I came across The American Republic almost by chance 24 years later, in the library of the Enugu campus of the University of Nigeria. I was in Nigeria for five months with my wife as her research assistant as she studied Igbo masquerades for her doctorate. We lived in a small apartment a short distance from campus in a city that was at times hot almost beyond belief. We often only had power for a few hours a day, and in that un-air-conditioned state — when we weren’t doing ethnographic research — we read a lot to each other, often by candlelight.

Given the poverty and corruption of the country, and the fact that Nigeria suffered a military coup while we were there, it is perhaps not surprising that most of our reading was comfort fare — Jane Austen, Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens. But one day as I was wandering the quiet stacks of the library with no lights and no air conditioning, I dimly saw on a bottom shelf two volumes by a historian I remembered liking for The American Political Tradition, which I’d read as an undergraduate.

I started reading and was surprised. My American history text in high school had been Hofstadter’s biggest competitor, The American Pageant, by a Stanford University professor, Thomas Bailey. “Old American flag Bailey,” as some called him, rarely liked to admit to anything truly unpleasant in American history, and often resorted to whitewashing patriotism to paper things over. Pageant was meant to be “feel good history” — the kind that even today is popular with the public. What is amazing then and now about Hofstadter is that he was critical and yet popular at the same time.

Hufbauer makes a great case for how an old U.S. history text changed his intellectual life–but it’s not going to get me to start assigning textbooks to my students!  However “revisionist” or revolutionary, they all end up reassuring students that there’s only one story to tell and that they’ve read it already, and that’s exactly the opposite of what I want my students to learn–even (or perhaps especially?) in my lower-level classes.  I may however, borrow his article for my lower-level class next term, in particular the portions in which he compares the Hofstadter textbook to that of “old American flag Bailey.”  Check it out:

A passage from the 1966 edition of Bailey’s Pageant on Columbus highlights the profound differences between these books:

Christopher Columbus, a skilled Italian seaman, now stepped upon the stage of history. A man of vision, energy, resourcefulness, and courage…. Success finally rewarded the persistence of Columbus…. A new world thus swam within the vision of civilized man.

Bailey sums up that the “discovery” of America was a “sensational achievement, “but states that “The American continents were slow to yield their virginity.”

Hofstadter’s approach with his co-authors was poles apart:

When we say, “Columbus discovered America,” we mean only that his voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492 first opened the New World to permanent occupation by people from Europe [….] When Ferdinand and Isabella succeeded at last, in January 1492, in expelling Islam from Granada, they moved immediately to wipe out all other non-Catholic elements in the Spanish population, including the Jews who had helped immensely in financing the long wars. The rulers’ instrument was the Spanish Inquisition: its penalties, execution or expulsion. Driven thus to dissolve in blood and misery the source of their wealth and power at home, Ferdinand and Isabella were now prepared to view more favorably Columbus’s project…. [T]he same tide that carried Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria so hopefully toward such golden isles … also bore the last of some hundreds of thousands of Spanish Jews toward Italy and other hostile refuges.

Today “permanent occupation” probably won’t raise many eyebrows, but at the time that — as well as the larger context of religious persecution for the voyage — was a paradigm shift for an American history textbook. In fact, Republic’s one-word assessment was that European contact was, for native populations, “catastrophic.”

Sometimes I wish I could just assign a textbook and be done with it, but teaching in the Age of the Great Fragmentation raises difficult epistemological questions.  Hufbauer implies a number of these questions by situating his encounter with the book in a particular time in hiss intellectual life and place in the world.  I’m sure that the majority of my students would be happier if I just chose a nice textbook and didn’t bother them with articles, monographs, or primary sources.  But, I don’t think that making the majority happy is a terribly noble goal as a Professor or as a historian.

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:

Why can’t I just comment over there under my username and my URL?  Is there any way the Chronicle software gurus could fix this?  Why all the super-secret, password-protected bullcrap?

One might think that the Chronicle wants us to log in so that they can monitor the tone of discussion on their articles and posts, but the comments over there don’t appear to be moderated any more than the comments on most mainstream U.S. online publications.  Some of the new commenters who have drifted over to TR 3.0  are bringing down the quality of conversation, and I wonder if some of your regular readers and commenters at Tenured Radical 2.0 would agree.

