Historiann

Well, imagine my surprise when I returned from my recent short vacation to find this little invitation in the mail from the University of Colorado.  (While I live in Colorado and work at a university, CU is not my employer–I work at the old aggie school I affectionately refer to as Baa Ram U.)  My surprise turned to delight when I opened this fine, glossy card, to read that I am invited to meet the new president of the University of Colorado, about whom I’ve blogged quite a bit here, here, and here.  (My overall take on uncredentialed politicians who presume to lead universities is here.)  Check it out below–the party is at the Potterville Country Club.

Side note:  I’ve never seen an academic’s spouse advertised like a warm-up act, but I guess it’s just further proof of the different ways that politicians think compared to people in academia.  (I don’t even know if my current Dean is married, and although one of her predecessors was married, I never met his wife, even when he hosted a nice luncheon for junior faculty at his house.  And, I’ve never seen or heard anything featuring the presence of the wife of the current president of Baa Ram U. or his immediate predecessor.)  Does anyone else think this is strange?

Five years ago, I donated a modest sum to a scholarship in memory of the historian and CU Professor Emeritus Jackson Turner Main upon his death, and I suppose a good deed sent to the development office never goes unpunished, which is why I get invitations to all sorts of parties for fancy donors to CU.  As if!  It reminds me of the Christmas card I got from George W. Bush and family in 2004–I had been a major donor to Kerry, so I wonder if the Bushies were just reaching out in case I wanted to make friends with the other team in victory.  Yes–it was the official White House Christmas card.  I also wonder if they sent the card out to Kerry donors to gloat!  (Maybe that’s what Benson is doing to Historiann?  Probably not–as they old saying goes, money talks, bull$hit walks, and they don’t know about my secret identity as Historiann.)

So, anyway, back to the current invitation on my desk:  what do you think I should wear?  (The invitation says “business casual,” but I don’t even know what that is any more.)

8 Comments »

This rodeo is mostly kids-only competitors and was a benefit for Cystic Fibrosis research, although apparently after dark they do “open bull riding,” which means that anyone can give it a whirl.  (Not recommended!  Hint:  there’s a good reason why most pro Rodeo bull riders retire at twenty or twenty-one!)  These rodeos run every Saturday night in summertime, 4 to 11 p.m., and none of those children are watching TV, playing video games, or getting bored.  School-aged children participated in calf-riding and “mutton busting,” while teenagers rode the bulls.

At one of the first rodeos Historiann ever attended, my friends and I saw a nineteen year-old young man get absolutely stomped by a bull.  We had ringside seats, and the distraught mother ran down in front of us to see her son carried off by the paramedics.  The boy was hospitalized, but thankfully suffered no brain injuries or anything else irrevocable.  It’s a hard living, but those who do it look forward to “cowboy Christmas.”  Potterville boasts the World’s Largest 4th of July Rodeo.  Giddyup!

No Comments »

I’ll return to more Berks blogging soon, but this was too good not to pass on:  a colleague of mine is reading and translating an Arabic volume of letters and other writings by Egyptian writer Sayyid Qutb, the man who went on to write America as I Have Known It, and to become one of the intellectual fathers of contemporary radical Islam.  He recently sent along this quotation:  “And this is the small city of Greeley in which I’m now staying.  Indeed, it is beautiful, beautiful, giving the impression of a germinating plant in a dreamy garden.  Every house is like a shoot in a field, and each street is a path to a garden,” quoted in Salah ‘Abd al-Fatah al-Khalidi, Amrika min al-Dakhil bi Nizar Sayyid Qutb (Jidda: 1986), 60-1.

NPR did an in-depth exploration of the history of Greeley as a utopian temperence colony, and of Qutb’s stay in Greeley in the 1940s, (recording available here) where he studied at Colorado State Teachers College (now the University of Northern Colorado.  Regular readers know that Greeley is referred to as “Potterville” at Historiann.com.)  It may have been here in Greeley that Qutb became convinced that Americans were shallow, materialistic, sexually immoral, and spiritually impoverished.  For those who knew Greeley in the 1940s–or even for those who know the town today–this comes as something of a surprise!  (Well, at least the sexually immoral part.  It’s not all bad:  you can get a lot of work done and save a lot of money living in boring small-town America.)

