Historiann

Locked and loaded!

Public Radio International’s This American Life last week was forced to retract a story they ran last January that drew heavily on a performance piece by Mike Daisey currently playing off-Broadway in New York.  Ira Glass writes on the website:

I have difficult news. We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth. This is not a story we commissioned. It was an excerpt of Mike Daisey’s acclaimed one-man show “The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs,” in which he talks about visiting a factory in China that makes iPhones and other Apple products.

The China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show. On this week’s episode of This American Life, we will devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in “Mr. Daisey [and] the Apple Factory.”

Daisey lied to me and to This American Lifeproducer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn’t excuse the fact that we never should’ve put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake.

We’re horrified to have let something like this onto public radio. Many dedicated reporters and editors – our friends and colleagues – have worked for years to build the reputation for accuracy and integrity that the journalism on public radio enjoys. It’s trusted by so many people for good reason. Our program adheres to the same journalistic standards as the other national shows, and in this case, we did not live up to those standards.

Glass and TAL did the right thing to retract this story and to devote last weekend’s entire show to correcting the record and to conducting a kind of on-air autopsy of what went wrong with TAL’s Daisey’s reporting and TAL’s fact checking.  Continue Reading »

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Via Shakesville, a real-life story of the real-life effects of ultrasound laws that “give” women the “right to know” about abortion.  First of all, the effects of the Catholic affiliation of many hospitals in the U.S.:

[B]efore I’d even known I was pregnant, a molecular flaw had determined that our son’s brain, spine and legs wouldn’t develop correctly. If he were to make it to term—something our doctor couldn’t guarantee—he’d need a lifetime of medical care. From the moment he was born, my doctor told us, our son would suffer greatly.

So, softly, haltingly, my husband asked about termination. The doctor shot me a glance that said: Are you okay to hear this now? I nodded, clenched my fists and focused on the cowboy boots beneath her scrubs.

She started with an apology, saying that despite being responsible for both my baby’s care and my own, she couldn’t take us to the final stop. The hospital with which she’s affiliated is Catholic and doesn’t allow abortion. It felt like a physical blow to hear that word, abortion, in the context of our much-wanted child. Abortion is a topic that never seemed relevant to me; it was something we read about in the news or talked about politically; it always remained at a safe distance. Yet now its ugly fist was hammering on my chest.

Then, the author’s experience as she was–as it turns out unnecessarily–subjected to Texas’s new ultrasound laws: Continue Reading »

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Let’s take a trip into history, to a world that time and systemic hormone disruptors have forgotten–the world after the Comstock Act and before the legalization of diaphragms and cervical caps and the invention of the Pill.  I will share with you the most interesting thing I learned in co-teaching a course on the History of Sexuality in America last term:  American women were encouraged by the marketing geniuses at Lysol in the middle third of the twentieth century to use Lysol douches for both contraception and personal hygiene. 

I had heard about the Lysol contraceptive douche, but until my colleague lectured on the subject, I had no clue that it was actively promoted for decades in degrading and fearmongering advertisements by the manufacturer.  It was an enlightening moment for me and for the students when my co-teacher explained in her lecture that Lysol was very popular during the Depression, because it was 1) inexpensive, 2) probably something you had already lying around the house, and 3) didn’t require a physician’s assistance (unless it caused internal injuries!)

(Remember:  I am not a modern U.S. historian.  The only thing recommending contraception in my period of expertise, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is perhaps the fact that most were non-toxic, if also as ineffective as Lysol.  The most dangerous “menstrual regulator” available was jumping off of fences or carrying heavy loads of wood, or eating too many juniper berries or drinking too much pennyroyal or squaw mint tea.)   

