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Duh.  (And where are Senators Obama and McCain on this?  Inquiring minds want to know!)

Sign the petition, in the name of all that is right and just in the world.  (H/t Lambert at Corrente.)

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Well, it’s been a heckofa holiday weekend, U.S. American-style:  rodeo Thursday, marching in the Stampede Parade with the Weld County Democrats Friday morning, swimming in the smokin’ heat Friday afternoon (thank goodness for friends with access to pools!), a neighborhood cookout Friday night along with a viewing of the legal fireworks display at the rodeo grounds, errands and a movie Saturday (Kit Kittredge–see the review below), and a visit from friends on Sunday.  Land sakes, a cowgirl needs a vacation from all of this time off!

There was lots of history in the news this weekend, of personal and professional interest.  So, herewith, is my latest roundup:

• The Black American West Museum has come into the possession of most of the land that once was home to the Dearfield Colony in Weld County, Colorado, an African American agricultural community from 1910-1948.  They’re working with a Weld County Commissioner and hoping to attract volunteers and donors to turn it into a historic site for its 100th anniversary in 2010.  See the Rocky Mountain News story on it, which also includes an interview with two men who lived there, and an audio slide show of Dearfield.  The history of African Americans in the west is overshadowed by a mythology that overwhelmingly privileges the perspectives of white settlers.  The preservation of the Dearfield Colony would be a tremendous contribution to the history of black Coloradoans in the early twentieth century.
• University of Pennsylvania historian and McNeil Center Director Daniel Richter was featured in a Weekend Edition Sunday look at colonial and early national Philadelphia.  He waxes eloquent on the crowding and mucking up of William Penn’s “greene countrie towne.”  Next week, they’re doing an in-depth investigation of Charles Wilson Peale and his museum as a hook for moving into an exploration of the nineteenth century city.
• Historiann took advantage of the air conditioning in a local movie theatre Saturday afternoon to see Kit Kittredge:  An American Girl.  Yes, it was inspired by a book that’s part of the insidious “American Girl Doll” borg, but it was more than halfway decent.  Set in the midst of the Great Depression in Cincinnati, it renders a kid’s-eye view of living with the tumult of hard times when Kit’s father moves to Chicago to find work, while she and her mother turn the family home into a boarding house, plant a garden, and even sell eggs to make ends meet.  It was entertaining for adults without resorting to double-entendres and trashy jokes in the fashion of so many movies putatively for children.  And, one bonus of films set in a reasonably distant historical period:  absolutely no product placements or advertising, despite the movie’s connection to the American Girl marketing juggernaut.  (It would have been in very bad taste to advertise anything in a movie about the depression, in any case.)

More on KK:  Well-known character actors from the American film repertoire like Wallace Shawn, Joan Cusak, Glenne Headly, Jane Krakowski, and Stanley Tucci, did their jobs quite well in their roles as the eccentric adults that come into Kit’s life as she lives in the boarding house and struggles to get her articles published in the local newspaper.  (Perhaps unsurprisingly, these adult actors overshadow the lead character, played by Abigail Breslin.)  The movie turns into a caper when a rash of local burglaries cast suspicion on the inhabitants of the local hobo jungle, and on the young day laborers who work for Mrs. Kittredge.  It’s also an extended exercise in nostalgia for twentieth-century childhood, with a tree house, a secret club, strap-on roller skates, children who are permitted to take streetcars downtown without chaperons, bullies in school who get their comeuppance, and a heroine who’s writing it all down with her typewriter, complete with stuck keys when she types too fast.  All in all, wholesome fare that was well-received by the under-12 set in the theatre–and when you consider the absolute absence of decent movies that feature a girl heroine and leader of her kid gang, well–it’s more than worth a look if you’ve got 4-11 year old girls or boys in the house on a too-hot or too-rainy summer afternoon.

Historiann’s only complaint about Kit Kittredge is that Julia Ormond and Chris O’Donnell are too glamourous and good-looking to be cast as Kit’s parents.  You just can’t believe anything could really be all that bad with those two as the resident loving authority figures.  (Am I crazy, or does O’Donnell look better than ever with some grey hair and a bit of a middle-aged paunch?  A few imperfections make him look almost like a real man instead of a cookie-cutter himbo.)  Willow Smith is adorable as hobo sidekick Countee–which turned out to be a great “passing” role!