I must say that landscaping and watering the high plains desert until it looks like southeastern Pennsylvania is troubling from a sustainability perspective, but it gets some pretty good results.  Qutb would be impressed!  Here are some photos from my garden on Tuesday afternoon–poppies and bachelor buttons on top, roses and more roses in the second and fourth photos, and snapdragons and yarrow in the third photo.  The roses are really abundant this year–and, unlike roses anywhere else in the world, they’re a no-maintenance garden standby here.  Just cut them back in late winter or early spring, feed them bone and blood meal 2-3 times, and admire the view.  (And yes, that’s Creepy Doll Head below, on a stake, standing guard over my herb garden with roses as a backdrop!)

9 Comments »

Thanks to all of the friends and family who called or e-mailed yesterday and today to see if famille Historiann was OK after the big tornado touched down not too far from Potterville, Colorado–Indyanna, Regius, Said Friend, etc.  (Our neighboring town of Windsor got creamed, however, and sadly, a man in an RV died in a campground in Potterville.  Fortunately, it was all just property damage in Windsor, without loss of life.)  We were pretty clueless in our corner of town.  The power went out for about 10-15 minutes a little after noon, but that was the worst we suffered.

There were more tornados sighted in the area this afternoon again.  This is really strange, since we live close enough to the mountains (in what they call the “rain shadow”) that we miss out on a lot of the weather that hits the Eastern plains.  We have occasional tornado warnings, but rarely does anything touch down this close to the mountains.  Rest assured, I’ll keep the radio on this weekend so that we can stay abreast of weather news.

1 Comment »

Date:  May 13, 2008

Time:  4:25 p.m.

Place:  Potterville, Colorado; corner of Mystreet and Oneblocknorth.

Found:  Intersex crossing sign.

(I know some jackass teenager did this with a Sharpie–but I’m choosing to read it as a comment on our restrictive and distorting gender binary and compulsory heterosexuality.  And, it’s the most interesting vandalism that I’ve ever seen in this town!)

At the 2008 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women next month, we’ve got a great panel that brings together disability studies, queer theory, and the history of sexuality in really innovative ways.  “How Do They Do It?:  Sexual Representations of Conjoined Twins in U.S. Culture” features Ellen Samuels on “Entertaining Millie and Christine McCoy:  Where Enslavement and Enfreakment Meet,” Alison Kafter on “Fabulist Past, Fabulist Future But no Queer Presence:  Desiring Disability in Sheila Jackson’s Half-Life,” and Cynthia Wu on “The Queer Pleasures and Frustrations of Chang and Eng’s Autopsy,” chaired by Ruth Alexander and with a comment by Catherine Kudlick.  Check out our program here!

5 Comments »

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!)

2 Comments »

Here in Potterville, Colorado, it’s the most beautiful two weeks of the year.  The many crabapple, apple, plum, peach, and cherry trees are in full bloom, as are the tulips; if the forsythia holds on, just about every flowering tree and bush in my yard will be abloom at the same time. 

What, you say?  Historiann lives in the High Plains desert?  What the hell is she doing with a veritable fruit orchard in her garden?  Trees are integral to the history of (the pseudonymous) Potterville, which started out in 1870 as a Utopian experiment called the Union Colony, and was organized around the principles of teetotalism, anti-capitalist communitarianism, and bringing trees to the Great American Desert.  Well, one of out three goals outlasted the first decade, and it makes for a spectacular show of blossoms in late April and early May.

According to Enduring Roots:  Encounters with Trees, History, and the American Landscape by Gayle Brandow Samuels (1999), town founder Nathan Meeker spent the princely sum of $1,490.00 on bringing Eastern trees west–apple trees, maples, and evergreens–and in the first season, watched most of them wither and die (pp. 97-99).  They were replaced by trees that were given much more water and attention, hence the odd landscape Potterville presents today:  when you cross the town line and kick the tumbleweeds out of the front grille of your car, you’re greeted with flora that recall the Delaware and Ohio River valleys. 