Nicole Pasulka at Mother Jones, riffing on Andrea Tone’s Devices and Desires,  has assembled a brief history of Lysol’s contraceptive application as well as a slideshow of the advertisements promoting the Lysol douche.  Warning:  this may be offensive and/or induce involuntary buttcheek clenching in women especially.  Clicquez a vos risques!  Continue Reading »

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This was my first thought when I heard Rush Limbaugh’s repeated prurient insults directed at a private citizen.  It’s interesting to me that Democrats are now articulating this very idea in media appearances–see the clip from syndicated columnist Connie Schultz on Rachel Maddow last night, and now President Obama in his press conference this afternoon.  It’s difficult for a lot of parents of daughters not to see in Sandra Fluke their own daughter, if not now then eventually someday.  As Schultz says, “[Limbaugh] asked for video, Rachel, of this young woman; he called her a slut because she wanted to be responsible about birth control.  They have no idea yet, it seems to me, what’s been unleashed but they’re about to find out.”  (Scroll up to about 5:30 to see Schultz’s interview.)

If my college students are at all representative, many of them were put on the Pill in high school by their parents.  Not all of them, of course, but it’s hardly a remarkable thing any more for a parent of a teenager to do this.  Republicans love their birth control as much as any other Americans.  They also love their daughters as much as other Americans–so who are you calling a slut, again, mister? Continue Reading »

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From The Child's Colored Gift Book, with One Hundred Illustrations, (1867)

 Aaron Bobrow-Strain got some nice publicity yesterday for his new book, White Bread:  A Social History of the Store-Bought Loaf, which according to Amazon will be released tomorrow.  Bobrow-Strain’s subtitle suggests his focus, which is really on the past 100 years and the invention of the mass production of factory-baked loaves.  In an interview with NPR on Weekend Edition Sunday, he made the point that “white bread was a deeply contentious food — ever since the early 1900s’ ideas of “racial purity” up to the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s. . . . . White bread first became a social lightning rod with the Pure Foods movement of the late 1800s. Bobrow-Strain says well-meaning reformers were concerned about a host of legitimate food safety issues, and their activism led directly to many of today’s food safety laws.  But food purity ideals bled into the social realm in the form of what Bobrow-Strain calls “healthism” – the idea that “perfect bodily health was an outward manifestation of inward genetic fitness.” 

Fans of Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad:  Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century (1986; 2009) will likely be familiar with the earlier parts of Bobrow-Strain’s narrative, from what I can tell from the promotional materials–I’m glad to see that Shapiro’s book has been reissued and perhaps thereby brought to the attention of younger scholars.  (I tried but failed to find even a table of contents for White Bread online–I guess we’ll have to wait until the book is officially published to “look inside,” as the Amazon feature suggests. . . )

Bobrow-Strain is not a historian, but rather an Associate Professor of Politics at Whitman College, and he holds a Ph.D. in Geography and other degrees in Latin American Studies International Studies.  White bread–or to be more specific, raised loaves made of refined wheat flour–has a much longer and more interesting early American history, and one that marries well with Bobrow-Strain’s arguments about white bread and racial purity.  Continue Reading »

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Blowin' smoke, as usual. Why should we pay for his poor choices?

Violet Socks at Reclusive Leftist has a terrific primer to help everyone understand that contraception is basic to health care, and that the Obama administration is not forcing taxpayers to underwrite birth control.  The Obama administration rule is that insurance companies must provide birth control–you know, the insurance companies we pay money to so that they will cover our health care needs?

She elaborates on the especially stupid argument offered by some that contraception coverage means that women will be paid to have sex:

Insurance normally covers all kinds of medical expenses connected with sex and other voluntary activities. Bill O’Reilly complains that “men’s activities” aren’t covered, but they are. If men want Viagra so they can have sex, insurance covers it. If they get gonorrhea or syphilis or crabs from having sex, insurance covers it. If they get AIDS from having sex, insurance covers it. If they want to go skiing and need a cardiac stress test first, insurance covers it. If they need Diamox so they can go skiing in Aspen, insurance covers it. If they break their legs skiing, insurance covers it. If they need Simvastatin to lower their cholesterol because they won’t stop eating fatty food and red meat, insurance covers it. If they suffer a heart attack from all that fatty food and red meat, insurance covers it. If they need a nicotine patch to quit smoking, insurance covers it. If they get lung cancer because they won’t stop smoking, insurance covers it. And on and on and on.

