Historiann

It’s Stampede season here, friends, and we’re all excited about rodeo days and the world’s largest Independence Day rodeo, right here in Potterville!  Heck’s'a’poppin’.

• First up, the hearings for Elena Kagan’s nomination to the Supreme Court start today.  Tenured Radical has a nice round-up of her own, with some quality links for your enjoyment.  I liked this article by Deborah L. Rhode of Stanford University, “Why Elena Kagan’s Looks Matter.”  (Answer, paraphrased by me:  That ol’ devil, patriarchal equilibrium.)  Don’t miss the part in the article where she describes how hateful, anonymous insults about her looks after publishing an op-ed illustrated the point of her new book rather perfectly.  Rhode writes, “Yet pointing this out is likely to unleash the prejudices at issue. I got a recent taste after publishing an op-ed in The Washington Post. The editorial summarized themes from my just released book, The Beauty Bias, which documents the price of prejudice and proposes some legal and cultural strategies to address it. It was surprising to discover how many individuals were willing to take time from their busy day to send hate mail on the order of ‘I just bet that you yourself are one ugly c—.’ Some readers, annoyed that no author picture accompanied the article, felt strongly enough to do independent research. One explained: ‘knowing there had to be a reason why [you would write about bias] I looked you up in the Stanford Faculty Directory and then all the pieces fell together… I’m sure Stanford has to tie a bone around your neck to get even the campus dogs not to run away from you.’ Several hundred online posts following the article included more of the same. One reader proposed taking up a collection so I could ‘buy …a burqa: This would certainly improve the aesthetics around Stanford.’”  Lovely.  (Does the WaPo realize that comments like this reflect poorly on them?  Once again, and with feeling:  either moderate your comments or eliminate them!  Same goes for you, Daily Beast.  Why give these douchebags a forum when they can start their own damn blogs, for free?)
• Paul Krugman has some bad news for us all.  (Well, those of us who aren’t fabulously rich enough to eschew employment and live off of interest income, anyway.) Sucks for us, friends!
• Randall Stephens has some interesting reflections on Glenn Beck’s use of history and style of historical argumentation.  He writes, “Beck’s political grandstanding and maudlin theatrics are offensive enough. (I can think of no better ipecac for the typical humanities professor.) But it’s his ahistorical theories of the past that disturb me most. Continue Reading »

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From a distance, of course–Potterville is about 1,137 miles away, 4,659 feet higher, and 70 degrees colder than San Diego this morning.  Damn! but I wish I were waking up in the Hotel del Coronado today.  It’s -11 here now–but it will be sunny, at least!  The sun is about the only thing San Diego will have in common today with the High Plains Sub-Zero Freezer we’re locked in until the weekend.  Classy Claude will be filing a first-person report later this weekend, if he can peel himself off the beach, shake the sand out of his drawers, and find a wifi hotspot. 

First, the good news:  the 2010 annual meeting of the American Historical Association is in San Diego!  That’s it for the good news I’ve heard.  If you’re there and not interviewing for jobs, interviewing for jobs you’re unlikely to get, or interviewing dozens of candidates for a job at your institution, at least you can do it without wearing boots and lugging a giant coat around a big hotel because you’re stuck yet again in Chicago or Boston.  (Who’s with me on pushing the AHA to south and west, friends?  We’ll throw Denver in there too, for you winter sports enthusiasts.  How about instead of Chicago, Boston, Chicago, New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Atlanta, and Chicago, we have Dallas, Phoenix, San Diego/L.A., Denver, and San Francisco?)