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More than one person has googled that question in the past few weeks, and it led those people to Historiann.com.  In the spirit of service to all humankind that is Historiann’s raison d’être, let’s give the people what they want, shall we?

• WHEN:  Sometime in June 2011.  The date will be announced probably sometime later next fall or winter.
• WHERE:  Undecided, although the consensus at the business meeting on Sunday morning three weeks ago was that it probably should move to the east again, after California in 2005 and Minnesota last weekend.  My prediction is that it will be held in a central portion of a state that begins with “M,” although another great idea was to hold it in a major city that has the first initial ”P.”
• These decisions are the major order of business for the Little Berks meeting, October 3-5, at Interlaken, Connecticut.  Anyone is free to attend–show up and lobby for your favorite east coast location!  (Bonus points for being willing to host the conference at your university!)  Ordinarily, the Little Berks meeting is in the spring, except in years when we’ve had a Big Berks meeting, and then it’s in the fall.  (Please review Tenured Radical’s definitions and explanations of the Little Berks and the Big Berks, if you’re unclear on the distinctions.)
• TIME LINE:  Please review the letter posted at Blogenspiel last month–that’s about what our timeline was for the 2008 conference.  Please note that proposals will probably be DUE IN WINTER 2010, just eighteen months from now, and about eighteen months ahead of the next conference.  (We’re an all-volunteer organization, without the paid staff like the AHA and OAH have to put on our massive conference, with 1,100+ people on the program.  Automating our applications with a web submissions system helped make it easier to circulate proposals to our sub-committee members, but didn’t save us enough time to move the deadline for proposals back.  So much work for the program happened throughout last summer after our Program Committee meeting, and I can’t imagine having to teach while managing all of the details about panels falling apart and other sesions still being assembled!)
• In the end, however the 2011 Program Committee co-Chairs are sovereign, so they’ll set their own deadlines.  You can look here for more information about the 2011 conference as it becomes available.

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PART II OF A TWO-PART SERIES

This post is a follow-up to yesterday’s post, which was about workplace bullies and the ways in which they can come to dominate a work environment by driving away some people while turning those who remain into bullies themselves.  According to Robert Sutton, “[R]esearch on emotional contagion, and on abusive supervision in particular, finds that if you work with or around a bunch of nasty and demeaning people, odds are you will become one of them.”  This describes many of the people I worked with in my first tenure-track job, which I resigned seven years ago.

My major foe at my former university was someone who was tenured but simultaneously (and humiliatingly) denied her promotion to Associate Professor.  She had published a book after all in a department that didn’t require a book, whereas men in the department had recently been promoted to Associate Professor before tenure and, in one case, without a book at all.  (That’s right:  men without books?  Can’t wait to promote you!  Women with books?  Wait a year or two, then apply again.)  There was a whole class of women assistant professors who got that treatment right around the time I was hired, either within their department or at the college review level.  Need I point out that the curious creature known as the tenured Assistant Professor was a pink-collar only rank?  Unfortunately, this individual’s experience resulted not in anger and radicalization, but in shame and internalization, which was then directed outward not at the people who caused her misery, but at other targets below her on the hierarchy. 

This was a pattern that repeated itself many times in that department.  People were filled with ressentiment about the way they were treated, and most of them either became bullies or apologists, explaining that “don’t worry, you’ll still be tenured.  That’s just the way we do things.  Everyone goes through it, so you’ll just have to suck it up.”  There were a few good people who tried to make changes–but they have been easily defeated by the others.  Those who were my friends and allies were valiant in their optimism and their commitment to change, but in the meantime, what a life:  stomping out flaming bags of poop that someone else is leaving on yet someone else’s doorstep. 