Does this mean that men are being paid to have sex, to ski in Aspen, to eat sausage, to smoke or not smoke? No.

And let’s not forget:  women seeking contraception are in the habit of having sex with men, of whom we could with as much justice demand sex tapes and accuse of wanting to be “paid to have sex!”  Continue Reading »

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Remarkable providence!  A jury in Denver has decided that an unconscious woman actually got herself pregnant:

The woman became pregnant and Cox’s DNA was found in the fetal tissue. A test determined the woman became pregnant at about the time of the alleged attack.

Beyond the DNA, prosecutors had little direct evidence linking Cox to the alleged sexual assault.

There were no witnesses to the alleged attack. The alleged victim did not have a rape kit done at a hospital. There were no tests performed to confirm her suspicions that she might have been drugged that night as she has no recollection of what happened.

During closing statements Thursday, Steinberg criticized the investigation by Lone Tree police and called the alleged victim a “party girl” who drinks a lot.  Continue Reading »

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Thinking about that thread on LDS post-mortem baptism of people of other faiths left me wondering:  did some of the angry commenters actually know what Morman post-mortem baptism entails?  I knew all along that there is no use of human remains, no disinterrment, no visitation of graves, and no involvement at all of the baptisees and their families.  If this kind of thing were central to the ritual, then I would share the outrage that some expressed at the practice.  Perhaps people really thought there was some kind of involuntary conscription involved that went beyond uttering someone’s name while a live Mormon undergoes a symbolic baptism on behalf of the baptisee?

Well, don’t take my word for it–take the word of Elna Baker, probably one of America’s most famous Jack Mormons.  She describes the Morman post-mortem baptism ritual, and why someone’s body must actually be immersed in a “water vault,” in a podcast from last September 26 on Marc Maron’s WTF.  Continue Reading »

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Remember when during the 2008 primary election candidate Barack Obama argued that his selection as the Democratic nominee would mean that we’d get past all of the kulturkampfen waged by aging hippies and College Republican Baby Boomers still stuck in the 1960s?  Indeed, it was central to his appeal, and he played it up.  For example, here’s his speech “The America We Love,” June 30, 2008:

Still, what is striking about today’s patriotism debate is the degree to which it remains rooted in the culture wars of the 1960s – in arguments that go back forty years or more. In the early years of the civil rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War, defenders of the status quo often accused anybody who questioned the wisdom of government policies of being unpatriotic. Meanwhile, some of those in the so-called counter-culture of the Sixties reacted not merely by criticizing particular government policies, but by attacking the symbols, and in extreme cases, the very idea, of America itself – by burning flags; by blaming America for all that was wrong with the world; and perhaps most tragically, by failing to honor those veterans coming home from Vietnam, something that remains a national shame to this day

Most Americans never bought into these simplistic world-views – these caricatures of left and right. . . . Continue Reading »

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Or rather, they walk into a BBC interview studio–and they discuss the night from their different disciplinary perspectives.   Here are the results!

Do we manipulate the darkness, or does it manipulate us?

Oxford Professor of Circadian Neuroscience, Russell Foster, explains his research which shows how the blue-tinged sky of dusk is a trigger that tells our bodies it’s time to prepare for bed[, a]nd why it would be good for us to go back to rising with the dawn and going to bed at sundown.

Rut Blees Luxemburg finds surprising richness of night-time colours in her photographs, and historian Craig Koslofsky shows how early modern Europeans first colonised the night by introducing street lighting.

And most interstingly of all, Craig Koslofsky of the University of Illinois talks about his research for Evening’s Empire:  A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe.  If you just want to hear about the book, scroll ahead to about 32:15 in the podcast.  Continue Reading »

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