Historiann

Maybe because it’s almost back-to-school time, but vaccinations are in the news on my blogroll.  Pal MD has an unintentionally hillarious post about some scandalously stupid reportage on a so-called “victim” of Gardasil.  (Longtime readers will recall that support for inoculation/vaccination are just about the only thing that Historiann has in common with Cotton Mather!) 

She reports that she went to the ER and was told she was likely having a stroke, and was sent home to return if it got worse. Now, I realize we’re getting third-hand information, but a reporter is supposed to clarify this. No one who goes to the hospital with a “stroke” is sent home to see if it gets worse.

Uhm, wouldn’t a real reporter dump the lady boo-hooing about her off-label use of Gardasil, and instead, you know, figure out which local hospital is sending home people suffering from strokes?  Now that’s a man-bites-dog story if I’ve ever heard one!  Just go read the whole thing to feel teh stupid and how it burns.  He’s got another recent post about how people with medical degrees need to take back vaccination education, instead of leaving it to the cranks, the quacks, and the religiously insane anti-vaxers.

And speaking of quacks and cranks, our friend Knitting Clio (who is not herself a crank or a quack at all) reported last week that her friendly neighborhood chiropractor–who has been of great assistance with her back pain–is now giving helpful seminars in local tea-shops about the dangers of vaccination.  She writes about the hazards of this woo-peddling:  “Take Colorado [ed. note-- please!], where the rate of vaccination (75%) is below what is needed for herd immunity.  Between 1996 and 2005, 208 adults and 32 children in Colorado died of diseases that could most likely have been prevented by vaccinations. The state spends millions of dollars per year caring for children and adults with diseases such as pertussis (whooping cough), influenza, and measles that could have been prevented by vaccination.”  (Side note:  why do chiropractors hate the vax?  I’ve seen and heard of it before, but what’s the reason for it?)

The struggle over knowledge about vaccination is a cautionary tale about the dangers of professional complacency in the face of overwhelming success.  This is a paradox:  when an evidence-based consensus emerges within a profession and there are no professionals who truly disagree with the consensus in the main, that’s when movements propelled by outsiders (but legitimized by disgruntled or marginalized insiders) feel emboldened to challenge the consensus.  It’s not just primary-care physicians who have to worry about this–it’s also anthropologists and biologists, whose professional knowledge of Charles Darwin and the significance of his theories have been vigorously challenged by people outside of universities and without any professional credentials.  Historians also have had strange ideological struggles emerge out of what was a well-documented consensus on the facts of, for example, the Holocaust, the causes of the U.S. American Civil War, and the history and meaning of the Confederate flag. 

In all of these cases, a hardy band of conspiracy-minded and/or magical thinkers was able to gin up enough popular support to convince other neutral observers that there might be a scholarly ”controversy” where none in fact existed among the actual scholars.  Does this happen because there are a few determined cranks and quacks still inside each profession, and they’re just very good at finding allies outside the profession because they no longer have allies within?  Or do political movements seize upon those few disaffected professionals, flattering them and giving them an appreciative audience so that they’ll serve as scholarly figureheads?  In all of these cases, it seems that there are a few professionals who are willing to sign on to provide a ”respectable” face to the fake controversy–David Irving in the case of Holocaust denial, for example, or Michael Behe for ”Intelligent” Design?  These credentialed intellectuals were happy to provide a presentable face to deeply disreputable, and even dangerous, ideas. 

Fight the woo, within and without your profession, and remember that things like “evidence” and “overwhelming scholarly consensus” mean nothing if we don’t continue to explain exactly what the evidence is and what the consensus means.

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UPDATED BELOW–IT’S A MUST-READ!

I’m as much into the corny pageantry of politics as anyone–I marched with the Weld County Dems last week in the Stampede Parade, after all, dodging horse poop with Congressman Mark Udall, and I’ll probably park myself in front of the TV to watch the next president’s inauguration, as I have ever since Ronald Reagan’s second inauguration in 1985.  But, does anyone else think it may be a little risky for Barack Obama to ditch the many millions of dollars for rent and renovation of the Pepsi Center in Denver in favor of renting out the even bigger venue of Invesco Field (formerly Mile High Stadium) for his acceptance speech?  (This is the convention that’s already having fundraising problems, after all!)  If he wins the election, this move may look providential, or even presidential–but if he doesn’t win, what will this stunt look like?