I just wanted you to know that I miss being a part of the conversation, and that my absence is not due to my disinterest in your posts.  I am, however, pretty disinterested in mixing it up with commenters like this, who are just trying to derail a promising conversation.  Where else can I go for a smart conversation about the cultural significance of Jo Calderone?  After all, I’m only a lesbian on the internets–and like most of your readers, my real life is much, much duller without you.

Love,

Historiann

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: yes, you absolutely can get it done. At some point, you’ll suddenly find yourself at the top of whatever incline you have been ascending; then you’ll turn around only to see the landscape fall open before you on the other side. You’ll see the whole vista laid out. And then, you’ll slide right down into it with ease.

I think they key to this advice is not to skip over the ”I was writing about 4-5K words per week” part.  That’s how we get to the “whole vista laid out” and the easy walk down the mountain.  As a quotation attributed to Thomas Jefferson says, “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.”  I’m feeling the need to get to work and get lucky myself.

Congratulations, Squadrato!  I hope you enjoy the hike down.  (Click over there to see some of her book-related plans for Burning Man this year, too.)

This video seems newly timely given the massive wiretapping scandal blowing up News Corporation.  Now that Rupert Murdoch and his empire look pretty weak, the long knives are out for him.  Roger Simon reports that nearly 30 years ago–perhaps to the soundtrack of an Adam Ant video–Murdoch said something racist at a dinner with Chicago Sun-Times reporters after he bought their newspaper:

Women in Early America is an anthology on women in America from contact through the Revolutionary era. Proposals for essays that employ a transnational approach and that rewrite master narratives are especially encouraged. As the volume is largely intended for use in undergraduate courses, essays that are written for that audience and that address major themes in women’s and gender history courses are also particularly desirable.

New York University Press has expressed strong interest in publishing this project. I’m in the process now of soliciting proposals for chapters so that I may put together a book prospectus within the next few months to secure a contract. If you are interested in proposing an essay for this volume, please send an abstract and cv to tfoster4 AT depaul DOT edu. 

Recently, I edited New Men: Manliness in Early America which explored how manliness was defined and redefined in the context of colonial and Revolutionary America. This volume is a companion volume and uses the same starting point as New Men which began as follows: “In 1782 when J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur published his description of American society and wrestled with what it meant to be an American he articulated a question that many were asking: ‘What, then, is the American, this new man?’ For every generation that followed, the question has resonated.” Women in Early America takes up Crevecoeur’s question and applies it to early American women using the insights of women’s and gender history.

For the record:  I was a reader consulted on his proposal for New Men back in 2008, and I thought it was a strong proposal.  The completed book is even stronger than the proposal was, as it features the cutting-edge scholarship of emerging scholars like Benjamin H. Irvin, Carolyn Eastman, Tyler Boulware, and Natalie A. Zacek, while also offering essays by senior early Americanists like Kathleen Brown, Trevor Burnard, Ann Marie Plane, and Janet Moore Lindman.  (I see that many–but not all–of these scholars have a Johns Hopkins U. connection.)  Bookended by a preface by Mary Beth Norton and an Afterword by Toby Ditz, Foster has produced a collection that should command respect and a wide readership. 

I think it’s high time for a new collection of essays on early American women, especially since the number of us working on black and brown women’s history and/or on women who speak Spanish or French or Nahuatl instead of English has expanded a bit so that a collection these days could be published in which white, English-speaking women are not the subject of the majority of essays. I also think that it would be terrific to see the book incorporate the new emphasis we’ve seen recently on material culture as a way of understanding women’s lives, as we’ve seen in books by Marla Miller and Laurel Ulrich, and in essays by Sophie White and Linda Baumgarten, for example.

Some of you may recall that we had a rip-roaring discussion on the state of early American women’s history at the Omohundro Institute conference in Salt Lake City in 2009, and early American women was the subject of the William and Mary Quarterly-Early Modern Studies Institute workshop at the Huntington Library last month.   Those of you who contributed to those conversations should consider sending Foster a proposal!  I’m assigning many of the essays in Long Before Stonewall in the History of Sexuality in America course that I’m co-teaching next fall with Ruth Alexander, and I certainly will consider adopting Women in Early America for my American Women’s History to 1800 course.