One of the effects of this kind of work culture is that it stifles new ideas, fresh methodologies, and innovative research and pedagogy, because of the rate of turnover among those who leave, and the inner turmoil suffered by those who stay.  (Bullying academic departments tend not to allow Assistant Professors to follow their own bliss, either in the classroom or in their research agendas.  This is sometimes the very motive for the bullying:  many departments really don’t want anything–or anyone–new or innovative around.  And, scrutinizing other people’s work to belittle it is one of the pleasures of academic bullying!)  Unsurprisingly, women’s history and histories of other not-dominant groups and historically marginalized perspectives have a hard time gaining purchase in an environment like that.  For example:  Historiann was hired to be the American women’s historian in that department, a position that had been a tenure track line for thirteen years but one that had never seen anyone progress to tenure.  (Historiann was number five in the long line of historians who had held that position.)  And guess what, girls and boys?  Twenty-four years later, no one yet has been tenured in that line!  That’s right:  success beyond anyone’s wildest antifeminist dreams in 1984, when the position was first established.  Of course, the fact that that position was the only line dedicated to women’s history was doubtless a major factor behind the abuse and harassment suffered by all of the historians who hopped on and off that merry-go-round.

So, who says cheaters never prosper?  Bullies may not be happy people, but it seems to me that they get what they want, and that really sucks.  (The woman described above is probably one of the unhappiest people I’ve ever had the misfortune to know–a truly wretched creature.)  But what might suck more is staying in an abusive job because you’re determined to be SuperProf who’s going to vindicate herself and save her department of its destructive culture.  We don’t encourage people in abusive relationships to believe they can make the abuser change–why should we expect people in bullying work environments to stick around and try to change the culture, when they have little if any power or influence to force reform?

The million-dollar question is, of course, how can anyone turn a bad department into a good one?  Who can get control over bullying work environments and force change upon them?  My sense is that it takes a strong-willed dean who’s not afraid of the bullies and who’s got a healthy budget to clean house with brutal post-tenure reviews (including perhaps buyouts), and to support lots of new hires.  But–in the arts and humanities–what deans have that kind of time or money, outside of elite universities and SLACs, where the humanities are central rather than marginal to the identity of the institution?  My guess is that most departments have to shift for themselves, so how do good people leverage their goodness to isolate, marginalize, and/or drive out the bad?

Resources:

• The Workplace Bullying Institute
• Bob Sutton’s “Latest Tips for Surviving Workplace A$$holes:”  offers some very useful ideas.  Your three best friends are documentation, documentation, and documentation.
• Academic Leadership on “The Bullying Boss.”  This description of bullying behavior is more specifically accurate to the academic workplace.
• Dealing with Bullies in the academic workplace.  This article emphasizes the importance of establishing civility and of calling out infractions quickly and non-confrontationally.  (It won’t work with determined bullies, but it may help preserve a pleasant, rancor-free work environment.)

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As we here in Potterville pull on our boots and get ready for the big rodeo and ”western celebration” coming to town, I’m happy to report that a few of you are getting out of your towns to attend conferences and conduct some research.  Here are some interesting museums featured on a few blogs I read regularly:

• Anxious Black Woman is just back from the National Women’s Studies Association annual meeting in Cincinnati, and gives us a great report on the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, a new museum there.  I’m particularly grateful for her review, because Historiann lived in southwestern Ohio when this museum was being planned a decade ago, and she was a little skeptical of the concept.  (White people in and around Cincinnati are really into the Underground Railroad, and every little town has at least two or three mythological sites or houses that people commemorate as alleged stops on the UGRR.  Historiann was always suspicious that this was a means for white people to re-write the history of slavery and to cast their ancestors in heroic roles as slavery resisters, rather than in the much more likely role of slavery enablers, especially because African Americans were enslaved in southwestern Ohio, contrary to the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.  I lived in a town near the Ohio-Indiana border I’ll call “Boxford,” which likes to pretend that its proximity to the authentic Quaker town of Richmond, Indiana somehow retroactively turns all nineteenth-century Boxfordians into abolitionists.)  ABW’s verdict on the museum?  Disappointing in its interest more in masters than enslaved people and in its erasure of women, although the introductory movie was good.  (But go read her more thorough treatment yourself!)  The good news is that the NWSA itself was a great experience–I’m envious that I wasn’t there!
• If your summer travel plans take you to Cincinnati, the Cincinnati area has all kinds of new museums–for example, the Creation Museum of Hebron, Kentucky, just a few exits down the road from the Cincinnati airport, is another museum that was just under construction when Historiann lived nearby.  It’s a creationist extravaganza of imaginary natural history–tell them Bing McGhandi sent you!  Here’s a reality-based review of the CM.
• Professor Zero is in Lima (Peru, not Ohio!), and went to the Museo de Pedro Osma, which sounds like an interesting palace filled with colonial as well as twentieth-century art.
• Do any of you have recommendations for interesting fine arts, history, or other museums in your home towns (or that you’ve encountered on your travels) for summer vacationers? 
• Finally, for those of you in the academy who are public historians, or work with public historians, what’s your sense of public history’s relationship to non-public history (frequently referred to somewhat condescendingly as “academic history,” as though public history is an inferior intellectual pursuit)?  My sense is that there used to be more conflict or resentment among “academic” historians, but that these distinctions (well, snobberies, actually) are fading.  Is Historiann (who is not a public Historiann) overly optimistic?