I’ve heard it suggested by local house museum docents that Meeker’s death was an indirect result of his sumptuous budget for trees.  Before coming to Colorado, Meeker was the agricultural editor of the New York Tribune, and the newspaper’s publisher, Horace Greeley, encouraged him to ”go west, young man,” and provided a great deal of financial backing for the fledgling Union Colony.  When Greeley died and his estate called in the loans, Meeker didn’t have the money, and legend suggests that it had gone to his profligate tree budget.  (I can’t verify that yet, however.)  So, in 1878 he took a job as an Indian agent on the Western slope at the White River Indian Agency, where he annoyed the Utes so much with his utopian reformist zeal (especially his insistence that they adopt his farming techniques) that the following year they rose up and killed him and took his wife Arvilla and youngest daughter Josephine captive, along with the other U.S. women and children in the settlement.  Their captivity was short lived–only 23 days–but Josephine had time enough to stitch together a fitted, fashionable dress made of Indian blankets, which is on permanent display at the local museum.  It was rumored that when released, she was pregnant by a Ute man, a rumor that gained credence when she was sent to Washington, D.C. to work for a Colorado congressman.  However, she died of pneumonia shortly thereafter, before any putative child would have been born.  (Source for the verified information in this paragraph is here.)  Was Meeker doomed by his commitment to importing an Eastern landscape to the high plains desert?

Rumors of pregnancy resulting from captivity are an occasionally recurring theme in the history of North American Indian captivity.  There was a suggestion that 170 years earlier and 2,400 miles away, Esther Wheelwright conceived a child in captivity.  (I haven’t written about Wheelwright here for a while–to recap, she’s the topic of the book I’m writing now.)  In The Unredeemed Captive(1994) on p. 92, John Demos quotes the one letter I’ve ever seen with that suggestion that “mr whellrites dafter is with child by an indian.”  The letter, dated February 28, 1710, was written by former captive Esther Williams, who received the intelligence about “whellrites dafter” and other captives from another local ex-captive, John Arms, who returned home in the winter of 1710.  I’ve never credited the report–because at the time, Esther was enrolled at the Ursuline convent school, and had been since January 1709.  Moreover, she was a month shy of her fourteenth birthday in late February 1710, and far, far too young to have been considered sexually mature or marriageable in either Abenaki or colonial French society.  And because the goal of both cultures was to include her in family life and persuade her to remain by gentle means, I think it’s highly unlikely that she was raped.  Finally, there is no other evidence that corroborates this one account, suggesting to me that Esther Williams was either misinformed or she misreported information about another captive.

Last week, someone found their way to Historiann.com by googling the phrase “Esther Wheelwright pregnant by Abenaki.”  If you’re still out there, the above paragraph is my two cents.  As for the connections between crabapple trees and Esther Wheelwright–I dunno.  Something about captives thriving in a new environment?  The challenges of “going native” in a new environment?  The perserverence of Esther Wheelwright, Josephine Meeker, and the flowering almond in my back garden that will not die? 

6 Comments »

The Denver Post has a curious and lengthy front-page article today on the failure of higher ed in Colorado to serve and graduate Latino/a students.  This is a serious concern, because more and more of our college-age population are Latino/a.  To wit,      “[s]tatistics show Latino students are less likely than any other group to graduate from high school, and at most Colorado four-year and community colleges, they are more likely to leave before finishing a degree than their white counterparts.”  David Longanecker, the “executive director for the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education and former assistant education secretary under President Clinton, said the higher education system has to change.  ‘In many respects, it’s provided a sieve to differentiate the able from the less-able students,’ he said. ‘We need to take students and teach them what they need to know rather than weed out the wheat from the chaff.’”