Inside Higher Ed reports that attendance is down at the AHA this year, because of the economy and the related dearth of open positions in history.  (There are also fewer drop-ins than there would be in major Eastern cities because of the West Coast location, too, and the additional travel expense for people in the Eastern and Central time zones especially.)  And, the AHA itself reported that it’s “A Grim Year on the Academic Job Market for Historians,” because “[d]uring 2008–09 job advertisements fell by 23.8 percent—from a record high of 1,053 openings in 2007–08 to 806 openings in the past year. This was the smallest number of positions advertised with the AHA in a decade.  To make matters worse, a subsequent survey of advertisers indicates that about 15 percent of the openings were cancelled after the positions were advertised.”  Marc Bousquet at How the University Works takes issue with the AHA report’s conclusion that the problem is an oversupply of history Ph.D.s, and says that it’s not an oversupply of qualified job candidates, but that it’s an undersupply of tenure-track jobs because of university administrators’ decisions over the past 25 years to hire more contingent faculty than tenured or tenure-track faculty proportionally. Continue Reading »

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Well, friends:  we’re in the midst of a butt-chapping deep freeze, thanks to an Alberta Clipper that just won’t quit.  It’s -15 degrees Fahrenheit here in Potterville, and won’t get above freezing until sometime this weekend.  Those of you in the East might be enjoying a snow day today, so here are a few tidbits to warm you up and get your engines running this morning:

• Chris Hedges asks, “Are Liberals Pathetic?“  (h/t Susie at Suburban Guerrilla.)  He writes that their “sterile moral posturing, which is not only useless but humiliating, has made America’s liberal class an object of public derision.”  He then goes on to contrast elite, sheltered liberals with working class men who “knew precisely what to do with people who abused them. They may not have been liberal, they may not have finished high school, but they were far more grounded than most of those I studied with.”  What do you think?  I think he’s onto something, but he also engages in a romanticization of a partcular kind of working-class masculinity that equates “fighting” with manhood only, and by implication slights the liberal coalition of today which is based on feminists and gays.  Can we get away from these gendered tropes for criticizing the left?  (Hedges himself identifies the intersection of Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue that’s really to blame for Dem reluctance or even refusal to attempt real change.)
• Hedges’ essay reminded me of an interesting piece by Joe Bageant on the absence of compassion among so-called “progressives” called “Shoot the Fat Guys, Hang the Smokers.”  I worry about this–it’s part of what I was trying to get at last year in most of my posts on Sarah Palin.  Laughing at or condescending to people isn’t a winning strategy.  Smugness will be the death of the left.
• Clio Bluestocking brings us more tales from the Orwellian world of online teaching at her school–or, as Hacky McHackhack, the overpaid consultant puts it, “delivering education.”  Continue Reading »

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I had an e-mail exchange yesterday with a good friend of mine from when I lived in–let’s call it Winesburg*–Ohio.  He left Winesburg a few years after I moved out to Baa Ram U.  He told me today that the junior scholar who replaced him there really likes her job.  He writes,

Apparently, this new assistant prof loves it and has a bunch of friends also hired at the same time. And my response was, just wait until the friends start moving away. And then I remembered how I really liked [Winesburg] for a couple of years — then [good friends] moved away and then you, and so on.

I’ve been thinking about the transience of academic careers and lives a lot lately–Flavia commented briefly on this in her most recent post, and then I got this e-mail from my old friend yesterday.  Continue Reading »

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Who can resist “The Grandaddy of ‘Em All?” It’s high rodeo season out here on the high plains desert–check out this bareback rider, courtesy of the Denver Post.  There’s a reason you don’t meet too many rodeo cowboys over the age of 21–especially not the bull riders.  (One exception:  calf-roping teams frequently feature “senior citizens,” by which I mean, men in their 30s, 40s, or even 50s, many of whom do a brother act or a father-son act.)  The African American Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo usually rolls through town later in the summer.  Unfortunately, I missed the Colorado Gay Rodeo last weekend in Golden, and (shockingly!) Potterville’s own Stampede because of my recent travels.  Although Cheyenne Frontier Days is supposedly ”the Grandaddy of ‘Em All,” the Stampede is bigger, better, and beats ‘em every year, fair & square.  (We’ve got much better food at our rodeo–pork chops on sticks, roasted sweet corn brushed with butter, and lotsa barbecue.) 

Now, for some less cheerful news:  I’ve got some updates on the UNC Predator Proffie, Vance Fulkerson, that we’ve been following here at Historiann, all from the Denver Post this morning.  To wit:  Continue Reading »

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Cam the Ram

And of course, I do so affectionately, since I like teaching at the old Aggie school because of days like yesterday, when some of the Ag students put on a show-and-tell for the rest of the university in a plaza in-between the Liberal Arts college and the library.  The big guy at left is the university mascot known as “Cam the Ram.”  (He’s not really a Rocky Mountain Big Horn, for perhaps obvious reasons, but a farm animal shaved down and wrapped up real purty.)

