But wait: there’s more!

It’s hose or be hosed, friends, so I’ll proudly vote Canada this year. It will only be a few more decades when global warming will make them our masters, anyway. All of that sweet, fresh, water and melting arctic ice. . . I say surrender now while it still seems kind of cool and not completely desperate.

Quebec City

I hope your summers are off to a fine start. In Quebec City, it’s lovely late spring weather–not too hot, but warm and sunny and just right!  (Well, today was pretty hot actually, and a cold front is going to blow through tomorrow, but we’re always ready for that in the true North, strong and free.)  The tulips, crabapples, and lilacs are just flowering here–so it’s especially floral and picturesque.

The fun thing about Quebec is that it’s (in the words of one of my traveling companions) a “free city,” especially in the tourist centers of the upper and lower cities inside the city walls.  It’s got a relaxed and playful vibe–people walk around in everything from skins from the waist up (men, anyway) to suits and more formal wear.  The teenagers and young adults of the city were sunning themselves and showing off their tats on the walls of the city.  The historic parts of the town are tres touristique, and there are more tacky T-shirt shops than ever, but hey–everyone has to make a living, right?  Being a francophone Canadian means that one lives in a very small country, and not everyone wants to get rigged up like a Musketeer to go to work. 

Ursuline chapel and museum

It’s great to be back in the archives, but I’m left with the challenge of taking haphazardly-kept records that span a century (or more) and turning them into something I can analyze. I feel weak and stupid again, but it’s also fun to think big.  Researching this book is kind of like being handed a stack of sporadic grocery lists–those that survived two devastating fires, that is–and describing and analyzing everything that went on in a kitchen over a century or so: all the meals, all of the people, all of the celebrations, all of the tragedies, etc. You know, the stuff someone else might actually care enough to read about.  I’m gradually coming to terms with the fact that I’m going to have to do some serious old-fashioned social history if I’m going to figure out this monastery.

The big find of the day?  An obituary of a nun who died of le scorbut, which is scurvy, a disease that it usually suffered by seamen, slaves, and others who don’t have access to fresh fruits and veggies.  Three guesses as to how you die of scurvy inside a convent when no one else is dealing with malnutrition, friends, and the first two don’t count!

Do you know this movie, or does it stir a distant memory? I find it mesmerizing still–it’s a glimpse of an experience that’s something new for most urban or suburban children. If you have young children in your life please share this movie with them.

Don't ask.

Wasn’t that an old Homer Simpson line or something, “it’s funny because it’s true?”  Anyway–here’s something I found pretty funny, although some of the commenters don’t seem to get the joke.  Actually, I think the author, Daniel J. Ennis, gets it right:  the oversupply of Ph.D.s is due to the satisfactions of smugness:

I don’t spend much time on The Outside, but I meet nondocs in the grocery, and at church, and at unavoidable family gatherings, and I see them struggle to achieve the smug. So much alcohol, so much philandering, so much striving for promotion to V.P., attachment to sports teams and political parties, time lavished on soup kitchens and animal shelters, on raising kids and caring for the aged, so much windsurfing and cross-training … so many airy castles designed to prove that there are good lives to be lived without that ne plus ultra of credentials. We were acquainted with those people before we went to graduate school. As Bob Dylan (honorary doctorate, Princeton) put it, “All those people we used to know /they’re an illusion to me now.” The nondoc trades thousands of dollars and hours for an uncertain shot at self-satisfaction. The person with a Ph.D. has a lifetime supply.

.       .       .       .      .       .      

While there is nothing more miserable and annoying than a doctorate-in-training, once that little sucker breaks out of the cocoon she can beat her wings like the butterfly she was meant to be. In mixed company (i.e. groups of doctorates and nondocs) she can let slip “when I was working on my doctorate” and the room becomes hers. In mixed marriages (distasteful, perhaps, but sometimes useful to pay for life’s little necessities, like health insurance), the Ph.D. can be the ultimate weapon in a decades-long struggle for emotional dominance. Nobody argued with The Professor (Ph.D., Botany, UCLA) on Gilligan’s Island. All those marooned nondocs depended on his serene intelligence when the chips were down.