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(Ali G glossary here–scroll down for “respek.”)  One of the disturbing issues raised in the li’l women’s history and Berkshire Conference hoedown we’ve been having around here lately is that of respek–or the lack of respek, more properly–afforded not just mid-career and junior schmucks like Historiann and Notorious Ph.D., Girl Scholar, but even to senior women scholars.  Go read here and here (in the comments) for descriptions of the two sessions last month at the 2008 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in honor of the career of Susan Mosher Stuard (h/t to New Kid on the Hallway–thanks, baby!), one of only two women’s historians that Historiann worked with in her entire undergraduate career.  (And Stuard taught at Haverford College, while Historiann majored in History at Bryn Mawr!  Shocking!)  Read those descriptions, and gaze in wonder at the obnoxiousness of a few men, young and old, who are just full of advice for the first generation of women’s historians! 

Have you ever met Merry Wiesner-Hanks?  Do you really want to be that guy who thought he was schoolin’ MW-H?  Or Connie Berman?  Or Judith Bennett?  I don’t think so.  Because even if I could imagine an alternative universe where you would be more right than them about women’s history, you’d still look like a jerk.  Come to think of it, you’d look a lot like Ali G!  “I was finkin’, that women history, right?  Is pre’ty much th’history of bonin’!  Of womens being boned by the mens, right?  And then servin’ the mens tea, or wha’ever.”  It’s funny how our profession, which is supposedly so hung up on rank and authority, isn’t so much when it comes to women with rank and authority.  Tips for toads:  if you don’t know too much about a particular field of inquiry, then maybe ask an informational question rather than tell the people who invented that field of inquiry what they need to do to satisfy your demands.

Respek, man.  Fink abou’it.  Peace, out.

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So much to blog about, so little time when one is writing pointless books about irrelevant (is it redundant to say they’re female?) people that will nevertheless destroy the historical profession!  Taking a break from my vulgar colonial schemes to corrupt the history and memory of the eighteenth century, here’s what I found recently in the twenty-first century:

• The pay gap in academia is worse at R-1s, and it starts at the moment of hire.  (Good news for those of you at SLACs, CCs, and regional universities!  Right?)  The intrepid Scott Jaschik reports that “[a]t research universities, even controlling for variables such as discipline and numbers of papers published and other factors, there is an unexplained 9 percent salary gap that favors men.”  Whoodathunkit?  Only everyone who reads Historiann.com!
• Teh funny:  via Notorious Ph.D., a blind-reviewer voodoo doll.  I’m going to buy two.
• Tenured Radical explains (with mostly small words that even the ig’nant can understand) why women’s history is important. 
• Another Damned Medievalist at Blogenspiel has two posts up about the Berks.  One features a primer about how to get ready for the 2011 conference, as well as some compliments about the conference.  (I am sure the 2011 Program Committee will be happy to build on the numbers of medieval panels, roundtables, and workshops featured in 2008!)  The other post, Transformative Conferences, features a discussion in the comments about the fracas at the panel in honor of Susan Mosher Stuard in Kalamazoo last month, when a man stood up to suggest that perhaps women’s history was too important to be left to women historians!  (As if!  Yeah, the men were going to get around to women’s history, when a bunch of women showed up and started making trouble and smearing menstrual blood all over the seats at conferences!)  Hey, medievalists:  I’ve been hearing whispers about this for weeks now–you have to let us Americanists in on the gossip, too!  (At least tell Historiann, who remembers Susan Stuard fondly from her undergraduate days, and whose BFF is a medievalist.)  I’m glad they did a panel in Stuard’s honor, and what a fitting send-off into retirement was the learned comment by the Venerable Bede there.  Nice work, dude!
• Brett Holman offers le dernier mot on this manufactured controversy at Airminded, which reminds me of that old bumper sticker:  “Against abortion?  Don’t have one.“  Don’t like women’s and gender history?  Then don’t do it, but STFU!  (It seems so obvious, doesn’t it?)  Thanks, Brett!
• 
• Knitting Clio schools Hendrik Hertzberg, and calls out a lot of the bullcrap prounouncements on African American history and American women’s history by the ig’nant class of elites who dominate our political discourse.  (That cowgirl knows her bullcrap!)
• Oh, and the sexy cowgirl picture?  This one is for commenter Fratguy, who I think has a little crush on the cowgirls here at Historiann.  Come and get it!  (Here’s a close-up; click the top one for a larger view.)