Time Haters

Via Salon, we learn that Larry Flynt and Columbia University political historian David Eisenbach have written a book together, One Nation Under Sex: How the Private Lives of Presidents, First Ladies and Their Lovers Changed the Course of American History.  It looks for the most part like the kind of book you’d expect Larry Flynt and a political historian to write–it’s built at least 80% around secondary sources and it offers almost no acknowlegement or citation of the pioneering historians who made this kind of book possible (the feminists and the gays, of course). 

Instead, the footnotes I’ve been able to vet (via the book’s page at Amazon) offer just the usual parade of biographies of (in the words of my kiddie encyclopedia collection) “great men and famous deeds.”  Kudos for citing Catherine Allgor’s A Perfect Union, her new bio of Dolley Madison, and Clarence Walker’s Mongrel Nation, though–otherwise in the notes for the first chapter, it’s all founding fathers, founding brothers, the dogs and barn cats of the founding fathers, etc.  Shocking, I know.

It’s funny (and by funny, I guess I mean LOLSOB) how some analyses (like those offered by the feminists and queers) go from being dangerous, unsourced, risky, out-on-a-limb evidence problems, to being conventional wisdom in about 30 seconds these days.  Too bad for you, historians of sexuality–it looks like you risked your careers, your fortunes, and your sacred honor only to get buried in a footnote in a book by Joseph Ellis or Robert Remini, because those are the only books any authors of popular histories will ever read or cite.  In fact, all of you feminists and gays (or queer feminists) are pi$$ed on by Flynt, along with the rest of historians without whose years of work in the archives he could never have written his book.  From the Salon interview with Flynt:

After all the research you did for this book, (ed. note:  Srsly?!?)  what would you say is your big takeaway in terms of the intermingling of sex and politics in America?

The biggest thing I took away from this book is the degree to which it’s existed since the founding of our nation almost 250 years ago. When I started the book, I didn’t even know that we had a gay president, and I didn’t know that Lincoln’s sexuality was called into question. Historians really get under my skin because I think they’re the most anal-retentive group of professionals I’ve ever met. They can look at Mount Rushmore and get writer’s cramps. Historians never wanted to believe that this magnificent man who drafted the Declaration of Independence had actually fathered children by a black slave.

The publishers of history books tend to be conservative and they only want to know about policy and politics. They don’t want to know about sex. That’s why it’s left out of these books and has been for centuries.

Let’s say it all together for old times’ sake, friends:  AWESOME!!!  All historians are exactly alike, and they agree on everything all of the time.  There are no conflicts or controversies among historians about how to read evidence or how to write good history–a broad consensus defines the entire profession.  Thank goodness for old pr0n peddlars who can finally show us the significance of sexuality in the past!

(“Time haters” is a sketch from the Dave Chappelle Show in which Dave and friends go back in time to shoot a slave owner at point blank range.  It’s actually hilarious, but more importantly it sends up white people’s nostalgia/affection for the past and for American history re-creations and re-enactors.)

The Wisconsin Republican Party

UPDATED BELOW, with more links to bloggy commentary.

UPDATED SUNDAY MORNING:  a comment by a Wisconsin proffie got stuck in moderation–take a gander at it here.  Those of you who might be hiring faculty next year–alert your deans.  You might be able to recruit some top-notch former Badgers!

Yesterday, my university and blog-related e-mail accounts filled up with links describing the political $hitstorm that resulted from University of Wisconsin historian William Cronon’s op-ed in the New York Times on Monday about recent events in Wisconsin’s political history and his new blog, Scholar as Citizen.  (Enemies of liberty everywhere watch out, he’s got a blog, and he ain’t afraid to use it!)  The two-cent summary is that the Republican party of Wisconsin has issued a Freedom of Information Request for his e-mail account for every piece of correspondence since January 1, 2011.  Cronon describes each step down  the path to Crazzyville on his blog, but don’t miss Tenured Radical’s rundown and commentary, too.

This morning he reports that the New York Times has written an editorial excoriating the Wisconsin Republican Party’s use of the Freedom of Information Act to attempt to intimidate or silence critics.  It’s available online here, and will run in Monday’s print edition.

I commented over on his blog yesterday on the Republican Party’s response to Cronon’s complaint about their FOIA request in which they accused Cronon (while misspelling his name:  classy) of “intimidation” in complaining about their intrusive and abusive attempts to intimidate him.  I said that if they want e-mails from public university faculty, let’s give ‘em some e-mail.  Let’s cc Scott Walker and Republican Party head Mark Jefferson on every frigging e-mail we write every day, and be sure to forward them every e-mail we receive, including the stuff that goes straight into the spam bucket.  (Tenured Radical has their e-mail addresses, if you’re interested.)

