Catch you next week!  Don’t forget:  proposals for panels, workshops, and single papers for the 2011 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women are due March 19!  So spend whatever time you’d otherwise be spending at Historiann.com this week putting together a proposal for the Berks instead.

We’ll have to do a massive femblogger meetup there.  The conference will be in Amherst at the University of Massachusetss, June 9-12–the Pioneer Valley is lovely in the late spring, friends!  And remember:  this comet only comes around every 3 years, so if you miss this one, you’ll regret it for sure.

Do any of you ever wish you could crawl back into the 90s again? Or is it just me and Fratguy?  We were poor for most of the ’90s–and when we were no longer poor, I had a bad job, but we always had very good friends and neighbors wherever we were–Philadelphia, Baltimore, Hartford, Somerville/Cambridge, Washington D.C., Providence, R.I., and “Winesburg,” Ohio.  I’m probably just nostalgic for the first decade of adulthood, when the possibilities seemed endless.  (I will say that it’s nice not to have moved at all for 8 years in a row!  It seems like I spent half of my 20s in a U-Haul, driving up and down I-95 and figuring out how to avoid the New Jersey Turnpike.)

(Aside:  Does anyone know if there have been any articles or dissertations written about all of the babies, baby dolls, fetuses, and allusions to reproduction that populate both Nirvana and Hole songs and videos?  Does anyone want to offer an analysis in the comments below?) 

Although this video of “Malibu” might suggest that we’re going to the beach for Spring Break, we’re not.  More details later–but I think I’m going to stay off-line and just live in the meat world on my vacation.

Here’s some flava of the 1970s for you, too:  “put down the cigarette, and drop out of B.U.!”

And, of course, we have a classic from the 1980s, shot at Eastern State Penitentary in Philadelphia. Panopticontastic!

Has the historical profession, much like the blogosphere, gone tribal, such that we don’t even bother having conversations across political lines?  Or is this just a brief cease-fire in the kulturkampf?  (Or does the kulturkampf continue, and I’m just unaware of it because I’m not on the Front Lines myself?)

Dish it!

How many of us can relate to the “expert” in this video?  “I spent my entire life attending the nation’s most prestigious schools to talk about bull$h!t like this.  I’m really just happy to be on TV.”  Awesome!

I’ve actually been on a documentary on TV.  (Well, in Canada, anyway!)  I’ve been invited to appear in others, but they seemed kind of dodgy.  As in, “we’re just looking for some chimp to sit in front of a bookshelf and read our script,” no input from me necessary.  Sorry–not interested.  Who else has experience with appearing on TV as a talking head?  Confess!  (And provide a link so we can check you out, if you’re comfortable with that.)

I’ve been asked to consider taking on a new responsibility here. It’s a responsibility that comes with a lot of responsibility, and relatively little power, though it’s very important that the job be done well and ethically. It involves working with folks who have tenure, organizing them to get certain tasks done.

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So, as a responsible person with relatively little power (I can’t fire these folks, affect their pay, or withhold special treats/privileges), what do you do when someone says “no” to doing their share of a group job?

In general, it’s a good policy to avoid assignments in which one would have all of the responsibility, but little or no authority.  I have taken on major service tasks in which the responsibility-to-authority ratio was a little more evenly balanced–for example, I served as Graduate Studies Chair, and I served on the program committee of a major conference.  (These jobs also kicked my butt–that was the responsibility side!)  But in both of those jobs–as on the search committees I’ve been on–I got relatively immediate gratification.  We hired a fine new colleagues/admitted some promising new graduate students/or put together a great conference program–and so I got to see what all of my work added up to within a year or so–and then it was done.

We all know that service tasks undertaken by the faculty are hardly ever recognized or rewarded with respect to our annual salary exercises or with respect to tenure and promotion.  And yet, someone’s got to do the jobs in which the authority : responsibility ratio is all out of proportion.  There are a few exceptions for which I’d consider breaking my general rule–such as, is the task one I think is important and whose goals I believe in, or one I might even enjoy?  That would make the work easier to bear.  But (for example) feeding the bureaucratic beast is not my priority.

Bardiac’s commenters have a lot of good ideas:  for example, it helps if you’re someone who always pitches in, or if others are in your debt.  Someone also suggested flattery.  Finally, one commenter’s brief (and I think humorous?) suggestion was simply:  “I have two words for your consideration – Tonya Harding.”  (Does anyone under the age of 30 or so get that joke?) 