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Happy Juneteenth!  I want to follow up today on some of the dynamite panels on pre-emancipation African American women’s history I saw at the Berkshire Conference last weekend. 

Researching and Writing the Lives of Unfree Women, Friday June 13.  I reported briefly on this panel on Sunday, but want to follow up because it was so good.  The room was jam-packed, so that when Natalie Zemon Davis arrived after the session had already started, a thoughtful junior scholar gave up her seat so that NZD could sit.  Other senior scholars like Tera Hunter and Elaine Forman Crane were in Standing Room Only (although Historiann tried to get them to take her seat)!  The session was chaired by Annette Gordon-Reed, whose work on Sally Hemings (and new book on the Hemings family) is justifiably admired.  All of the presentations were interesting, but I thought that these were especially fascinating:

• Terri Snyder’s discussion of researching Jane Webb (ca. 1682-1764), a sometimes-enslaved, sometimes free woman of color in Virginia and her efforts to secure the liberty of her seven children
• Cassandra Pybus’s presentation on Mary Perth (ca. 1772-1800), an enslaved Virginia creole whose life she has traced to Nova Scotia (as one of the “Black Loyalists”) and then to Sierra Leone.  Pybus spoke of the frustrations of the gaps in the historical record, and her reluctance to “make it up,” although other panelists said that all history has gaps that must be reconciled, and so they’re perfectly comfortable with sketching out a series of possible scenarios in their writing.
• Sharon Wood spoke about Priscilla Baltimore (ca. 1801-1882), a locally famous St. Louis and western Illinois entrepreneur and alleged conductor on the Underground Railroad.  Wood’s presentation offered some insight into researching in local archives, and a guide for people interested in African American women’s history in the western U.S.
• Angelita Reyes gave a wonderful presentation on Vicey Skipwith (ca. 1856-1930), a woman born in Virginia in slavery, who became a landowner after emancipation.  Reyes’s work illustrated the sequential connections from freedom, to marriage, to property ownership, and thence to “respectability,” and brought it all home (literally!) with her work uncovering the Vicey Skipwith Home Place and getting it on the National Register for Historic Places and the Virginia Landmarks Register.  The preservation of material culture and landmarks like the Skipwith Home are vital to African American history, and was especially welcome at the Berks given our emphasis on public history in many panels, roundtables, workshops, and seminars.

This roundtable discussion was a clarion call to get back into the archives, particularly into the state and local archives, do some old-fashioned social history, and discover the lives of unfree and recently emancipated women in order to (in Pybus’s words) uncover the “specificity of African American lives.”  Many panelists gave high praise to the genealogists and archivists whose work has enabled their work tremendously.  The sources and stories are out there, and they are recoverable. 