Has Obama learned nothing from Commander Codpiece’s ridiculous ”Mission Accomplished” speech on May 1, 2003, when he announced that ”major combat operations in Iraq have ended?”  The photo at left is the image that embodies the arrogant faux-masculinity, incompetence, and all-around a$$hattery of George W. Bush.  (The photo of him surveying the damage of Hurricaine Katrina from 37,000 feet is a close second, and I must admit, there are plenty to choose from, h/t Susie at Suburban Guerrila.)  This picture confirms what so many of us knew all along about Bush:  that he was a boy playing at dress-up, not a man capable of being President.  Will the Obama campaign announce next week that they’ve invited the pope to crown him Emperor, so that Obama can grab the crown and perform the second autocoronation in world history?  Napoleon was a successful emperor, at least until he wasn’t, and this painting by David below (The Coronation of Emperor Napoleon I Bonaparte) still makes him look like a presumptuous jerk, more than 200 years later:

The images of U.S. Presidents and presidential candidates that become iconic are those that capture a widely recognized idea or set of ideas about the person in question.  (Please note that I didn’t say these photos capture a truth about these men and women, although they may do that, too.  In some cases below, the photos capture a moment that’s used to caricature the men in question, and have little if anything to do with the truth of their character or their performance as president.)  Thus, the iconic image of Lyndon Johnson holding his beagle Him by the ears–everyone knew Johnson was a crude man and a bully, and this photo summed it all up:

When Michael Dukakis stepped out of that tank 20 years ago, the iconic photograph of him (at right) sealed his fate.  He looked too goofy to be a “Commander in Chief,” although the photo opportunity was originally intended to beef up his military credentials.  So much for good intentions!

Bob Dole’s fall off of a speaking platform during his 1996 presidential campaign cemented his image (unfairly) as a bumbling older man who may not have the stamina for the presidency.  In this case, it’s an iconic video of the pratfall, rather than a still photo.  Similarly, the iconic image of Bill Clinton as president was probably a video of him shaking his finger and proclaiming, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”  Everyone knew he was a tough dog to keep on the porch–and most suspected that he was untruthful.  (Lying about sex?  Who does that?)

The iconic image of the John F. Kennedy presidency was perhaps not one of the president himself, but rather the photo of his family with his little son John Jr. giving him a final salute as his casket passes by.  The image at left captures the feeling of lost opportunities and lost innocence, for both the young family and the nation.

I suppose that if Obama avoids pseudomilitary clothing, animal cruelty, and leaves his sceptre and main de justice  at home, the Mile High acceptance speech will probably work out just fine for him.  But, it seems to me that in a time of war, global environmental crisis, and economic peril for most Americans, a little modesty and humility would go a long way, especially after the breadless circuses we’ve been treated to for the past seven and a half years.  Being photographed speaking to a stadium filled with 76,000 people, after a warm-up by Bruce Springsteen or Stevie Wonder–well, that seems to confirm a lot of suspicions about Obama that even many Democrats have–that it’s all about him, Barackstar Obama, and that it’s not about the greater good of the Democratic Party or the country. 

A friend of mine who has volunteered for Obama and has regularly donated to his campaign sent me some initial thoughts about the Mile High speech, after receiving an e-mail from the campaign offering her a chance to win tickets to the speech if she donates still more money:

I feel like the Obama folks are convinced that his supporters require nothing but being able to bask in his presence. We’re not concerned with silly things like his policy decisions, or a sense of his stance on key issues, like abortion or gun control. Give us the possibility of 15 seconds in the man’s presence, and we’re satisfied. Its demeaning and irritating.

Whose party is it, anyway?  I mean both the one in Denver next month, and the one that calls itself “Democratic.”  (But, I will give Obama bonus points if his first words at Mile High are, “Hello Cleveland!”)

