Historiann

These boots were made for kicking some a$$!

Hiya, folks!  Hecksapoppin here–it’s warm and clear here on the High Plains Desert, so I have to pitch hay while the sun shines.  Here are some ideas to keep you occupied while I’m out.

• Isis the Scientist writes about the “Mythical Sunshine and Unicorns of University-Based Child Care.”  We see those little chain gangs of toddlers and preschoolers on campus–they must be somebody’s kids.  Why not yours? 
• The Mohegans have elected Lynn Malerba, a woman Sachem, for the first time since the eighteenth century.  In my book, I argued that the Algonquian Indians had no tradition of female political leadership, and that the so-called “squaw Sachems” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were evidence of the stresses of colonialism on Indian peoples.  (And of course, having women leaders became further evidence in English minds that Indian peoples didn’t deserve political sovereignty.  Never mind Queen Elizabeth I and Queen Anne, of course.)
• It’s only March 6, but I think we already have our Mansplainer of the Month.  Of course, it makes perfect sense that one 40 year-old 14-page article probably would have changed my intellectual life.  How tragic for me that I missed this Rosetta Stone!  All is lost!  I’ve submitted my resignation letter to my department Chair already, and will go dark here at Historiann.com as of midnight Sunday.
• A former No Child Left Behind advocate changes her mind and decides that testing kids to death isn’t teh awesome:  Continue Reading »

30 Comments »

Katha Pollitt, in an article called “Whatever Happened to Candidate Obama,” writes this (emphases mine):

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.

Now, I’m actually sympathetic to Pollitt’s viewpoint that “at least you can’t blame this on a woman.”  If we had elected Hillary Clinton President of the U.S., I’m sure she’d be getting even less credit for things that had gone well and even more blame for things that had gone poorly than President Barack Obama.  But–did Pollitt or anyone else proofread this paragraph?  As my professors used to say in cultural studies seminars in the early 1990s–there’s a lot of ”slippage” here.

I’m sure everything will be so totally different when we have that perfect, unassailable, totally awesome female Presidential or Vice-Presidential candidate!  Instead of that unstable freak Victoria Woodhull, or the dangerously radical Shirley Chisholm, or that crooked, incompetent Geraldine Ferraro, or that unserious, stupid ”Caribou Barbie” Sarah Palin, or that old b!tch, Clinton.  (Or, as Pollitt calls her instead, “Hillary,” in a column in which she never refers to President Obama as “Barack.”  Not once.)  Continue Reading »

57 Comments »

Why do the Villagers hate politics?

I'll bust a cap in your a$$!

“The way Congress is working right now, I decided I could make a better contribution to my state and country on a smaller stage,” [Indiana Democratic Sen. Evan] Bayh told me Tuesday. “There are some ideologues in the Senate. There are some staunch partisans. The vast majority are good, decent people who are trapped in a system that does not let that goodness and decency translate itself into legislative accomplishments.”

When his father Birch Bayh was running for re-election in 1968, Bayh noted, Republican leader Everett Dirksen approached the Democrat on the Senate floor and asked how he could help. “It’s unthinkable today,” Bayh said. “One after another, the barriers to incivility get broken down.

Senators actively fundraise against their colleagues, they campaign against their colleagues and that is not conducive to consensus building if you know the people you have to work with want to do you in.”

Uhhh. . . call me crazy, but I don’t want Mitch McConnell raising money for Democratic Senators’ re-elections!  It seems like the very definition of politics is that “the people  you have to work with want to do you in.”  Continue Reading »

15 Comments »

h/t GayProf at Center of Gravitas

Go read Squadratomagico’s post from last night, “A Rant about Entitled Slackers.”  (After Radio Silence, three posts in three days!)  She also has a nice memorial to Alexander McQueen, who sadly was found dead at age 40 by his own hand in London this morning, just days after his mother’s death.  But–I digress.  Back to slackers.

The slacker-dude she writes about in part one of her post is such a familiar character.  (Aren’t they always the special pleaders?  Funny how they never seem to have an A- or B-average.)  That’s the kind of person who really pissed me off even as a student–because I thought that ze might be getting away with it!  It infuriated me that professors seemed so blithely clueless about the scam artists they were dealing with.  Were the honest plodders like me working too hard, when we could be on easy street?  It just didn’t seem fair. 

Well, having made the leap to the other side of the lecture podium nearly 15 years ago, one of the most satisfying things I’ve learned as a Professor is Continue Reading »

29 Comments »

Hi, kids–I’m deep into a juicy new book in my field all day today and finishing prep for my seminar tomorrow, but if you’re looking for diversions, I’ve got a few for you:

• What if Holden Caufield grew up and turned into Howard Zinn?  Hilobrow gives us the hillarious results.  This is the smartest and funniest thing I’ve read all week on the deaths of both historian Zinn and creepy recluse J.D.Salinger on Wednesday.  Via Old is the New New.
• Dopey Educrat Arne Duncan says about New Orleans:  ”we had to destroy the village to save the village.”  Now, all we need are 9,999 more hurricanes, earthquakes, and tornadoes to take out the rest of school districts across the U.S.!  Never mind the loss of life–what about the children?  Hey, “progressives”:  how many of you would be jumping up and down and screaming if Margaret Spellings said “I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. That education system was a disaster, and it took Hurricane Katrina to wake up the community to say that ‘we have to do better,’”  hmmm?  (How long do you think it will be before we start reading the “after a promising fresh start, New Orleans schools have underperformed since being rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina” stories?  Three years?  Five?)
• Here’s an idea:  how’sabout we find a U.S. Secretary of Education who has spent at least 10 years teaching in an elementary or high school classroom?  Continue Reading »