Why not go all Merry Prankster on ‘em?  Clearly, Wisconsin is run these days by a bunch of clowns whose brains aren’t getting enough oxygen in that little Volkswagon they’re crammed into.  Think about it:  if you ran a wannabe-Machiavellian authoritarian junta attempting to take over a U.S. state, what would be a reasonable response to a history professor who has the stature to get an op-ed piece published in the New York Times?  Your options, since you clearly have no frigging clue who Bill Cronon is or even how to spell his name and you probably don’t care to spend .06 seconds on a Google search, are to 1)  ignore it, 2) issue a press release rebutting his opinions, 3) get all FOIA on his a$$ and guarantee that his original editorial, his blog, and all of his opinions get wider circulation and get the attention of people who disapprove of FOIA requests for university e-mail accounts?  (Or maybe you Googled “William Cronin” and nothing came up, so you thought you’d effectively shut him up and no one would be the wiser?  Crack oppo research team you got there, friends!)

I think “Comrade PhysioProffe” said it very well at the Pseudonym Exchange last month.  To paraphrase, he suggested that it was a really, really dumb idea to pick fights with people who have connections at the New York Times.  And a guy who has just published an op-ed piece on the most valuable piece of opinion real estate in the United States and who’s targeted as a result of said op-ed–well, as the kids used to say, you do the math, geniuses.

UPDATE, later this morning:  Bardiac, who I believe has insider knowledge of higher education in Wisconsin, also has some comments on the l’affaire Cronon today.  Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar chimed in this afternoon, too.

Then don't bother writing for The Nation, darling!

Via TalkLeft, we learn that Katha Pollitt is (once again) shocked, shocked to find there’s sexism at the house organ of the so-called American “Left,”  The Nation magazine!

It’s been a long time since anyone seriously maintained that women in power, simply by virtue of their gender, are reliably less warlike than men—how could they be, given that men set up and control the system through which those women must rise? But apparently Nation blogger Robert Dreyfuss has just noticed this fact.

In a post entitled “Obama’s Women Advisers Pushed War Against Libya” (originally titled “Obama’s Women” tout court) he’s shocked-shocked-shocked that UN Ambassador Susan Rice, human-rights adviser Samantha Power and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were keen on intervening militarily in Libya. The piece is dotted with arch and sexist language—the advisers are a “troika,” a “trio” who “rode roughshod over the realists in the administration” (all men) and “pushed Obama to war.” Now it’s up to the henpecked President to “reign (sic) in his warrior women.” Interestingly, the same trope—ballbreaking women ganging up on a weak president—is all over the rightwing blogosphere.

.       .       .       .      .       .      .       .      

[C]an you imagine a piece in The Nation titled “Black President Opts for Bombs” or “Qaddafi, a Man, Threatens to Massacre Rebels, Most of Whom Are Also Men”?

Misogyny—it’s the last acceptable prejudice of the left. 

Yeah, you tell them, Katha!  (Only, did you sleep through all of the coverage your rag and its contributors provided of the 2008 Democratic primary?  And all of those stereotypes about what a horrible nut-crusher Clinton is, and what a horrible, bloodthirsty monster she is for voting for the 2002 AUMF?  I guess what I’m saying is that some of us were pointing this out more than three years ago, and some of us remember.) 

Yes, this is the same Katha Pollitt who wrote this paragraph last winter, too:

I’m still glad I supported Obama over Hillary Clinton. If Hillary had won the election, every single day would be a festival of misogyny. We would hear constantly about her voice, her laugh, her wrinkles, her marriage and what a heartless, evil bitch she is for doing something–whatever!–men have done since the Stone Age. Each week would bring its quotient of pieces by fancy women writers explaining why they were right not to have liked her in the first place.Liberal pundits would blame her for discouraging the armies of hope and change, for bringing back the same-old same-old cronies and advisers, for letting healthcare reform get bogged down in inside deals, for failing to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan–which would be attributed to her being a woman and needing to show toughness–for cozying up to Wall Street, deferring to the Republicans and ignoring the cries of the people. In other words, for doing pretty much what Obama is doing. This way I get to think, Whew, at least you can’t blame this on a woman.