I’ll admit it–this partially explains my attraction to graduate school.  I don’t come from a wealthy or prominent family, and I was the first person in my family to earn an advanced degree.  I was just lucky to finish my Ph.D. 14 years ago, when there was a brief break in the clouds through which many of us of that generation ascended into tenure-track jobs. 

Another reason Ennis’s article makes sense to me is that recently, I’ve been mulling over the problem of self-mortification among religious women in the early modern era.  All of the literature suggests that the new, Reformation-era orders like the Ursulines, with their apostolic missions, were encouraged to leave behind the tradition of self-mortification that contemplative orders engaged in.  And yet, there is evidence that it continued in European as well as New World convents from Mexico to Canada, and that Indian convert women adopt the same practices.  (They weren’t just improvising with cedar branches–someone, after all, was supplying appliances like “iron girdles.”)  I think Ennis’s approach to this problem is correct in that he asks what are people still getting out of a Ph.D. given that they can’t count on a job at the end of the line.  So in exploring what mortification practices did for religious women, it’s useful to ask what value was there in inflicting pain and irritating open sores on their bodies?  What did they get out of it?, not Why did they sacrifice their comfort and health?  When we ask the first question, we open up the possibility for new answers.

Developed by Joel Surnow, the conservative co-creator of 24, along with production companies Asylum Entertainment and Muse Entertainment and writer Stephen Kronish, the project drew fire from the political left and some Kennedy historians. Even before cameras rolled, a front-page New York Times story last February included a sharp attack from former John F. Kennedy adviser Theodore Sorenson, who called an early version of the script “vindictive” and “malicious.”
 
History and parent A&E said at the time that the script had been revised and that the final version had been vetted by experts. Indeed, the script used in production had passed muster with History historians for accuracy.

“History historians?”  WTF?  How bad does it have to be to not be fit to share the same channel as Ice Road Truckers?

Anyhoo–lest you think this was some rinky-dink production with actors you’ve never heard of in bad Kennedy wigs and bad Kennedy accents, let me tell you that you couldn’t be more wrong.  This was a multi-million dollar production that featured Greg Kinnear, Katie Holmes, and Tom Wilkinson in bad Kennedy wigs and bad Kennedy accents!  You think I’m being unfair?  Check this out:

Now, that’s some seriously low-quality fake Kennedy hair and fake accents. (Is that why “History” nixed it?) Hasn’t everyone figured it out already that only the Kennedys of that generation spoke like “the Kennedys,” and they’re all dead. They had an accent all their own, and no one has ever convincingly faked it.

Fortunately, the show will still air later this winter in Canada and worldwide.  A note to all of my Canadian friends:  please set your DVRs to record it, and I’ll bring the popcorn!  (Go ahead–re-read my post from last winter, in which I predicted the bad accents and the excellent entertainment value in all of that historical incorrectness.  Awesome!!!)

My original post on this workshop is here.  The conference website with instructions for applying is here.  I’ll just add two things:  first of all, this is a dee-luxe conference.  The setting, the accomodations, the food, and of course the intellectual companionship will be brilliant.  You really shouldn’t miss out, if you have anything at all to say about women’s history.  Secondly, the Call for Papers emphasizes that all of early North America is game, so Mexican and Canadian history is more than welcome.  As Claudio Saunt, Ned Blackhawk, and others have argued, there really is an early American West, too–so think about it and do yourself a favor by applying to this conference. 

For those of you who have never been to the magical, enchanting Huntingon Library and Gardens, here’s a little preview of the wonders that awaits you.  There is no more beautiful or inspiring place to read, write, and think in North America:

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.  On arrival in Canada, English girls were typically schooled at Ursuline convents in New France’s principal northern towns, Montreal, Quebec (City), and Trois Rivieres.  Finding these New England women in the thorough records kept by French notaries–baptisms, marriages, deaths–means that they converted to Catholicism.  Letters exchanged with their birth families in New England confirm that a high proportion of them chose not to be redeemed or ransomed so as to return to their onetime homes.

