Historiann

As cynical as I try to be, I just can’t be cynical enough. Here’s what I’ve learned so far in our first week back to class at Baa Ram U.:

• Departments across the university are offering online classes taught by grad student and adjunct labor in order to fund research and professional travel for their regular faculty and grad students.
• Instead of “unethical” or “scandalous” or “a shocking abrogation of professional and moral values,” this is called “entrepreneurial.”  The money generated by teaching face-to-face classes doesn’t count for anything–the regular faculty have to become drummers and middle-managers of an expanded exploited class of laborers, in addition to doing our regular teaching, research, and service.
• Apparently, the administrative class at my uni have adopted the values that bankrupted the banking industry:  sell something of dubious and unproven quality or value just to make a buck.  To hell with intellectual or educational values–we’re all about the money, honey! Continue Reading »

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In our Yellowstone adventure, every day was full of marvels and wonders we don’t get to see or experience in our everyday lives.  We saw, in order:  lots of elk (bulls mostly), marmots, a coyote, bison galore, a black wolf, and a black bear!  (Fratguy thinks it was a grizzly bear, but I say it was black and I’m sticking to my story.)  Several brown, cutthroat, rainbow, and brook trout were caught (and released.)  Plus of course we saw loads of geysers, hot springs, mud pots, fumaroles, and the like volcanic wonders, like Castle Geyser here on the right.

Once again, I was struck by the numbers of French, German, Japanese, and Chinese tourists.  I also heard some Russian and Italian spoken by other parties.  All of western Wyoming really was full of French people–we chatted with a few families on a French tour who stopped in the same hotel we did last night in Jackson Hole. Continue Reading »

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Mama needs a break, kids.

I’ve been fortunate enough to visit several of our major National Parks and Monuments this summer– Arches National Park,  Escalante National Monument, Capitol Reef National Park, Mesa Verde, and now Yellowstone.  (Touring these parks is kind of an expansive version of a staycation for us westerners.)

I wonder what kind of charismatic megafauna we’ll see–moose?  A bear?  A cougar?  I haven’t seen a cougar up close and personal since I almost stepped on one’s tail in Strathcona Provincial Park in British Columbia in 1997.  It was the one time in my life when I was left literally speechless, and could only gesture to the giant tail and the terrific haunches to which it was attached.  I can probably live happily without coming that close to a cougar ever again. Continue Reading »

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The good news:  I got a raise for the first time in four years!  The bad news:  my total raise for all four of those years was $1,860.  Yes, that’s right:  I am worth exactly $465 more per year, if we average that out over four years.  In those four years:

• I have taught 5 6 new courses and co-taught another new course, meaning that six seven out of sixteen courses over the last four years were entirely new.
• I have written and published 2 essays in peer-reviewed journals, one book review essay, and one non-peer reviewed essay, plus a bunch of miscellaneous shorter essays.  I have also written seven conference papers (two of which were article-length and precirculated; all the while making progress on a book manuscript too, about three and a half out of six or seven chapters.)
• My book won an “honorable mention” for a prize awarded by the Canadian Historical Association and the American Historical Association.
• A chapter from my book was excerpted in Women’s America (edited by Linda K. Kerber, Joan Sherro DeHart, and Cornelia Hughes Dayton).
• I have given four invited talks or lectures at four different universities in the U.S.
• I have served on a search committee and put in three years on the College of Liberal Arts’s Tenure and Promotion Committee.
• I reviewed four book manuscripts (one of them twice) and four article manuscripts (one of them twice) for publication.

At this rate, I might break into the high five figures before retirement!

Continue Reading »

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I have a few ideas for you.

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Stay out of the woods, my pretties!

In a very smart and measured editorial last Sunday in the Denver Post, Professor Lloyd Burton of the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado, Denver, pointed out how language shapes our views of wildfires and forest management:

We have three problems with our narrative: First, it is an urban narrative applied to a mostly rural landscape; that is, it reports on [wildland-urban interface] wildfires as if they were urban fires. The initial focus is always on proximate causes (what ignited the fire), followed by a quest for fault-finding, usually around the issues of why the fire wasn’t immediately eradicated or why everyone may not have been moved out of harm’s way.

Applying the urban narrative to the WUI also stresses the necessity for the immediate and total suppression of all fires, whenever and wherever they arise. In the urban context, this is absolutely understandable. To do anything other than that would invite catastrophe in our densely populated cities. But applying this urban expectation to WUI wildfires is both futile and inappropriate.

A second problem is that the news media mindset and resulting language of its discourse is saturated in metaphors of war. We are treated daily to visuals of ex-military aircraft bombing fires and structures with toxic fire-retardant. We have strong, courageous, well-trained and well-disciplined “fighters” in the field being coordinated by a top-down incident command system; and we use many of the same communications technologies and terms to implement tactical field maneuvers. Continue Reading »

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Thanks for all of the concerned e-mails, but Famille Historiann and all of the animals are just fine.  We live about 40 or so miles east of the High Park Fire that’s now tearing up the foothills west of Fort Collins.  We’ve been seeing, and unfortunately smelling, the smoke even this far out.  This is the second major fire outside of Fort Collins this year, and it’s only June. 

This is the great advantage to living on the High Plains Desert rather than in the mountains:  there’s no such thing as a forest fire down here!  Because of course the only trees are the cottonwoods along the creeks and the landscaping in the sweet, quiet little towns like mine. Continue Reading »

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That’s better.  Too much negative energy in that last post and the accompanying image.  Sadly, it looks like we’ll miss the Transit of Venus out here on the Front Range, as it’s entirely overcast.  (Imagine your own frowny-face here.)  Neat discovery:  old X-ray films are really handy for observing things like solar eclipses and Transits of Venus, although who knows what technology they’ll have on hand for the 2117 viewings! Continue Reading »

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Courtesy of Subversive Cross Stitch

Yegads.  What is it with these door-to-door hucksters who think that 1) “No Solicitors” doesn’t apply to them, and 2) who argue with me about it instead of beating a hasty retreat?  (Aside from being just plain irritating, do they really think they’re going to make the sale?)

I looked up the definition of “solicitor” last year, after being argued with by a religious nut who claimed that he wasn’t a solicitor because he wasn’t try to sell me anything.  Here’s the first non-obsolete Oxford English Dictionary’s definition of solicitor:  “One who entreats, equests, or petitions; one who solicits or begs favours; a pleader, intercessor, advocate.”  Notice that this says nothing about sales–it suggests that anyone asking for my time in the service of any cause whatsoever (political, religious, or personal profit) without a personal invitation from me is in fact A SOLICITOR. Continue Reading »

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One of these things is not like the other!

Want to smoke pot in public at the University of Colorado today?  Move along, and never mind the fish fertilizer, especially if you don’t have a CU i.d. to prove that you’re a member of the campus community.  But of course, if you’re armed to the teeth with handguns and shotguns of your choosing, campus denizens and members of the public alike are always welcome on our state university campuses!  (And for now anyway, students at CU can even keep their guns in their dorm rooms.  Awesome!!!)

Think about this for a moment:  a district court judge has ruled that a public university may ban all non-students and non-employees from a public university campus today, just because the admin says so, whereas other courts have ruled that public universities have no right to forbid anyone–students, faculty, staff, and the general public–from campus with a gun, so long as it’s permitted. Continue Reading »

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