What do you think?  Which have been your service tasks from hell, and which have worked out okay, or even (to your surprise) have been enjoyable?

The part of the film I found most disturbing was when Schwartzman told her friends what happened–and her friends told her that it happens to everyone.  What else did she expect?  That’s just the way it is, and she really should get over it because that’s how it happens sometimes.  After all, she consented to some sex acts.  In other words, they told her that rape is clearly on the continuum of how heterosexuality operates.  They read her actions as complicit with the rapist–whereas there was never any ambiguity for Schwartzman.  As she related in the Q and A session after the movie, she cried and screamed and repeatedly begged the rapist to stop during the rape, and then went home and wrote in her journal “I was raped last night.”  When even her friends told her that what had happened to her wasn’t rape, she bottled it up and tried to forget it.

I’ve got a new lecture on rape as a tool for social control in early America that I’ve added to my classes recently.  Last spring, when I gave the lecture for the first time, I was extremely disappointed (although sadly, not surprised) that the first comment on it was from a woman student who told us about how a friend of hers falsely accused a man of rape.  Another woman student agreed–yes, apparently, the biggest problem with rape among college women today in their view is that so many men were falsely accused.  It was as though in a class of both men and women students, these women were eager to reassure the men that of course she didn’t think they were rapists.  (As though my lecture were an accusation?)  Like slavery and coverture, my students last spring were desperate to convince themselves that rape is in fact a crime so terrible that it never, ever happens any more.  (As we discussed a few weeks ago, postfeminist ideology means that there are no victims any more.)

The response of the students at UNC last night to Schwartzman’s movie was quite different–they were fully absorbed by her story, and asked very smart questions.  Schwartzman completed a final cut of the movie last year, and has taken her show on the road this academic year–if you’re interested in inviting her to campus or in purchasing the movie for your students, you can find more information here.  She also has a blog to help publicize her campaign to encourage young people to think about sexuality, desire, and consent at whereisyourline.org.

“I guess I have been castigated for believing too deeply in the president,” [Axelrod] said, lapsing into the sarcasm he tends to deploy when playing defense.

That’s right:  if you made a mistake, it was only that you loved him too much.  (Where does anyone get the idea that Democrats can’t take a punch?  Oh, I don’t know–the fact that they’re falling all over their fainting couches because someone “castigated” them.  With words!  Really mean ones, I guess.)

In an interview in his office, Mr. Axelrod was often defiant, saying he did not give a “flying” expletive “about what the peanut gallery thinks” and did not live for the approval “of the political community.”  [Ed. note:  Weak!  If you don't give a "flying" frack, then don't bring it up.]  He denounced the “rampant lack of responsibility” of people in Washington who refuse to solve problems, and cited the difficulty of trying to communicate through what he calls “the dirty filter” of a city suffused with the “every day is Election Day sort of mentality.”  [Ed note:  you have to govern with the Washington you have, not the Washington you wish you had, with flying multicolored ponies and cream soda in all of the fountains and in the reflecting pool of the Lincoln Memorial.]

When asked how he would assess his performance, Mr. Axelrod shrugged. “I’m not going to judge myself on that score,” he said. But then he shot back: “Have I succeeded in reversing a 30-year trend of skepticism and cynicism about government? I confess that I have not. Maybe next year.”  [Can we get red pop next year in the reflecting pool?  That would be pretty, and extra-delicious.]

I’m just stunned to learn, once again, that President Barack Obama’s team really did believe that he was the magically transformational politician they marketed during the primary and general election campaigns.  How could any adults actually have seriously believed that?  How could anyone with even a passing acquaintance with American history believe that meaningful progressive change happens without a great deal of effort, and equal or stronger resistence thereto?  What theories of presidental power are they working from–or are they all still smoking Hopium and hoping the rest of us will get a contact high from the fumes?

Seriously:  does Axe think Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation after inviting slaveholders to join him for a Summit on Labor Reform at Blair House?  (Of course, Lincoln didn’t sign the Emancipation Proclamation for humanitarian reasons–it was a powerful weapon of war meant to cripple the Confederacy, and it was held in reserve for maximum effect until after Robert E. Lee was turned back at Gettysburg, his only attempted invasion of the North the Union victory at Antietam.  It was just a bonus that it was the morally as well as the politically right thing to do.)  Anyhoo–believe it or not, the linked article gets stranger and more pathetic:

“Every time I hear that the White House is getting the message wrong, it breaks my heart,” said Mr. Axelrod’s sister, Joan, an educational therapist in Boston.