Here are the calves (whose “moooooowww”s I could hear in my office upstairs!) Continue Reading »

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Ten Top Trivia Tips about Historiann!

1. Native Americans never actually ate Historiann; killing such a timid prey was thought to indicate laziness!
2. Historiann can usually be found in nests built in the webs of large spiders.
3. The only Englishman to become Historiann was Nicholas Breakspear, who was Historiann from 1154 to 1159.
4. When provoked, Historiann will swivel the tip of her abdomen and shoot a jet of boiling chemicals at her attacker.
5. Birds do not sleep in Historiann, though they may rest in her from time to time!
6. A cluster of bananas is called a hand and consists of 10 to 20 bananas, which are individually known as Historiann.
7. It is impossible to fold Historiann more than seven times.
8. It takes 8 minutes for light to travel from the Sun’s surface to Historiann.
9. Historiann can turn her stomach inside out.
10. If you lie on your back with your legs stretched it is impossible to sink in Historiann.

Via Squadratomagico.  Here’s the place where you find out about yourself (or anyone else)–let me know in the comments what you discover!  How, I wonder, can anyone who, “when provoked. . . will swivel the tip of her abdomen and shoot a jet of boiling chemicals at her attacker,” be deemed “timid prey?”  Oh well, like all women (except when I was Nicholas Breakspear), I’m accustomed to accusations of embodying all kinds of mutually contradictory traits:  “naturally” weak and helpless, yet I can ruin a warrior and sap his strength if he eats from my dishes when I’m menstruating; a man-crazed lesbian; passionless yet I can’t control my sexual desires.  You get the picture.  All just a day’s work as a marked category, friends!

Just remember:  it is in fact impossible to fold Historiann more than seven times.  (I think my actual limit is closer to three.)  I hope you get your weekends off to a great start–here in NoCo, we’re battening down for another big snowstorm!  But, that’s life on the high plains desert at  5,000 feet for you.  (I recall a graduation weekend/Mother’s Day weekend snowstorm here in Potterville in the early 2000s, and we regularly see snow flurries on May 1 for some reason.)  Wish me happy shoveling!

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Edward Linenthal, the editor of the Journal of American History and Professor of History at Indiana University, is visiting Potterville, Colorado this week as the Hewit Distinguished Professor of History this year at the University of Northern Colorado.  Yesterday he gave an informal talk to the History faculty there over lunch on the subject of “How to Get Published in the Journal of American History.”  He also provided a lively and in-depth glimpse of how the journal works and some of his priorities as editor.  I caged an invite from my pals at UNC, and found Linenthal so engaging and down-to-earth that I asked him if I could publish my notes on his comments, and he said yes.  So, here you go:

• The numbers:  Linenthal said that they receive 215 submissions a year, and that of those they can publish twenty.  (For those of you who took remedial math like me, that’s an acceptance rate of about 9.3%–ouch!)  Everything is read by a pair of Associate Editors, and of those 215 submissions, perhaps 35-40% are rejected in-house without review.  (When asked which articles were rejected in-house, Linenthal said that it was only those that were very narrowly cast, ”horrendously written,” and/or those that don’t fit the mission of the JAH at all.)   
• The process:  The 60-65% of articles that are sent out to readers are each sent out to four readers, which Linenthal admits can lead to a “cacophony” of opinions that are difficult to sort through.  If you’ve got an article under review at this journal, don’t hang out by your e-mail in-box drumming your fingers:  Linenthal says that he’ll “always go for thoroughness over speed,” every time, but says that their average in responding to authors is four months after submission.  It’s a double-blind review process, and Linenthal says that they absolutely don’t play favorites.  “We’ve pissed off any number of senior scholars” by rejecting their work, “but I say, if you’re at that level and you can’t deal with that kind of criticism–tough!  Get over it.”  Continue Reading »

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Internationally known A-list blogger William K. Wolfrum (who also blogs at Shakesville) has tagged humble Historiann for Blogroll Amnesty Day.  This means that I have to send $100 to the name at the top of the list, then add my name to the bottom and then send 5 copies to other blogs, and then wait for the money to roll on in.  Payday is just around the corner, darlings!