The curious part of the article is in the discussion of possible solutions to the problem.  For the most part, universities tout special mentoring programs, but however well intended, we all know that those are “solutions” run on the cheap and that they have more PR value than actual value.  (The effective pre-college mentoring programs the article discusses look good–but the people who run them admit that they can’t serve the tremendous need in the state.)  The article claims–without any documentation, and apparently, without any actual research–that “[g]one are the days of 250-person lecture halls.”  Oh really?  Historiann’s lower-level surveys are capped at 123, and she has to make-do with only one graduate TA (and that, friends, is a very new development.  Most of our survey courses have been taught by people without TAs or graders, and most often by adjuncts or “special faculty” who teach two or three sections of their surveys per semester, in addition perhaps to one or two upper-level courses for a total of 300-400 students per semester.)  Does that sound much more hands-on and student-centered than 250-person lectures?

We all know what works, but I’m quite confident the people of my good state won’t want to pay for it.  What works is what Amherst College and other elite liberal arts colleges have done for 200+ years–small classes where faculty and students can hold each other accountable for their work.  Capping all classes at 30, especially lower-level introductory classes, centering courses more on reading, writing, and disucssion rather than on passive listening to lectures, and asking faculty to teach no more than 2 classes per semester, will ensure that students at all levels of the curriculum will get the attention and mentoring they need and deserve.  No responsible faculty member ever said, “I think teaching works best when I’m in an auditorium on a stage where I can’t see past the third row of students, and where students are very confident that I don’t know them and won’t notice that they’re not attending class.”  In my career, I’ve never heard someone make the argument that that style of teaching was their pedagogical ideal.

Education at large state universities is higher education on the cheap, and quite frankly, you get what you pay for.  This system works acceptably well for middle-class and upper-class students who went to good high schools and whose parents attended college, because they have an educational background and parental expectations and resources to help them get through Freshman and Sophomore years when they’re in the large, impersonal General Education classes.  (The system certainly isn’t ideal for them either, but they’ve got a cultural and material cushion that most first-generation college students don’t have.)  And by the way–paying faculty a living wage for teaching two classes capped at 30 students each also means that universities would have to wean themselves of adjunct and “special” faculty who teach four or five classes per semester, plus the equivalent load over the summer.  It goes without saying that faculty teaching four or five classes of thirty students each will be stretched too thin to offer the kind of support that their students need.  Reading, thinking, writing, and discussing should be at the center of higher education, and they are activities that technology can enhance sometimes, but can never replace.  And there’s no way to do it on the cheap unless you’re satisfied with Wal-Mart results.

The fact is that our current regime of higher education works for the wealthy, who can always pay $40,000-$50,000 a year for private colleges and elite universities for their children.  In fact, by refusing to allow state universities to offer a comparable education and forcing them to operate on the cheap, the system enhances the value attached to a private college or university education.  The privilege they’re paying for, in part, is the exclusivity of their degrees.  Why should state governments enhance the caché of Amherst College or of Stanford University, instead of trying to offer the students at their state universities a comparable experience?  Enough of this welfare for the wealthy!  Enough!

19 Comments »

Colorado Democratic Congressman (and candidate for the open U.S. Senate seat) Mark Udall is a happy, happy man this week.  And, oddly enough, it’s all due to the Colorado State University archives.  Yesterday, the Denver Post published a story about his presumptive opponent, Republican Bob Schaffer (pictured below right), based on research in the CSU archives.  Schaffer, a former 4th district Congressman, placed the papers documenting his 1997-2002 career in the U.S. House of Representatives in the CSU archives.  To his credit, Schaffer donated his papers without any restrictions–an admirable gesture upholding the values of transparency and open access that historians and archivists revere.  (I’m not otherwise a fan of Schaffer, but I wish more public servants shared these values.  I respect tremendously his decision to open his records, although I’m sure this week he’s regretting it.) 

Unfortunately for Schaffer, the story was unflattering, to say the least, as it documented a 1999 trip he took to the Mariana Islands courtesy of disgraced former lobbyist and felon Jack Abramoff.  The Post article says that the Congressman and his wife Maureen stayed “for free at a palm-studded beach resort and, besides factories, also toured historical sites and met with clients of Preston-Gates, Abramoff’s firm, according to a copy of the trip’s agenda archived in Schaffer’s congressional papers.”  (Who says working in an archives is boring now, eh?) 

