren’t leading a class every single minute of the day, then they’re not working.)  Continue Reading »

19 Comments »