15 Comments »

UPDATED BELOW

Howard Zinn died yesterday.  I never read much of his work, but I admired his career a great deal–the linked obituary is a nice rundown, but hilariously, it identifies Camelot lapdog Arthur M. “history goes in cycles” Schlesinger Jr. as a “liberal historian.”  Zinn was a “polemicist,” as Schlesinger called him–but then, aren’t we all?  It’s just that some of us are timid polemicists, and some of us are bolder than others, and Zinn was a bold, combative person.  (He was literally combative–the obituary linked above says that he got his head bashed in by police at a Communist rally when he was 17, and he was in the Army Air Corps during World War II.)

I never met Zinn, but curiously, our paths crossed in a distant way in-between my freshman and sophomore year of college.  Here’s the story of my brush with (the correspondence of) greatness:  Continue Reading »

17 Comments »

From a story at Politico claiming that the White House “plans a combative response” in the event that Scott Brown (R) beats Martha Coakley (D) today to succeed Ted Kennedy as the next Senator from Massachusetts:

Press secretary Robert Gibbs said a key theme of 2010 will be asking voters “whether the people they have in Washington are on the side of protecting the big banks, whether they’re on the side of protecting the big oil companies, whether they’re on the side of protecting insurance companies or whether they’re on the people’s side.”

Unless the White House has been relocated, isn’t the Obama administration among “the people” we “have in Washington?”  Continue Reading »

34 Comments »

What’s your pleasure?  There are lots of snarling fights all over the place these days:

• Tenured Radical returns to the U.S. from her travels and mulls over the question, “How Should Graduate Schools Respond to the Bad Job Market,” and gets accused of and blamed for all sorts of crimes she never committed and things she never said.  (So does Historiann, in the comments!)  Yeah–because Tenured Radical has never, ever offered any helpful advice or a sympathetic ear (or shoulder) to graduate students negotiating the job market.  What a horrible, horrible person!
• Katherine Franke at Feminist Law Professors, in “Marriage Equality:  The Old Fashioned Version“ schools us on what’s wrong with feminism today:  “Among the things that drives me to the highest levels of frustration when I consider the state of feminism today is the way in which women, particularly mothers and wives, have given up on men. Not so long ago we had a rich, systemic and unrelenting critique of the ways in which fathers and husbands felt little or no obligation to do domestic work – whether it be taking care of kids, maintaining the household – even clearing the table – or other “reproductive” work. The fact that men felt entitled to and received a free pass when it came to this work received a thorough working over by those who cared about dismantling the second class status of women.” Continue Reading »

84 Comments »

UPDATED BELOW

The always-controversial feminist theologian Mary Daly died a few days ago.  Word spread through the feminist blogosphere, and eventually obits ran in major media outlets.  Melissa McEwan’s Shakesville, a vital feminist blog I read and link to (and which occasionally links to me) ran a brief obit and appreciation of her career.  In the fourth comment, someone wrote, “Honestly I am somewhat happy [to hear of her death] considering the transphobic bigotry of hers that I have read.”  Four comments after that, McEwan said she wasn’t aware of Daly’s transphobic bigotry, and said that it was totally OK to discuss it in the thread but please refrain from dancing on her grave.  McEwan then added an “update” to her post that “Daly’s work was unfortunately marred by a streak of transphobia. Wikipedia summarizes its emergence in her work, including her assertion in Gyn/Ecologythat transgender people are “Frankensteinian.” While we want to honor her contributions to feminist thought, we also want to note the limitations of her brand of feminism, which deemed some women monstrous, a view that Shakesville endeavors quite fervently to counter. Cait and Shaker just_some_trans_guy also note she was challenged on her racism as well.” 

Well, of course that lengthy apologia for someone else’s opinions wasn’t enough.  Did any of the very opinionated commenters who were so very concerned about Daly’s transphobia offer quotations, or, you know, any actual evidence of her grave sins against humanity?  (I mean, aside from citing Wikipedia?)  Did anyone do what Mary Daly herself did her whole life–commit scholarship by citing evidence, chapter and verse?  Continue Reading »

64 Comments »

Well, it’s been quite a holiday here in the ancestral homeland–everyone got here safely for the holiday celebrations, but it looks like our ride home next week will be a little more complicated, thanks to the latest wannbe-Jihadi’s attempt on an American airliner.  Thanks a lot, a$$hole!  We still have to take our frakkin’ shoes off every time we go through airport security eight years after “shoe bomber” a$$hole Richard Reid tried to set his chucks alight.  I wonder what new meaningless ritual inconvenience awaits us now?  Let me guess:  no more pixie sticks and juice boxes allowed in our carry-on bags, because this a$$hole tried to mix a powder with a liquid.  (Does Homeland Security know about the explosive properties of Pop Rocks?  Because I don’t want to fly if anyone is carrying Pop Rocks.) 

On a happier note:  here are a few images from our Christmas here in the Northwest Territory: Continue Reading »

28 Comments »