Historiann

Well, well, well–we finally pulled up to the ranch late on Sunday night, but with all of the stall-mucking and fence-riding to be done, as well as another holiday to prepare for, I’ve had no time at all to blog about the great time and intense learning that was the 2012 Gay-S-A in San Juan, Puerto Rico.  I won’t bore you with the specifics of the intellectual conversations that I had, but rather will instead entertain you with a “slice of life” overview of the conference that will perhaps offer some useful strategies for those of you prepping for MLA, AHA, or the other large disciplinary conferences that will meet in the next few months.  (Tenured Radical, Madwoman with a Laptop, and GayProf have all beat me to the conference round-up, so you can go there for the intelleckshul content.  This blog post is–mostly–a bagatelle, a lagniappe if you will–just for fun.)

Among the many interesting things I learned:

• You can make new friends and impress important people if you show up at a graduate student panel at 8 a.m. on a Friday morning.  I don’t want to go into it, but you can get a (perhaps undeserved) reputation for being a decent person for doing something like that, something you might have done anyway just because you were interested in hearing the papers.  Shhhhh!!!
• This may be especially important if you disappointed a lot of people at your panel.  The panel was a great success, especially for a first-day, almost first-thing in the morning panel.  But as I whispered to GayProf as we were being introduced, “I have the feeling that thirty people in this room are disappointed, thinking ‘that’s not what I thought he/she looked like!’”
• I like to go swimmin’ with bare-naked women and swim between their legs.  True!  (And that naked woman will apparently be me this weekend, because I foolishly left my brand-new bathing suit in the hotel bathroom.  Oh well–I didn’t like the bottoms, although the top was super-cute–see photo below.)  And it’s also true that you can have substantial intellectual conversations and engage in serious problem-solving while swimming in the ocean or pool, and while sitting around afterwards in your bathing suit or sundress.  I think this might be due to the fact that it’s difficult to be pretentious or cagey when you’re only half-dressed (or worse.) Continue Reading »

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Al Young

We learned yesterday that Al Young has died at the age of 87 in Durham, North Carolina.  A leading scholar of the “New Left,” especially with respect to working class people and the history of the American Revolution, his influence on several generations of early American historians is indisputable.  Young saw the Revolution as one that emerged from the bottom up, although he was very clear that the Revolution benefited only a tiny minority of elite Americans in spite of the sacrifices and suffering of the masses.  You can read other tributes to him on H-OIEAHCnet by Mike McDonnell and Kenneth Lockridge, with others certain to follow, I am sure.

Young’s New Left view of the Revolution (as opposed to the consensus school dominated by Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood) triumphed among scholars trained from the 1970s through the 2000s.  (Wood published a book called The Radicalism of the American Revolution twenty years ago.  Young never wrote a book called The Consensus of the American Revolution!  His full name was Alfred Fabian Young, after all.)  Unlike proponents of the consensus school, Al was never offered a position at an elite, private institution, and spent the bulk of his career at Northern Illinois University.

I knew Al briefly after his retirement, Continue Reading »

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Image credit here.

Some people are mystified as to why “binders full of women” is the meme that people remember from Tuesday night’s presidential debate.  Some men obviously don’t get it (see below), but I think a lot of women were struck by the awkwardness and belabored tone of Mitt Romney’s anecdote about improving the representation of women appointees in his gubernatorial administration in Massachusetts in the past decade.  In trying to demonstrate that he thinks about sex equity and has taken steps in his career to redress what he sees as an imbalance, he unfortunately only confirmed a Democratic perception of him as insular and out of touch with the worlds that most people live and work in.  Perhaps many were wondering like me, “the only time you thought about this was when you were nearly 60 years old and in public office?  What about all of those years at Boston Consulting Group and Bain?  Hmmm.”

(N.B.  Before demagoguing this, Democrats should ask themselves about their party’s commitment to sex equity and equal opportunity for women and men in the workplace.  How ’bout that 2008 primary season?  Remember that?  Then shut up, Democrats, and stop acting like your party isn’t the abusive boyfriend or husband warning women “It’ll be worse for you if you dump me for the other guy!“) Continue Reading »

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The early morning phone call (for North Americans)!  The endless numbers of invitations to give lectures!  Being taken seriously!  There is no end to the inconvenience of having won a Nobel Prize, apparently.  Doesn’t that make you feel better?  I know it makes me feel better about my obscurity and mediocrity!

I like this guy:

“Frankly, I have no complaints whatsoever,” says Martin Veltman, a physics laureate at the Universities of Utrecht and Michigan. Veltman shared the 1999 prize with his former student, Gerard ‘t Hooft, for work that put the mathematics behind the Higgs boson on sound footing. But Veltman does raise an eyebrow at some of the other members of the Nobel club. “Sometimes I wonder about the other laureates,” he says. “In fact I have discovered the truth of a remark by [Enrico] Fermi. Someone asked him: ‘What have the Nobel prize winners in common? His answer: ‘Nothing, not even intelligence.’”

Here’s something this year’s prizewinners have in common:  Continue Reading »

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You know what I’ve been thinking?  More of you should read Jonathan Rees at More or Less Bunk.  Here’s why:  the man shows a commitment to explaining why if the future of higher ed is online, then the future of the republic is a dim one.  (See for example his riff on selling As based on Michael Moore’s question, “Why doesn’t GM sell crack?”)  While some of us just  rip something out of the mailbag, or rant about politics, or put up a YouTube of a song we heard in yoga this week, Jonathan has signed up for a MOOC and is posting regularly on the results.