Ms. Axelrod says that while her brother is devoted to Mr. Obama, he is not a sycophant. She paused when asked whether he admired the president too much. “He is very, very loyal, sometimes to a fault,” she said.

Who the hell gives permission for his sister, or any family member, to comment on the record in a story like this?  (coughRahmEmanuelcough?)  I guess Axe really is at the center of the not-ready-for-prime-time White House.

“In a campaign, you’re not held to the same standard of actually doing what you say you’re going to do,” said Anita Dunn, a former White House communications director and Obama campaign adviser. Mr. Axelrod can still sound like the self-described idealist who developed Mr. Obama’s campaign message, expressing impatience with what he calls “the gritty pragmatist school that says you have just got to accept the system” in Washington. “I’m not surprised that there are people who never liked us in the first place trying to have a big ‘I told you so’ about how you really can’t change the system,” he said.

Mr. Axelrod has never lived in Washington before and has come to loathe what he calls “the palace intrigue pathology of Washington.”

And yet, he found the time for an extensive b!tchfest with a New York Times reporter, thus giving plenty of fodder for the courtiers to nosh on this week.  He also nevertheless believed that one transcendently perfect man was going to change all of that “palace intrigue pathology” overnight.

Dear Historiann,

I have a question about working outside one’s dissertation field, and wonder to what extent the topic of one’s dissertation dictates the career.  Is it permanent?  I am now working on a topic largely unrelated to my doctoral work, and I have already discovered this to be less-than-an-asset on the job market.  For jobs in my dissertation field, any search committee would look askance at current project; for jobs in “current project field,” they will look askance at the dissertation.  (Think: dissertation on revolutionary France, current project on Argentina). 

To what extent are we defined by a choice of dissertation topic, even throughout our careers? I have heard people commenting about a very senior (famous) historian who wrote a recent book, saying “how can he work on Y? He’s a specialist on X!” (X being his doctoral subject). He completed his Ph.D. 30 years ago, and has written a number of books. My view is, surely he’s had time to become a specialist in some other field/s of history since then. But this view is obviously not shared by all in the discipline. Should a junior scholar wait til after tenure to bust out their “true historical passion?”

Signed,

Roving Renata

Renata, I agree with you that people in our profession can be extremely fussy and fuddy-duddy about switching fields and gaining new competencies.  (And as someone who wrote a book that wasn’t a revision of her dissertation at all but was an entirely new project–well, let’s just say that I can relate to your anxieties.)  People are unusually identified with their first books, especially if their first books were well received.  I once had a colleague who was absolutely haunted by this.  He once said to me, “it’s just agonizing to think that people will read my first book and think that that’s who I am as a scholar!”  (He’s now the editor of a tippy-top history journal–so clearly, his career hasn’t been stalled or ruined by any of his books.)  We all learn and grow, and most people probably look back on their first books with a mixture of pride and acknowledgement that it’s merely the book we were capable of writing at the time.  We’d all do it differently, if we had it to do over–but that would be boring, so most of us want to move on and write about something new, and that something might take us far afield from where we originally began.

I would say that the distance you’re moving away from your original field is less important than your explanation for the move in job and fellowship applications.  If there’s a coherent intellectual justification for making the move, then you’ll be able to explain it cogently in your application letters–and it would be worth your while to explain it as clearly as you can, in as much detail as you think relevant.  Believe it or not, there are many departments that will appreciate the breadth of your interests–these will tend to be small departments at SLACs or regional universities, or interdisciplinary departments in which you might be just one of two or three historians.  But, there will be other history departments (as you note) that will not see it as a bonus (or who will be downright suspicious.)  Large research universities with faculties of 40 or more will likely already have several Latin Americanists–if they’re running a search in early modern or modern European history, they’re looking for someone who will be happy to be slotted into a more defined geographical space and time, at least in hir teaching if not also hir research.  You might not make the cut there–but then, you probably wouldn’t be as happy there as you would be at a place where you could swim around in more fields or subfields.  As in fashion, so it is with our profession:  the fit is everything.