UPDATE, Tuesday afternoon:  Chris Bowers at Open Left reports (via Iowa Indepdendent) that “the the Obama campaign is not integrating downticket campaigns into a ‘coordinated campaign’ structure. Instead, local Democratic staff are being fired and replaced with Obama staff.”  Chris continues, “As such, what is really disturbing about these charges is that the promise Obama’s campaign and movement held out for a fifty-state strategy that supported downticket candidates everywhere could be a mirage. If local staff are being fired, coordinated campaigns are being abandoned, and everything is replaced with Obama-focused infrastructure, then this isn’t really party building, it isn’t really a fifty-state strategy, and it isn’t really a movement. It is, instead, an entirely top-down organization serving a single purpose: electing Barack Obama.”  Now you’re catching on, Chris!

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UPDATED BELOW, 7/7/08

Never mind that he’s a tough and cool politician now.  Never mind that he looks like Captain Scarlet’s boss, Colonel White, Commander in Chief of Spectrum.  Gen. Wesley Clark was the Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO.  Do you know what that means?  Well, neither do I, at least not exactly, but I do know that that’s about the greatest job title ever.  Most of the media morons piling on Wes Clark this week aren’t fit to shine even the tiniest bar on his chestful of medals.  But there they go, like good little lapdogs, chasing after a manufactured “controversy” that benefits the Republican presidential candidate.  When questioned by Bob Schieffer about John McCain’s qualifications for the presidency on Face the Nation Sunday, Clark made the sensible point that “I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.”  (Here’s a good rundown of this week’s fauxtrage, h/t to Sarah at Corrente.)

Aside from proving that they’re so not over the huge crush they’ve had on John McCain since 1999, many in the media have also once again illustrated their utter ignorance of military service.  (These two things are interrelated.  Many people in the media, especially men, tend to be deferential of military service in the peculiar fashion of those who never served yet fetishize military experience.)  If Michele Norris had gone to a service academy instead of the University of Wisconsin, do you think she would have challenged Clark like this today on All Things Considered?

When you yourself were a candidate for president, you touted your own military service. And I seem to remember you saying that that was part of what made you a well-qualified candidate to sit in the Oval Office.

That’s right:  tragically unlucky Lieutenant Commander = Supreme Allied Commander Europe of NATO.  There’s no difference!  So, either military experience matters, or it doesn’t, yes or no, and the media is too lazy or stupid to ask useful questions or make evaluative judgments.  Apparently, the bad actors who ran Abu Ghraib have the same qualifications to run for president as Sergeant York.  I think I heard Clark’s eyeballs roll back in his head at this point in the interview, and yet he still answered Norris very patiently:

I did lead the armed force of NATO to a successful military action that saved a million and a half Albanians. I did make the recommendations on targeting. I did go to heads of state and ministers of defense and ministers of foreign affairs, the North Atlantic council, and helped hold NATO together. So I not only saw war at the bottom, but I saw war at the top.

Duh.  Can’t the media see that they’re being played like a fiddle?  The last thing McCain wants is for Wes Clark to be Barack Obama’s running mate, because McCain knows that Supreme Allied Commander beats unlucky Lieutenant Commander ever time, and Clark’s long and deep military credentials would give the Obama ticket a hell of a lot of gravitas.  This whole fracas was a masterful example of the bitch-slap theory of politics, designed to test Obama and, perhaps more importantly, to disqualify Clark as a Vice Presidential candidate.  And unfortunately, the media weren’t the only ones who fell for it this week.  (Confidential to B.O.:  Distancing yourself from the Supreme Allied Commander because the Republicans want you to makes you look weak.  You’re the one who got rolled, friend.)

UPDATE, 7/7/08:  Via TalkLeft, Digby notes that Clark is off of the Obama campaign.  Mission accomplished, indeed!  When will Democrats stop taking orders from Republicans?  When, my Lord, when?

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I’m a few months late with this, but my across-the-street neighbor forwarded it to me just last week (h/t Del!), and I thought it was thought-provoking.  In an essay called “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus,” Clay Shirky writes about the parallels between the trauma induced by the Industrial Revolution in England in the eighteenth century, and the anxiety provoked by the surplus of time that fossil fuels, labor unions, and the Welfare State brought us in the mid- to late Twentieth Century in the West.  In eighteenth-century Britain, he writes,

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

He then goes on to argue that for the past 60 years, TV, like gin, has served as a pain-killing distraction for a few generations until people woke up and figured out what to do with the possibilities of this new era.  It’s a provocative essay about the possibilities of Web 2.0 and other interactive media, and proposes that we’re on the cusp of taking advantage finally of “cognitive surplus.”  He relates a conversation with a TV producer, who is attached to the Old Media model of We Produce/You Consume, and who was resistant to hearing his ideas about the possibilities of interactivity.  About on-line gamers, she asks, “where do they find the time?”  Of course they have the time, Shirky writes, because they’re not watching television!

