Historiann

Glitter on the highway! Hope your weekend travels are safe, fun, and loving!

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We want YOUR article!

Mary Berkery, the Managing Editor of the JWH e-mailed me last month to help spread the word about a new graduate student article prize.  Here are the details:

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I heard a rumor recently that Mary Beth Norton will retire from Cornell University this year*, and I was delighted to hear that she’ll be honored at a conference organized by a few of her recent students.  (Apparently, some special people got e-mailed invitations already; I guess mine must have fallen out of one of the fiberoptic Pony Express intertubes in Nebraska, or something!  Thanks to reader Perpetua for bringing it to my attention.)

On Friday, September 28th, participants will gather at the A.D. White House for a series of sessions inspired by distinct aspects of Professor Norton’s scholarship and teaching. That evening, attendees will continue the celebration at a catered reception at the Johnson Art Museum. The conference will conclude with a morning roundtable and brunch on Saturday, September 29th. If you are interested in contributing a brief paper to one of the sessions, please email Molly at mwarsh@tamu.edu or Susanah at ssromney AT gmail DOT com.

The conference is being organized by two of Professor Norton’s former students (and now historians), Susanah Shaw Romney, PhD ’00, and Molly Warsh, BA’99. The event has received generous support from Cornell’s History Department; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Society for the Humanities; and numerous other on-campus and off-campus entities.

You can go to the conference blog and sign up for updates by entering your e-mail address.  I hope that Mary Beth will get a good audience for this event–she has always been among the most enthusiastic of women’s historians, and a very generous mentor and colleague to junior scholars like me.  Continue Reading »

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Miss Susie had a baby, she threw it in the well

The baby went to heaven, Miss Susie went to HELL-o operator. . . Continue Reading »

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Military historian and American women’s historian Tanya L. Roth has written three useful and thought-provoking posts on her job search in the past academic year.  (Job seekers might especially want to check out her series:  Part I, Part II, and Part III here.)  She has some nice reflections on her approach to the market, her goals, and her reasons for taking a job in an independent school teaching history and English.  Congratulations, Tanya, and good luck with your classes this year!  You will be tired at the end of every day with all of those new lectures to write and all of those new lessons to plan.

But, I’m a little taken aback by Tanya’s explanation of her job choice as “giving up on academia,” or more neutrally, “leaving” academia.  She’s teaching English and history–which sounds pretty academic to me, and I’m sure her work life will look a very similar to the work lives of those of us teaching at colleges or universities.  (At least, it will look more like our lives than the lives of your average bricklayer, retail clerk, or attorney, for example.)  Maybe I’m tragically naive because I’ve never worked outside of a college or university environment (except for summer jobs in high school and college, of course)–and that well may be the case–but to my mind, teaching secondary school doesn’t seem like she’s “given up” on anything. Continue Reading »

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Squadratomagico has a nice description of how she came to have a solid draft of her second book:

Over the past two months, I pretty much doubled the size of my book manuscript. It went from readily fitting into a 1.5″ binder, with lots of extra room, to filling up a 2.5″ binder; I was writing about 4-5K words per week. There is more work to be done before I could even dream of sending it to a press — there are incomplete footnotes, directions to myself to amplify certain discussions, lots of polishing and streamlining to complete. In addition, over the past year I’ve been ruminating over a new dimension to my argument — a bigger, more exciting level of interpretation — and I need to integrate those ideas more thoroughly.

So, yes: there is a lot to do. But the fact remains that I have written a second book, even if only in draft. It was touch and go for a while, but I actually have a physical object now, a big pile of pages that I produced and that will someday be a bound volume with a cover and a title. For all those out there struggling: Continue Reading »

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Or, the trouble with Myrtle Malloy, anyway. What is Brad’s trouble, indeed?

This is an educational film with a surprisingly feminist twist, Continue Reading »

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Run, don’t walk, over to Flavia’s place to read about the data-crunching she’s done on surnames of married women whose wedding announcements appeared this summer in the New York Times:

So this weekend, my dears, I decided to do some valuable procrastination in the service of collecting cold hard marriage data. I skimmed the 500 most recent NYT wedding announcements, from May 1st until yesterday, and recorded how many women in heterosexual partnerships kept their last names, took their husbands’, or did something in between. I also recorded their ages.

.       .       .       .      .       .      

[A]rmed with a primitive spreadsheet, I decided to investigate. I can break the numbers down in detail in the comments if anyone cares, but the short version is this: of 450 heterosexual marriage announcements, 75% clearly indicated whether the bride was changing or keeping her name. Of that number, 30% kept their birth name outright, with an additional 10% “continu[ing] to use [their] name professionally”; hyphenating their last names with their husbands’; forming a new shared surname; or indicating that they would be using their maiden name as a middle name, à la Hillary Rodham Clinton. The remaining 60% took their husbands’ names.

Moreover, from this sample, there is not a strong correlation between the age of the bride and her decision to keep or change her name. Women who got married at age 26 and younger showed almost exactly the same 40/60 split as the data set as a whole. Continue Reading »

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She’s so sweet here and so young–who can resist? 

I’m off to Michigan–did you guess?  Please do summer the Historiann way: get plenty of fresh air, wear sunscreen and bug spray P.R.N., and give yourself and your animals plenty of water.  Blogging will resume once I’ve groomed and watered the horses.  Continue Reading »

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Living in the present reality is just too, too sad. Not for me personally, but for the Republic at large, and it just seems strange that summer is all popsicles and bike rides and the adult equivalent of day camps for me. (More on my recent summer adventures tomorrow, I hope.) So instead of ranting about all that again, how about a little fun? That’s right: the guy you know who just can’t lose. (Was I the only person who actually rooted for Ms. Musso and his sister?)

If only we could all be like Parker Lewis! And the lead actor, Corin Nemec, is still a working actor, so good for him. Continue Reading »

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