Surviving Dislocation, Separation, and Sale:  Enslaved Women in the Americas, Saturday June 14.  V.P.Franklin chaired and commented on two papers, one by Jessica Millward (”Abandoned Lands and Abandoned Plantations:  Enslaved Women and Mobility in the Age of Revolution”) and Daina Berry (”‘Young Girls are First on the Stand’:  Enslaved Females and the Domestic Market.”)  There is no better evidence of the return of social history than Berry’s database of 81,000 slave valuations and her efforts to give us a nuanced portrait of the prices set on enslaved people according to age, sex, health, etc. in Antebellum slave markets.  Particularly interesting was her discussion of “fancy girls,” enslaved women who were used as sex workers, and of the self-mutilation (chopping off a hand or a foot) enslaved people engaged in as resistance, in order to decrease their market value.  

That’s all for today–if you saw these panels, please comment further.  If you saw other great African American panels, please report on those!  (I’ve heard that the discussion in Stephanie Camp’s seminar Sunday morning was terrific–but I wasn’t there myself, unfortunately!)  I hope you all honor our ancestors and enjoy a nice picnic today!

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Historiann has promised herself that she’s going to run many miles this morning and then spend the rest of the day in the eighteenth century thinking about Abenaki national security issues, but fortunately so many other clever and insightful Berks bloggers have posted wonderful comments and overviews of the sessions they saw last weekend at the 2008 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women that Historiann is pleased to direct you to them today.  To wit:

• Knitting Clio has an excellent post up about a roundtable discussion that I desperately wanted to see, and it looks like it was as good as I thought it would be, darn it all!  About the panel called CHILDHOOD AS A USEFUL CATEGORY OF HISTORICAL ANALYSIS, she writes that it was a fascinating look at the ways in which feminist historians are inventing a new history of childhood.  She also has overviews of SEXUAL SCIENCE REVISITED:  A ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION WITH CYNTHIA RUSSET, another roundtable called TRANSFORMING HEALTH CARE FROM BELOW, a fascinating public history panel that links directly to KC’s own research agenda called TEACHING ABOUT HEALTH AND CONTRACEPTION OUTSIDE THE CLASSROOM, and KC’s own seminar, WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF THE BODY?  (My only complaint:  why does she call her post a “post-mortem?”  Women’s history is alive I tell you!  It’s ALIVE!)
• Kittywampus has a little blurb about us, directing us to new feminist blogs.  It was great to meet you, and I’m so pleased you enjoyed our new seminar format!
• Finally, Tenured Radical has more Berks blogging, from the Complaints Department.  Apparently, the notion of 1,400 women and men getting together to talk about women’s and gender history is proof of the irrelevance and faddishness of our field.  (Either that or it’s extremely threatening to someone named Miss Mary Rusticus, who didn’t attend the conference but apparently feels extremely entitled to complain about our little kaffeeklatsch.  Jealous, much?)  Now, while not all forms of history are Historiann’s cuppa joe by the campfire, I can’t imagine the sense of entitlement (or embattlement?) that would lead me to complain publicly about the mere existence of a sub-field of history.  Historiann says:  let a thousand flowers bloom!  And if that’s just not your style, you can kiss my ass.

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We at the Berkshire Conference last weekend shared plenty of transhistorical, global bad news about women in history and in the historical profession, so far be it for me to suggest a Whig narrative for Western women’s and gender history.  But–does anyone find it a little weird that this story is a stunning newsflash worthy of several pages in the New York Times Sunday Magazine?  (Hat tip to Historiann commenter Indyanna.)  People, this is 2008.  Why aren’t you writing urgent stories about the millions of men who are letting their female partners down by shirking housework and child care?  I guess dog bites man isn’t a news story, so we have to go with “man bites dog, then changes diaper.” 

Also, while it’s nice that Marc Vachon and a few of the other men in this story help make things work around the house, I wonder if they are really worthy of a 10-page magazine spread?  (Talk about evidence of the low expectations that our culture has for heterosexual men!  Man Microwaves Dinner for His Own Children–film at 11!)  Are decent, thoughtful husbands really like exotic zoo animals?  Why are egalitarian heterosexual couples being covered by the New York Times like they’re members of a secretive tribe recently discovered by anthropologists?  How do these kinds of media representations of heterosexuality shape young men’s and women’s expectations of partnerships and/or marriage?

More reflections on the conference to follow…but I’m feeling the urge to retreat into the eighteenth century, especially if men like Marc Vachon are Big News in 2008.

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