So that’s the answer to the question, “Where do they find the time?” Or, rather, that’s the numerical answer. But beneath that question was another thought, this one not a question but an observation. In this same conversation with the TV producer I was talking about World of Warcraft guilds, and as I was talking, I could sort of see what she was thinking: “Losers. Grown men sitting in their basement pretending to be elves.”

 

At least they’re doing something.

 

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

Well, Historiann always had a thing for the Professor herself, but then he didn’t really have a lot of male competition on the island now, did he?  (Mr. Howell?  The Captain?  Gilligan?)  And, I sure spent long afternoons after school with my brother watching old episodes of Gilligan’s Island, Lost in Space, and then usually a M*A*S*H* re-run.  And we both have advanced degrees!

I think he’s got an interesting argument, but here’s my question for you, dear readers:  I’ve looked for books or articles about eighteenth-century England that makes the argument outlined above, and I can’t find it.  It’s now been 17 years since I read intensively in British history, and my readings were more on the seventeenth-century, pre-industrial side of things rather than on the later end of the long eighteenth-century and the proto-industrial revolution side of things.  Can you European historians help me out?  I assume it would have been published in the 1970s or 1980s, given how old I think Shirky must be with all of those Gilligan’s Island references.  I may have been casting my search net too narrowly, as it looks like cultural histories of gin and gin consumption are more of a 1990s and 2000s kind of thing.  What book is Shirky thinking of?  What do you think of his comparison of historical eras?  Is he onto something, or is he all wet?

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(Ali G glossary here–scroll down for “respek.”)  One of the disturbing issues raised in the li’l women’s history and Berkshire Conference hoedown we’ve been having around here lately is that of respek–or the lack of respek, more properly–afforded not just mid-career and junior schmucks like Historiann and Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar, but even to senior women scholars.  Go read here and here (in the comments) for descriptions of the two sessions last month at the 2008 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in honor of the career of Susan Mosher Stuard (h/t to New Kid on the Hallway–thanks, baby!), one of only two women’s historians that Historiann worked with in her entire undergraduate career.  (And Stuard taught at Haverford College, while Historiann majored in History at Bryn Mawr!  Shocking!)  Read those descriptions, and gaze in wonder at the obnoxiousness of a few men, young and old, who are just full of advice for the first generation of women’s historians! 

Have you ever met Merry Wiesner-Hanks?  Do you really want to be that guy who thought he was schoolin’ MW-H?  Or Connie Berman?  Or Judith Bennett?  I don’t think so.  Because even if I could imagine an alternative universe where you would be more right than them about women’s history, you’d still look like a jerk.  Come to think of it, you’d look a lot like Ali G!  “I was finkin’, that women history, right?  Is pre’ty much th’history of bonin’!  Of womens being boned by the mens, right?  And then servin’ the mens tea, or wha’ever.”  It’s funny how our profession, which is supposedly so hung up on rank and authority, isn’t so much when it comes to women with rank and authority.  Tips for toads:  if you don’t know too much about a particular field of inquiry, then maybe ask an informational question rather than tell the people who invented that field of inquiry what they need to do to satisfy your demands.

Respek, man.  Fink abou’it.  Peace, out.

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So much to blog about, so little time when one is writing pointless books about irrelevant (is it redundant to say they’re female?) people that will nevertheless destroy the historical profession!  Taking a break from my vulgar colonial schemes to corrupt the history and memory of the eighteenth century, here’s what I found recently in the twenty-first century:

• The pay gap in academia is worse at R-1s, and it starts at the moment of hire.  (Good news for those of you at SLACs, CCs, and regional universities!  Right?)  The intrepid Scott Jaschik reports that “[a]t research universities, even controlling for variables such as discipline and numbers of papers published and other factors, there is an unexplained 9 percent salary gap that favors men.”  Whoodathunkit?  Only everyone who reads Historiann.com!
• Teh funny:  via Notorious Ph.D., a blind-reviewer voodoo doll.  I’m going to buy two.
• Tenured Radical explains (with mostly small words that even the ig’nant can understand) why women’s history is important. 
• Another Damned Medievalist at Blogenspiel has two posts up about the Berks.  One features a primer about how to get ready for the 2011 conference, as well as some compliments about the conference.  (I am sure the 2011 Program Committee will be happy to build on the numbers of medieval panels, roundtables, and workshops featured in 2008!)  The other post, Transformative Conferences, features a discussion in the comments about the fracas at the panel in honor of Susan Mosher Stuard in Kalamazoo last month, when a man stood up to suggest that perhaps women’s history was too important to be left to women historians!  (As if!  Yeah, the men were going to get around to women’s history, when a bunch of women showed up and started making trouble and smearing menstrual blood all over the seats at conferences!)  Hey, medievalists:  I’ve been hearing whispers about this for weeks now–you have to let us Americanists in on the gossip, too!  (At least tell Historiann, who remembers Susan Stuard fondly from her undergraduate days, and whose BFF is a medievalist.)  I’m glad they did a panel in Stuard’s honor, and what a fitting send-off into retirement was the learned comment by the Venerable Bede there.  Nice work, dude!
• Brett Holman offers le dernier mot on this manufactured controversy at Airminded, which reminds me of that old bumper sticker:  “Against abortion?  Don’t have one.“  Don’t like women’s and gender history?  Then don’t do it, but STFU!  (It seems so obvious, doesn’t it?)  Thanks, Brett!
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• Knitting Clio schools Hendrik Hertzberg, and calls out a lot of the bullcrap prounouncements on African American history and American women’s history by the ig’nant class of elites who dominate our political discourse.  (That cowgirl knows her bullcrap!)
• Oh, and the sexy cowgirl picture?  This one is for commenter Fratguy, who I think has a little crush on the cowgirls here at Historiann.  Come and get it!  (Here’s a close-up; click the top one for a larger view.)

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Well, it’s been a whirlwind of a conference, and worth the two-and-a-half years of planning that preceded it!  The weather was sunny (mostly), warm, and fair.  All of the panels and roundtables I attended were full of fascinating people who had great conversations with their audiences.  (And those I didn’t attend I heard were also really good too–although if opinions differ here, I appreciate that no one wanted to complain about the conference this weekend.  There will be plenty of time for accusations and recriminations after the fact.)

Some observations and highlights:

• Thursday night’s plenary session called “THE CHANGING (?) STATUS OF WOMEN IN THE HISTORICAL PROFESSION:  PROGRESS AND CHALLENGES,” was in fact more about the persistent challenges than any measurable progress in the past 20 years.  Noralee Frankel from the American Historical Association (AHA) told us about the Rose report in 1970 on the status of women historians, and about the 2005 report–and showed us how we keep making the same observations and recommendations again and again, and how relatively little has changed over these 38 years (Historiann’s lifetime!)  The big gains were made in the 1970s and up through the late 1980s and the early 1990s, but we’ve flatlined since then according to Robert Townsend, also from the AHA.  He reported that as of 2003, women made up only 30% of history faculty in the U.S., well below our representation among History Ph.D.s (in the low 40s, about what it’s been for the past twenty years.)  And of course, there are still more women at the Assistant level than at the Associate or Full Professor rank–in about the same proportion as twenty years ago.  So clearly women are not moving up through the ranks as they should.  Elizabeth Lunbeck of Vanderbilt University (and author of the 2005 report) made the stunned observation at the end of an evening full of bad news:  “I’m struck by how we’ve been drawn in repeatedly” by a progressive Whig narrative that says that equity is on its way, ”when the situation [for women faculty] remains the same.” 
• At the conclusion of this rather depression plenary panel, I had the honor of announcing a new article prize, the Mary Maples Dunn Prize, which will honor the best article in early American women’s history by an untenured scholar published in The William and Mary Quarterly that uses gender as a primary analytical category.  Mary chaired the Thursday plenary, so her complete shock and surprise was visible to everyone there in the Ted Mann Concert Hall.  (It’s been such a huge success that it looks like we’ll be able to endow the prize!)  If you’re an untenured scholar in this field, sharpen your pencils and get to work.   
• If we made a conference documentary, it might be called 2008:  The Year Cultural History Broke.  (With apologies to the classic grunge rock movie by David Markey.  I still love you Courtney and Thurston!)  This was an unexpected but fascinating sub-theme of a good number of the panels that I saw and that I heard about:  get thee to an archive!  There’s lots of new knowledge there just waiting for us.  (I’ll post more on this topic later, for sure.)
• Tenured Radical was there, and cross-posting about the conference at Cliopatria.  I met Knitting Clio for the first time, too–I’m sure she’ll share some of her observations and experiences at the conference, too.  (I hope she slept better at the Holiday Inn Friday night!  I wonder who the troublesome guest was, if she was with the Berks…)  TR is apparently a big Ramones fan, and Antoinette Burton of the University of Illinois can dance!
• Terri Snyder of California State University, Fullerton, put together a brilliant panel, RESEARCHING AND WRITING THE LIVES OF UNFREE WOMEN for Friday afternoon.  Once again, we learned how stupid and untrue is the claim that “you can’t do research on women, especially unfree women, because there are no sources.”  Most of the lives uncovered for us in this panel were the result of painstaking research in state and local archives–and their stories should encourage us to find and tell some new life stories of our own.  And it turns out that Annette Gordon-Reed is just as beautiful and as brilliant as I always thought she must be–plus, she’s really nice, too.
• To borrow Muriel McClendon’s term for her group of allies on the faculty at UCLA, there were a lot of POW’s (Pissed Off Women) at the RETHINKING GENDER, FAMILY, AND SEXUALITY IN THE EARLY MODERN ATLANTIC session Saturday morning.  The roundtable discussion should perhaps have been called, THE PROBLEM WITH ‘THE ATLANTIC WORLD’ PARADIGM.  The early modern European historians and cultural studies scholars there–panelists Karin Wulf and Bianca Premo, and audience members Allyson Poska and Lisa Vollendorf, for example, sounded an alarm about the precipitous decline they’ve seen in dissertations and new scholarship on women, gender, sexuality, and the family.   
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• The reception Saturday night for the journal Gender and History was in the Frank Gehry-designed Weisman Art Museum, which sits majestically on the Mississippi River.  Walking over the bridge from the West Campus to the museum, it loomed in the sunset like the City of Oz.  (See my not-great photo at left, and at the top of the post is my snapshot of Roy Lichtenstein’s World’s Fair Mural, which greets you as you enter the Weisman.)  What a spectacular setting for the reception–made only more dramatic by lightning strikes nearby as the city got hit by a brief thunderstorm.

I’ll report more later–I’m going back to the Weisman with friends who like me don’t fly out until this evening.  Thanks so much to those of you who introduced yourselves as readers and commenters–I hope you’ll add your thoughts and observations below!

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Tom Noel, who teaches at the University of Colorado, Denver, and is known locally as “Dr. Colorado,” has a nice overview of the 1908 Democratic National Convention the last time it was in Denver.  There, Democrats officially nominated William Jennings Bryan for the third time, only to see him go down to defeat again in November.  Noel notes in his article that women’s suffrage was a major issue at the convention, since Colorado white women’s right to vote had been recognized since 1893.  Women from Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming attended the 1908 convention for the first time as delegates.

Apparently, historical talent runs in the Noel family, as his sister Jan Noel is a leading Canadian women’s historian at the University of Toronto, and one of the few who works on Francophone and pre-Confederation women’s history.  She’ll be on a panel at the Berkshire Conference next month called Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe and America, presenting a paper called “Alice (Clark) and the Looking Glass:  Searching for ‘Golden Ages’ among French, English, and American women, 1600-1800.”  English feminist Alice Clark (1874-1934) was one of the first women’s historians ever–her Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century was first published in 1919, and because it was so highly regarded (and the bibliography on women’s history remained so thin for 50 years) it was reprinted in 1968, 1982, and 1992.  (Thanks to Early Modern Notes for this excellent overview of Clark’s life and work.)  Along with Ivy Pinchbeck (1898-1982), whose Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 was first published in 1930 but reprinted again in 1969 and 1981, these pioneering authors owned the topic of English women’s labor history in the early modern period.  I read their books in graduate school in the early 1990s, and anyone working in early modern European women’s labor history has to grapple with them, so Noel’s re-visitation of Clark’s work is highly appropriate given the theme of the 2008 conference, “Continuities and Changes.”