Wasn’t that a nice touch–”a detective’s journey?”  I’d almost want to read my chapter, even if it were assigned to me on a syllabus.  Thanks Linda, Nina, and Jane!

Have any of you had the experience of having your books reviewed by people outside of what you thought were your major fields?  Were you surprised at the audiences who found value in your work, even when you weren’t writing specifically within that scholarly tradition?  Like I said, I’m grateful for the favorable attention military historians have paid my book, but I wonder:  if I had subtitled the book “Gender and War” rather than “War and Gender in Colonial New England,” would my book have been sent out to more women’s and gender historians from the first?

*I say that WA is one of the top two readers, because the other one, Major Problems in American Women’s History,is edited by my fellow WA anthologee Mary Beth Norton and my colleague here at Baa Ram U., Ruth M. Alexander.

Yeah, right!

What happens at the intersection of history, art, and commerce, when historical sites and/or historical re-creations are turned into tourist attractions?  Some folks on my blogroll have been writing thoughtfully on these questions. 

First, Flavia at Ferule and Fescue went to North America’s “Shakespeareapalooza” this summer (a.k.a. the Stratford Shakespeare Festival) and writes about the curious flava of the festival:

[T]he best parts of the festival were the most amateurish, in the best sense of that word: though the actors were all professionals, there was a palpable sense that they and the audience (even the annoying lady with the dyed-red hair in the row behind us, who was loudly showing off her Shakespearian expertise before the show and during intermission) were there out of love for the plays, for Shakespeare, and for live theatre. And if you have to be a tourist in a tourist town, it’s pleasant for it to be one with three bookstores on the main drag, where you can saunter to a tasty post-show dinner at midnight, and where all the other tourists also have rolled-up programs popped beneath their arms.

But the less amateurish stuff was less agreeable. The mainstage production–the one in the fancy theatre, with the big-name star, and with lots of special effects–was dreadful.

And speaking of dreadful–some inept ”social media” hack from the Stratford Festival “argued” in the comments with points she didn’t make, in a commentary on the festival that was overwhelmingly positive.  Whatever, d00dz!  Keep on practicing using those interwebs, will you?

Next, Chauncy DeVega at We Are Respectable Negroes wonders about the practice of sleeping in slave cabins:  is it “Honoring the African Holocaust and our Ancestors, or Trivializing their Memory?”  He writes,

Civil War reenactor Joseph McGill has been trying to commune with the ancestors by sleeping in slave cabins throughout South Carolina. His mission is noble and ought to be admired. However, part of me is uncertain about his project. For example, I have always wanted to go on a tour of the underground railroad where one traces the actual routes used, sleeping in basements, navigating north to freedom over several weeks. I have also wanted to go to Goree Island in Senegal, where I would meditate in the slave fortresses where thousands upon thousands were imprisoned and died.

As powerful as the experience would be, I wouldn’t have slave dogs on my heels and bounty hunters a step behind me. I wouldn’t be trapped in the belly of a beast, exhausted and frightened beyond all belief, for I knew not what would happen to me tomorrow. What would you do? How does one balance a yearning to experience just a tiny bit of the unimaginable with a fear of reducing hallowed ground to a tourism destination?

I think these are important questions–but ultimately, I come down on the side of opening up as many public history sites as possible, especially those that commemorate the lives of people whose histories pose challenges to Whig history or American exceptionalism.  All re-creations are ultimately performative and sanitized versions of the history they re-create–Stratford, Ontario offers just a highly selective view of Shakespeare’s world.  Colonial Williamsburg (for example) is undoubtedly lice-free and the re-enactors there bathe or shower and launder their clothes a lot more often than they would have in the eighteenth century.  Plimoth Plantation doesn’t hold public executions, and all of the bodies remain buried at Gettysburg. 