It looks like several of your dear colleagues on the “Left” have found a way to blame a woman anyway!  Cherchez la femme, toujours mes amies, cherchez les femmes.

What do you think, friends:  is Pollitt suffering from Stockholm Syndrome?  (She is something of a captive–it ain’t easy for feminist writers to make an honest living by their writing any more (and it probably never was), and I don’t hear mainstream rags like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or The New York Review of Books clamoring to publish a biweekly witty feminist column.  Maybe try Newsweek now that La Divine Tina edits it?  Because I’d advise her to start a blog if it could pay the bills, but alas.)  Although I usually like Pollitt’s work–brain farts like the comments from last February above aside–it seems like captivity is taking its toll.  I don’t think the boys read her work or care about it, because despite her senority her work certainly doesn’t change the tenor of the coverage over at The Nation. 

UPDATE, MARCH 23:  See Pollitt’s responses in the comments below, in which she reminds me of the columns and blog posts she wrote about the sexism displayed during the 2008 Democratic Primary.  It was hyperbolic and unfair of me to wonder if she had “sle[pt] through” the primary, because she wrote about the coverage of Clinton and was particularly critical of the sexism on the left and in the pages of The Nation.  I appreciate that she took the time to correct me and to engage in the conversation below.

Telling Histories:  Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower

It is good to be reminded of how new the field of African American women’s history is–the contributors to this volume were born in the 1940s-1960s.  They are people we know and work with, and they are truly a pioneer generation.  White’s introductory essay does a brilliant job of highlighting the awesome challenges of professing black women’s history from inside a black woman’s body: 

Educated African American women believed they had to overcome their history before they could do their history.  Yet the nature of the history they sought to overcome was so embarassing and demeaning [of racial, class, and sexual exploitation and abuse] that it kept them from engaging that history in all but the most indirect manner.  It was not by choice, therefore, but by necessity that we came late to the historical profession.

White and her contributors explain the many struggles that black women faced as they began to enter the profession in the 1960s and 1970s–the obligation placed on many to serve their communities rather than their intellectual ambitions; the scoffing and disbelief they faced in white and black male mentors who were mostly hostile to their interest in women’s history; the stresses of entering work environments in which the other people who look like them are all secretaries or janitorial staff; the racism and sexism of students who walk out of their classes and refuse to recognize their intellectual and professional authority; the cluelessness or plain old racism of overwhelmingly white feminist scholarly communities; and the never-ending suspicion of other historians that black women’s history can never be “objective” if it’s written by black women. 

Because so many of the books by the authors in this collection have won prizes and have come to define the field they invented, those of us who are their peers or who are slightly younger take their success as natural, or foreordained.  This collection makes it clear that every degree, every tenure-track job, every tenure decision, every book contract, every article, and every fellowship or prize was fought for, fought over, and only after overwhelming hard work, sacrifice, and protracted struggle were they won.  White’s own book, Ar’n't I a Woman?  Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985; 1999) has since its publication 26 years ago been recognized as an original and excellent contribution to American history.  It still remains a signal title in African American women’s history–which suggests both its quality, but also I think suggests that doing black women’s history is still really difficult both professionally and personally.  These essays offer troubling and often disturbing evidence of how difficult those struggles have been for the contributors, even to the present day.

Enslaved women’s history I think remains an especially overlooked field, and yet enslaved women are everywhere in the primary sources I read–even sources in Northern New England history, which is not something I expected based on my knowledge of the secondary sources.  I’m highly skeptical of anyone who says to anyone else, “It would be nice if you could write that history, but there are no sources.”  Those of us who train graduate students should take a vow never to say that, ever, and instead to work with students to find ways of finding new sources or of reading old sources in fresh ways.

This book should be required reading for history graduate students and all historians.  Think of it as companion to those venerable classics, Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream (1988) and Bonnie Smith’s The Gender of History (1998)–it’s kind of a nice coincidence that these titles are each separated by exactly a decade (1988, ’98, and 2008).  This book is not just for black scholars or African American historians–it’s for everyone.  Like I tell anyone who will listen to me, queer theory isn’t just for gay scholars or for historians of homosexuality–it’s good for everyone, because both queer theory and Telling Histories teach everyone to be alert to our assumptions about the way the world (or history) works, and they urge us to question those assumptions and to see the world from a different vantage.  And how is that not good for historians, or for any scholars?