I wonder if many women’s history researchers are (like me) indebted to women historians of Clark’s and Pinchbeck’s era.  Most of these women weren’t professionally trained, but with great intelligence and sensitivity, they invented social and cultural history in the late nineteenth century, and were arguably more widely read and are still better remembered than male historians writing within the conventions of the academy.  (See Bonnie G. Smith’s The Gender of History:  Men, Women, and Historical Practice for an eye-opening review of historiography and historians over the past 250 years.)  I could not have written my books* without the dogged research and guidance of amateur historians like C. Alice Baker (1833-1909, pictured at right), her younger protege Emma Lewis Coleman (1853-1942), and the unbelievably prolific Alice Morse Earle (1851-1911).  When my first book received its Library of Congress call number (F7.L68), I was extremely gratified and proud that my book will be shelved very near many of Earle’s books.  (She owns the F7.E section!) 

*(The second book is still a work in progress–alas!)

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Some people celebrate May Day like this, with May Poles, and white dresses, flowers, strawberries and cream, plays, singing, and drinking, drinking, drinking:

While other people commemorate it like this:

by calling it International Workers’ Day, with red flags, marches, calls for for justice, songs of solidarity (and perhaps drinking, drinking, drinking).  It’s good to hear that some people are celebrating May Day as a day of worker solidarity, with marches against the war and for immigrant workers’ rights.  And let’s all hope for a violence-free day in Los Angeles.  (h/t to reader John Burke for the inspiration and news on this year’s labor actions in San Francisco.)

It’s interesting to note the simultaneous revival of Elizabethan May Day revels at elite women’s colleges in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the emergence of May Day as International Worker’s Day, which was founded in 1891 in part to commemorate the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886.  I suppose those wealthy industrialist fathers of students at Bryn Mawr, Wellesley, Vassar, and Mount Holyoke were very interested in turning May Day into a spring festival that celebrated a romanticized European past rather than present-day industrial labor.  There are also interesting class and gender issues at work here in this juxtaposition, with the gentle Elizabethan tradition being revived among elite college-educated women (not that these ”New Women” weren’t also subversive in their own way, of course), versus the workers’ holiday, which was usually depicted in a way that centered on laboring men, as in the image to the right.

Greenpagan has lots more examples of the iconography of International Workers’ Day from around the world in the twentieth century.  Most of the images are of male workers, but there’s an Italian postage stamp that includes a women among a trio of workers, as well as a Chinese poster that includes a woman laborer.

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It’s a good day to be a boy genius:  Barack Obama once again swept two big primaries and overwhelmed Hillary Clinton yesterday in a Southern state primary.  Now all eyes turn to the Eastward, to see which way the Maine caucus will go.  UPDATE:  As the nation goes, so goes Maine, at least this weekend?  Obama wins another caucus in a walk–so far, with 59 precincts reporting, it looks like 57-42 for Obama.

 In other boy genius news:  NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday featured an interesting bit of trivia:  this winter is the 150th anniversary of the popularization of Felix Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” as a wedding recessional.  The credit (or blame) goes to the planners of the wedding of Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter Princess Victoria Adelaide Mary Louise to Frederick Wilhelm IV of Prussia, on January .  More interesting to me was the fact that Mendelssohn (1809-1847) composed the “Wedding March” as part his composition of music to accompany his favorite play, William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, at the age of 17.

But as classical music historian Robert Greenberg says in the interview, Mendelssohn was already an accomplished and ambitious composer who between the ages of 12 and 14 had composed four operas, twelve string symphonies, among others.  “He came from a wealthy banking family in Berlin, and his parents wanted only the best for their children,” Greenberg says in the interview.  “They were over-educated by any standards. Mendelssohn could speak multiple languages as a child, reading Homer in the original by the time he was 10. He was also an excellent water-colorist. Music was just another one of those things he mastered as a young man.”  It’s a good thing he accomplished so much at such young ages–he died at age 38 from a stroke.  Tragically, a stroke had killed his sister Fanny the previous year.  Brother and sister were very close–upon hearing of Fanny’s fatal stroke, Mendelssohn allegedly screamed and fainted away.  A rather Gothic flourish for a man known as the first of the great Romantic composers.

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