My bet is that the people who would choose to visit or even stay the night in a slave cabin are people who are genuinely curious about the history and would be respectful of the sacred grounds they visit.  It would be wonderful to have public history sites that commemorate the histories of enslaved and working people in the same numbers as the sites that recreate their owners’ and bosses’ lives in high-style Georgian and Victorian mansions.

What’s your view of the intersections of history, art, and commerce?

August 21, 1749

The meals here are in many respects different from those in the English provinces.  This depends upon the difference of custom, taste, and religion, between the two nations.  French Canadians eat three meals a day, viz. breakfast, dinner, and supper.  They breakfast commonly between seven and eight, for the French here rise very early, and the governor-general can be seen at seven o’clock, the time when he has his levee.  Some of the men dip a piece of bread in brandy and eat it; others take a dram of brandy and eat a piece of bread after it.  Chocolate is likewise very common for breakfast, and many of the ladies drink coffee.  Some eat no breakfast at all.  I have never seen tea used here, perhaps because they can get coffee and chocolate from the French provinces in America, in the southern part, but must get tea from China.  They consider it is not worth their while to send the money out of the country for it.  I never saw them have bread and butter for breakfast.

Dinner is exactly at noon.  People of quality have a great many dishes and the rest follow their example, when they invite strangers.  The loaves are oval and baked of wheat flour.  For each person they put a plate, napkin, spoon, and fork.  (In the English colonies, a napkin is seldom or never used.)  Sometimes they also provide knives, but they are generally omitted, all the ladies and gentlemen being provided with their own knives.  The spoons and forks are of silver, and the plates of Delft ware.  The meal begins with a soup with a good deal of bread in it.  Then follow fresh meats of various kinds, boiled and roasted, poultry, or game, fricasees ragouts, etc. of several sorts, together with different kinds of salads.  They commonly drink red claret at dinner, either mixed with water or clear; and spruce beer is likewise much in use.  The ladies drink water and sometimes wine.  Each one has his own glass and can drink as much as he wishes, for the bottles are put on the table.

Butter is seldom served, and if it is, it is chiefly for the guest present who likes it.  But it is so fresh that one has to salt it at the table.  The salt is white and finely powdered, though now and again a gray salt is used.  After the main course is finished the table is always cleared.  Finally the fruit and sweetmeats are served, which are of many different kinds, viz. walnuts from France or Canada, either ripe or pickled; almonds; raisins; hazel-nuts; several kinds of berries which are ripe in the summer season, such as currants, red and black, and cranberries which are preserved in treacle; many preserves in sugar, as strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and mossberries.  Cheese is likewise part of the dessert, and so is milk, which they drink last of all, with sugar. 

Friday and Saturday, the “lean” days, they eat no meat according to the Roman Catholic rites, but they well know how to guard against hunger.  On those days, they boil all sorts of vegetables like peas, beans, and cabbage, and fruit, fish, eggs, and milk are prepared in various ways.  They cut cucumbers into slices and eat them with cream, which is a very good dish.  Sometimes they put whole cucumbers on the table and everybody that likes them takes one, peels and slices it, and dips the slices into salt, eating them like radishes.  Melons abound here and are always eaten without sugar. In brief, they live just as well on Fridays and Saturdays, and I who am not a particular lover of meats would willingly have had all the days so-called lean days. 

excerpted from Peter Kalm’s Travels in North America, II: 473-75 (New York:  Dover Publications Inc., 1966); you can find an online English edition from 1772 here.

Much of what Kalm reports is still true today.  Quebec traditionally calls its three meals déjeuner, dîner, et souper, and all of the summer and autumn fruit grown in Quebec is a matter of considerable national pride.  The sort of vegetable melange Kalm describes on fast days is a kind of national dish–cabbage, onions, carrots, beans, turnips, or what have you from the garden all boiled and served together.  Kalm’s report tracks with what I’ve seen in the archival records elsewhere–early Quebec residents ate well, and they made an art of observing Church fasts.