So herewith are five blogs with which I’d like to share the cash love:

First up is Roxie’s World, when you’re in the mood for shockingly articulate cross-species blogging (with a side of Emily D.–yeah, you know me–thrown in for free.  How very public, for a dog!)  Then there’s Notorious, Ph.D., one of the few Americans who got good news about her job last week.  (Hint:  she gets to keep her job, and yet not do it next semester. . .wait for it. . .  while still getting paid!  Unbeflickinbelieveable.)  Next stop is Center of Gravitas, where GayProf can satisfy all of your needs for vintage Wonder Woman comics, gear, and what have you.  Next up is a new blog and blogger on WOC and GLBTQ issues who seems like an old friend already:  Prof. Susurro at Like a Whisper.  Don’t miss her recent review of Still Black:  A portrait of black transmen.  And finally there is Romantoes, for those of you who can’t say no to fries with that sandwich (You’re probably the alternately disturbed men and/or anxious women who google “hot 40 year old moms” several times each day and for some reason reach this blog.  What’s up with that?  Anyway, go check them out.)

Don’t thank me–just send the Benjamins straight to Historiann, c/o American Express, Potterville, Colorado.  I’ll swing by the P.O. on my next ride into town.  Toodeloo, friends, and I’ll see you tomorrow (or the next time I get a bee in my 10-gallon hat, which probably won’t be too long after that first cuppa joe in the morning.)

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Hotshot Harry dishes on the AHA

UPDATED BELOW

First day musings [from the American Historical Association's annual meeting 2009]…[ed. note:  Eat your heart out, Rate Your Students--my correspondents have reported first!]

I think the Friday start is a bit disorienting for folks. (That, and the crush of New Year’s vacationers leaving as the frumpy historians arrived gave the Hilton a sense of strangeness.) My memories of AHA openings is that they are rather tame, but this one was far more active. Registration opened at 12.00pm, and you would have thought they were giving out free booze. By 12:08, the very large promenade was packed and the printers serving up badges had suspended business due to overuse. (They were up and running shortly thereafter, but the lines took a solid hour or so to settle down to normal volume.) All I could think of was the Coconut Grove.  [Ed. Note:  Have no historians mastered on-line registration yet?]

More disconcerting for most was that the book exhibit did not open until 3:00pm. And really, this is the highlight of the conference for most, if not all. Picture the AHA without the book exhibit, even for five minutes. Grim.

On the job front…well, there isn’t much of one this year. The smell of fear that normally permeates the cattle pen is a bit more stale this time around.  [Ed. note:  it's a little known fact that Hotshot Harry lived in Potterville before he decamped for Tucumcari, so this greenhorn knows from cattle pens!]

As for the attire, there were some folks who seem to be trying for Soho hip and have missed the mark a bit. Otherwise, standard AHA attire is in effect. Manufacturers of wool have little to fear, despite the economic downturn.

UPDATE, 1/3/09:  RYS has posted the first-day at the AHA impressions of Archie–which brings back memories for me.  Consider Hotshot Harry’s post here the briefer, G-rated version of what Archie has to say.  Archie also provides more of an explanation for those long registration lines yesterday:

So just to prove that academics shouldn’t even be allowed to plan a cluster f*@k, this year’s meeting features an “improved” registration system. If you pre-registered, you wait in line to use one of several laptop computers. You look up your name and press print. Then you go stand in line and wait for one of the graduate student volunteers to call your name and hand you your badge. How this constitutes an improvement over the cardboard box full of alphabetized envelopes is beyond me. In the twenty minutes I stood there, the system crashed twice, and the whole show ground to a screeching halt. Only an a$$hat academic could have been talked into paying someone for this. On a related note, they made the poor grad student workers wear these red AHA T-Shirts that make them look like they are trying out for Santa’s workshop. Just sad.

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