Here’s his reportage so far on Princeton Proffie Jeremy Adelman’s World History course:

• Part one, in which our common Jonathan is “underwhelmed” by the technology used in the MOOC, and concludes that “[i]f this kind of course makes anyone unemployed, it’s not because they’ve built a better mousetrap.” Continue Reading »

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Today’s post is the final installment of my three-part interview with Mary Beth Norton, whose career will be celebrated at Liberty’s Sons and Daughters, a conference in her honor in Ithaca, New York September 28 and 29.  (If you’ve missed part I and part II, get yourself caught up and then read on.)  Here, we talk about her decision to to write a trilogy of books on early American women’s and gender history.  In chronological order of the history they cover, they are Founding Mothers and Fathers:  Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (1996), Separated by their Sex:  Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World (2011), and Liberty’s Daughters:  The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (1980).   We also talk about her experiences publishing with both trade and university presses, both of which present their own advantages and disadvantages.

Historiann:  You write in your introduction to Separated by their Sex that this is the third volume of your trilogy focusing on colonial and Revolutionary-era women’s history, connecting Founding Mothers and Fathers to Liberty’s Daughters.  When and how did you conceive of writing a trilogy?  Would you recommend this career strategy to younger historians?

MBN:  I knew I had to write a trilogy when I was three or four years into the research for what became Founding Mothers & Fathers, for I realized then that the project I had conceived as one book had to be divided into two. And even later I decided that Salem witchcraft deserved its own book, an offshoot of the trilogy, because otherwise I feared it would take over the second volume. As it happened, both the Salem research and the research for Separated by their Sex went in directions that I had not anticipated, and so In the Devil’s Snare became more a stand-alone (but related) volume. Continue Reading »

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Today’s post is part two of a three-part interview with Mary Beth Norton.  If you missed yesterday’s post, catch it here and get with the program! 

At the end of yesterday’s interview, Norton talked about how she transformed herself from a historian of loyalists in the American Revolution into a women’s historian.  She spoke of an anecdote in which a senior scholar in her field wondered why she had given up loyalists to study women, when her loyalist work was “perfectly OK!”  In today’s conversation, Norton and I move from a discussion about feminist scholarship to a conversation about feminist activism in the historical profession.  She also talks about her feminist mentors in the academy, and about the relationships and organization that has sustained her through her career.

Historiann:  I am pretty sure that if you had stuck with the loyalists, you would not have achieved the stature in your fields that you have as a women’s historian! 

I assume that as your star rose as a historian that you were able to make some changes in the Cornell history department itself, such as hiring more women and continuing to diversify the curriculum.  Can you tell us more about this side of your feminist activism?  Who or what was most helpful to you, and what (if any) obstacles still remain in your view to sex equality in academia or the historical profession in particular? Continue Reading »

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Today and for the next two posts, Historiann is thrilled to present an interview with the distinguished senior scholar and women’s history great Mary Beth Norton.  Norton is the Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History and a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University.  Even those of you who have never met her in person probably know of the legendary energy, enthusiasm, and industry that have made her a legendary scholar in both early American history and American women’s history.  Quite simply, Mary Beth Norton is a force of nature.

She is the author of The British-Americans:  Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774-1789 (1972), Women of America:  A History (1979, with Carol Berkin), Liberty’s Daughters:  The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (1980), Founding Mothers & Fathers:  Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (1996), In the Devil’s Snare:  The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692 (2002), and most recently, Separated by their Sex:  Women in Public and Private in the Colonial Atlantic World (2011).  Aside from numerous important articles, she is also the co-author of an American history textbook, A People and a Nation, and she is the co-editor (with my colleague at Colorado State University Ruth Alexander) of Major Problems in American Women’s History.

You’d think that someone with a groaning shelf of books like this wouldn’t have time to answer her own e-mail, but when I contacted her this summer about interviewing her, she wrote back immediately and enthusiastically.  Continue Reading »

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The 2013 annual conference of the Western Association of Women Historians will be at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon May 16-18.  Individual paper and panel proposals are due Friday, September 14!  Get your proposals in soon–the CFP and the forms are available here. The call is utterly broad, and remember:  you don’t have to live in the U.S. or Canadian West in order to join or participate:

All fields and periods of history are welcome, as are roundtables on issues of interest to the historical profession.  In order to foster discussions across national boundaries, we particularly encourage the submission of panels organized along thematic rather than national lines.  All proposals will be vetted by a transnational group of scholars, and preference will be given to discussions of any topic across national boundaries.  That said, single papers and panel proposals that fall within a single national or regional context will be given full consideration. . . [W]e particularly encourage proposols that include premodern time periods.

Who wouldn’t want a trip to Portlandia to round out the academic year?  (Duh!!!)  It’s a great place to meet people, network, and feel supported in your work.  And this year will feature a very much deserved tribute to the career of Lois Banner.  Continue Reading »

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With love, from Woodrow

UPDATED BELOW, within the hour

After hearing that this fellowship had been suspended and signing a petition to protest this decision, I received this e-mail yesterday from Susan E. Billmaier, a Program Officer for the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation:

Thank you for your concern regarding the Woodrow Wilson Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies. The following note was sent to friends of the Woodrow Wilson Women’s Studies Fellowship.  As the letter explains, the grants for the 2012-2013 year have been suspended, but the Foundation remains well aware of the importance of this award.  In the coming year, a careful review will ensure its continued strength going forward.  We thank you for your interest and hope you will remain a supporter of the Fellowship in the future.

Dear Friend of the Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship Program in Women’s Studies,

We are sorry to have to report that, as a consequence of the larger economic downturn, the endowment for the Women’s Studies Dissertation Fellowship has generated insufficient funds to cover program costs over the past several years.  The Woodrow Wilson Foundation has thus decided to suspend the competition for the 2012-2013 year while we explore options to ensure that the program will continue to flourish in the future.  During the coming year we will engage in a careful review of the Fellowship’s goals and structure, with a view toward achieving greater financial stability and success in the future Continue Reading »

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