• First up, the hearings for Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court start today.  Tenured Radical has a nice round-up of her own, with some quality links for your enjoyment.  I liked this article by Deborah L. Rhode of Stanford University, “Why Elena Kagan’s Looks Matter.”  (Answer, paraphrased by me:  That ol’ devil, patriarchal equilibrium.)  Don’t miss the part in the article where she describes how hateful, anonymous insults about her looks after publishing an op-ed illustrated the point of her new book rather perfectly.  Rhode writes, “Yet pointing this out is likely to unleash the prejudices at issue. I got a recent taste after publishing an op-ed in The Washington Post. The editorial summarized themes from my just released book, The Beauty Bias, which documents the price of prejudice and proposes some legal and cultural strategies to address it. It was surprising to discover how many individuals were willing to take time from their busy day to send hate mail on the order of ‘I just bet that you yourself are one ugly c—.’ Some readers, annoyed that no author picture accompanied the article, felt strongly enough to do independent research. One explained: ‘knowing there had to be a reason why [you would write about bias] I looked you up in the Stanford Faculty Directory and then all the pieces fell together… I’m sure Stanford has to tie a bone around your neck to get even the campus dogs not to run away from you.’ Several hundred online posts following the article included more of the same. One reader proposed taking up a collection so I could ‘buy …a burqa: This would certainly improve the aesthetics around Stanford.’”  Lovely.  (Does the WaPo realize that comments like this reflect poorly on them?  Once again, and with feeling:  either moderate your comments or eliminate them!  Same goes for you, Daily Beast.  Why give these douchebags a forum when they can start their own damn blogs, for free?)
• Paul Krugman has some bad news for us all.  (Well, those of us who aren’t fabulously rich enough to eschew employment and live off of interest income, anyway.) Sucks for us, friends!
• Randall Stephens has some interesting reflections on Glenn Beck’s use of history and style of historical argumentation.  He writes, “Beck’s political grandstanding and maudlin theatrics are offensive enough. (I can think of no better ipecac for the typical humanities professor.) But it’s his ahistorical theories of the past that disturb me most. Beck, like many conservatives, Christian or not, is incapable of coming to terms with the notion of change over time. What was true for bewigged, knee-breeches-wearing, slave-owning nabobs in eighteenth century Virginia must be just as true for a minivan-driving NASCAR dad in 2010. (Still, few of those NASCAR dads would adopt some of Ben Franklin’s woolly polytheistic notions.) Did America’s public schools once allow Protestant-styled prayers in the classroom? Then they should do so still. Were women once the caretakers of hearth and home? Then maybe they should still be. Didn’t learned folks once believe that the Grand Canyon formed in a matter of days during the flood of the Old Testament? Or was it millions of years in the making, as modern geologists would have us believe? The flood story—biblical, less complicated, more interesting—makes more sense.”  Go read the whole thing.  Love his description of this theory of history as a costume party.  I’ve always thought that Beck’s rhetoric was interesting (in a car-crashy, rubbernecky kind of way) because history is important to him.  (But as Stephens points out, Beck makes a mash of 250 years of history without any theory of change over time.)  Beck counts on the United States of Amnesia not to contradict his “facts” or to be aware of more subtle analyses than he presents to it.  But, go read Stephens–he’s watched a lot more Beck and thought about it harder than I have.
• Here’s some more data for the global wage gap between men and women scientists.  Grr.  North America appears to have the biggest gap between women and men, probably because our scientists are paid much better!  We’re number one!  We’re number one!
• Finally, I knew it when I captioned the photo on my previous post that it just wasn’t the right image.  “I’ll just do it myself” should of course be illustrated by our old friend, The Little Red Hen.  (This is a story that always struck me as oddly Libertarian for a children’s tale, and I’m not sure that I approve of the underlying message.  Shouldn’t the denouement involve more trans-species cooperation, rather than the hen enjoying her loaf of bread and going to bed all by herself?)