Items manufactured in the Mariana Islands can display a “made in the U.S.A.” label, although they are exempt from U.S. minimum wage laws and most immigration laws, and have been repeatedly found by the Department of Labor and the Department of the Interior to be in violation of workers’ rights and human rights:  aside from the sweatshop-style garment factories on the island and the slum-like dormitories for workers, U.S. government agencies also have proof of women being forced into sex work, and pregnant laborers being forced to have abortions.  Later in the day yesterday, the Denver Post published his campaign’s denial that he ever met with Abramoff, knew him, or spoke with him about anything, and today’s paper has a report that Schaffer endorsed a key Abramoff ally for governor of the Northern Mariana Islands.

Much of the research for the article, as well as the photos that illustrate it, was done at the CSU archives.  (Click here for a guide to the Schaffer papers.)  Historiann’s source deep, deep inside the archives says that many people, especially journalists, have been all over his papers in the past few months, no doubt because of his current run for office.  The source writes, “I know a permission to publish was granted. . . the day before [the article was published] and a rush order to scan the photos went through.”  The source also says that the AP has contacted the archive for permission to publish the photos, too.  Let’s hope that this doesn’t discourage public officials from donating their papers to archives without restrictions–but unfortunately I’m pretty sure that every politician in Colorado is making a note never to do allow such open access.  I’m also pretty sure every other politician in Colorado–and perhaps around the country–thinks that Schaffer is a sucker for doing just that.

UPDATE, 4/12/08:  Fiction in the archives?  From the Denver Post again:  Schaffer spent Friday huggin’ and kissin’ Vice President Dick Cheney, who visited Colorado to raise money for him.  Schaffer said, “I am really disgusted with the tone and tenor and direction of The Denver Post stories. I have had no contact with the individuals in the story, particularly Jack Abramoff,” Schaffer said. “It’s a matter of fiction. That’s all I’m going to say about it.”  Best of luck with that!

2 Comments »

It’s not enough that we subject them to a barrage of tests designed more to prop up local real estate values and funnel taxpayer dollars to wealthy corporations than to assess learning or teaching.  It’s not enough that they are practically bound in cotton-wool from birth, with their bike helmets, ski helmets, kneepads, elbow-pads, and car seats.  Now, we’re coming for the sweet, sweet acetones of their permanent markers.  Last week, an eight-year old kid in Colorado was suspended from school for sniffing sharpies, on the suspicion that he was getting high.  (Was I the only kid to liked the smell of permanent markers?  How many of them would you have to huff dry before you’d get high, anyway?)  What’s next:  outlawing twirling around on the playground, because that makes kids dizzy?

I’ve long wondered, what will become of the rising generation who never knew the comforting whiff of a fresh mimeograph as it hit their desks?  As they’re watching Turner Classic Movies, what will they make of that scene in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, when all of the kids pick up their handouts, sniff them, and sigh with pleasure?  It’s just not the same with photocopies.

Now, Suburban Guerilla points us to a Philadelphia Magazine article on Stepford Housewives 2.0 who schedule their eight-year olds for bikini waxes, highlights, and “blowouts.”  (Please tell us this is an April Fool’s Day joke!  Ha-ha?)  That’s right:  waxes for children who don’t yet have pubic hair.  From the article:  “‘I’ve actually been joking that I’m going to write a book called Where Has All the Pubic Hair Gone?’  Janice Hillman, a doctor in the Penn Health System at Radnor who specializes in adolescent medicine, tells me. ‘It’s such a rarity to find it these days in 10- and 12-year-old girls, and older girls. I need to check for it at that age — it’s an indicator of puberty and development, how much there is, where it’s growing. And now, I need to ask girls, if it’s not there, ‘Do you wax? Do you shave?’ Because so many of them do.’”

I suppose their mothers must experience limitless amounts of boredom and self-loathing.  Ladies, this looks like reason number 612 why you shouldn’t quit your job after having children:  less free time with which to turn your tween daughter into a waxed, implanted, tanorexic Pr0n star lookalike.  Talk about alienating girls from their own bodies.  Medieval Catholicism has nothing on these women.

9 Comments »