My sense is that it’s a lot easier to do this once you’ve published a book.  After you’ve brought one major research project in for a landing, you’ll get credit for having done that, and more benefit of the doubt for being able to do it again.  It’s harder to do if you’re a very junior scholar, and it’s even harder I imagine if in fact you’re moving into a very different field, with its own complex historiography (as in your example of moving from eighteenth-century France to Argentine history).  Whatever you’re working on now should be your “true historical passion”–if it’s not, then u r not doin’ it rite.  Don’t make the mistake of switching fields when rethinking your major research project is what’s really called for.  (My aforementioned book wasn’t in a different field than my dissertation–it was just a different topic and it engaged a much broader swath of time and space, although gender and power were at the center of both projects.)

The historians I admire are frequently people who have branched out far beyond their original comfort zone.  (In fact, most of the first generation of women’s historians didn’t become women’s historians until their second books–Mary Beth Norton’s and Carol Berkin’s first books were on loyalists in the American Revolution, and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s first book is Religion and the Rise of the American City, 1971.)  Other examples of field-switchers:  the eminent early modern French historian Natalie Zemon Davis most recently published Trickster Travels:  a Sixteenth Century Muslim Between Worlds (2006), about Leo Africanus, a Spanish-born Muslim who fled to Morocco and traveled throughout Africa and Europe.  Susan Amussen, an important scholar of gender in early modern England, recently published a second book called Caribbean Exchanges:  Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640-1700 (2007), which took her into the English Atlantic World and of course into the extensive historiography on Caribbean slavery. 

But, I am sure that even mid-career and senior scholars whose interests migrate have some frustrations with getting into conferences and publishing in journals outside of their original fields of expertise.  I’ve been hearing about some of these lately from friends whose interests have either moved around in time or through space, or both.  One friend has found that journals in his new field have resisted seeing his new work as “counting” in their field, and another friend is undertaking serious retraining in other historical fields, and has been schooled in public at conferences by scholars in the fields ze’s trying to move into.  (That’s a kind of resistance–and even rejection–that most Associate Profs think they have left behind!)  I admire their determination and ambition–and it makes me wonder how much more fun and interesting history would be if more of us were equipped with more than one or two analytical lenses or Big Questions motivating our research.

What do the rest of you think?  What advice do you have for Renata about the benefits and perils of switching fields over the course of a career in academic history?  I know that some of my readers have personal experience with this–so dish it up!

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:  Diane Ravitch writes,

As I listened to the day’s discussion, it became clear that NCLB’s remedies were not working. Students were offered the choice to go to another school, and they weren’t accepting the offer. They were offered free tutoring, and 80 percent or more turned it down. Enough students signed up to generate large revenues for tutoring companies, but the quality of their services was seldom monitored. I recalled a scandal in New York City when investigators discovered that a tutoring company, created specifically to take advantage of NCLB largesse, was recruiting students by giving money to their principals and gifts to the children; several of the firm’s employees had criminal records.

Adult interests were well served by NCLB. The law generated huge revenues for tutoring and testing services, which became a sizable industry. Companies that offered tutoring, tests, and test prep materials were raking in billions of dollars annually from federal, state, and local governments, but the advantages to the nation’s students were not obvious.

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What I learned that day fundamentally changed my view of No Child Left Behind. When I realized that the remedies were not working, I started to doubt the entire approach to school reform that NCLB represented. I realized that incentives and sanctions were not the right levers to improve education; incentives and sanctions may be right for business organizations, where the bottom line — profit — is the highest priority, but they are not right for schools. I started to see the danger of the culture of testing that was spreading through every school, community, town, city, and state. I began to question ideas that I once embraced, such as choice and accountability, that were central to NCLB. As time went by, my doubts multiplied. I came to realize that the sanctions embedded in NCLB were, in fact, not only ineffective but certain to contribute to the privatization of large chunks of public education. I wonder whether the members of Congress intended this outcome. I doubt that they did.

Who ever would have predicted this, my friends?  I know, I know:  just as history is far too important to be left to the historians, so education is too vital to be left in the hands of well-trained teachers with small classes.  Why do that, when instead we can create a federal boondoggle to enrich grant- and contract-seeking educrats and edupreneurs with no classroom experience whatsoever, and at the same time punish the teachers and principals with their damned unions by labeling their schools failures?  (It’s not a bug, it’s a feature!)

Have a great day, friends.  (And, I was just kidding about the resignation letter and going dark here–never fear, I’ll be back.)  Now, let’s drift along with the tumbling tumbleweeds with the Sons of the Pioneers:

Have a great Friday.  For those of you who are sliding into Spring Break–have fun, and travel safely (if you’re traveling at all.)  For those of you who aren’t–well, it’s almost spring for all of us in the northern hemisphere, so buck up!