Booze, women, and movies

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Erin Bartram, labor, narratives, Women

On Sunday, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-IA) said the quiet part out loud.

“I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing,” Grassley said, “as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.”

Saying the quiet part out loud and getting away with it because nothing matters is sort of the theme of 2017, but his comments did provoke a reaction. There’s plenty to be said about how Grassley tries to avoid the implications of inherited wealth by framing us all as Horatio Algers at birth. I wrote a whole post about that. But honestly, that’s pretty obvious.

What has been less remarked upon, at least by male political commentators, is what Grassley’s comments reveal about who works. The fact that many male commentators haven’t picked up on that suggests that even as they critique his classism, they share – or see as less problematic – his views on gender and labor.

Grassley argues that if “people” didn’t spend their money on “women,” they might invest it and be successful. It’s not clear to me whether he is thinking about prostitution or the dinners, diamond earrings, and washing machines he thinks must be bought to maintain a woman. Unless Chuck Grassley thinks the non-elite women of America are blowing their paychecks on hiring female prostitutes, it’s pretty clear that when he talks about “people,” he means “men.” He still thinks of men as the people who do – and are supposed to do – economically-valuable labor.

I’ve written elsewhere about the way imagining the American worker as white and male can hinder productive political discussions about policy, but it’s really important to remember that this danger doesn’t just come because people like Grassley have failed to get with the times and realize the contributions that women make to the economy now. The danger comes in refusing to acknowledge those contributions have always been there by ignoring and/or devaluing women’s labor, and by assuming that our historical moment is the one in which women’s economic contributions are most valued.

The arguments we see include:

• “Women were seen as less capable of hard physical labor and so were excluded from it in the past.”
• “Women are weaker and you just have to acknowledge they can’t do all the jobs.”
• “Men worked outside the home.”
• “Women finally started working in the [insert time period here].”
• “Women are more willing to take low-paid jobs.”
• “Men were always seen as the breadwinner.”
• And rarely articulated so bluntly, but at the core of all of these: “Work is something you get wages for.”

In no particular order, because weaving them into a compelling narrative doesn’t seem to make them stick any better, a non-exhaustive list of responses:

• Childbirth is pretty physically demanding. It’s literally called “labor.” (Of course, this is used to argue against women being allowed to engage physical labor in other spheres, sometimes.)
• In a family farm economy, did men work outside the home? Did they earn a wage? Was what they did still work?
• Cooking, cleaning, and childcare are physically demanding. So are producing cloth, dairying, maintaining an orchard, caring for small livestock, and brewing beer, all of which women did in colonial .
• If cooking, cleaning, childcare, and eldercare have no economic value, why do you have to pay (or enslave) other people to do them?
• If women are not capable of hard physical labor, why did white Americans enslave millions of African and African-American women to do physical labor in fields? (Spoiler alert: they basically invented racial difference in order to justify doing this while pointing to women’s agricultural labor as evidence of the cultural inferiority of a wide variety of Indian nations.)
• Women didn’t “start” working wage labor jobs in factories in the 1880s, or because of the war, or in the 1920s, or because of the other war, or in the 1970s, or in the 1990s. Women were the original industrial wage laborers in the U.S. And why should that be surprising? After all, what were these early factories making?
• Also women worked in mines.
• Also white women were harsh, violent, psychologically-abusive slave mistresses.
• How many of our “manly” jobs today require unyielding physical strength? Is investing inherited money too physically demanding for a woman?
• Jobs lose prestige and pay when women join the field/women can only join a field when it’s started to lose prestige and pay. See: teachers, paralegals, professors.
• We pay people who work in certain fields – childcare, food service, cleaning, nursing, home health care, nursing home care – less because the fields are dominated by women and associated not with skill and economic value but with feminine obligation and sacrifice. That has not always been the case.
• As much as it might unsettle your sense of historical superiority, women were paid for skilled work in colonial America and the early U.S. In case you need an example, here you go.
• If women weren’t earning wages or producing vital economic value for the household, why did we need laws for so long stating that their husbands had the right to the money they earned?
• Read this labor wanted ad and consider all the valuable skills required of a substitute wife: Wanted at a Seat about half a day’s journey from Philadelphia, on which are good improvements and domestics, A Single Woman of unsullied Reputation, an affable, cheerful, active and amiable Disposition; cleanly, industrious, perfectly qualified to direct and manage the female Concerns of country business, as raising small stock, dairying, marketing, combing, carding, spinning, knitting, sewing, pickling, preserving, etc., and occasionally to instruct two young Ladies in those Branches of Oeconomy, who, with their father, compose the Family. Such a person will be treated with respect and esteem, and meet with every encouragement due to such a character. [Pennsylvania Packet, September 23, 1780]
• Also sex work is labor. It’s paid physical (and mental/emotional) labor.
• Also wet nurses. More female labor with economic value rooted in the physical body.

“New Britain, Connecticut. Women welders at the Landers, Frary, and Clark plant.” Taken June 1943. Source: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/resource/fsa.8d39781/

I doubt Grassley was even conscious of what he was saying, and would backtrack if pushed on it. But plenty of people – conservatives, liberals, and leftists alike – speak the same assumptions out loud when they talk about labor. All I can suggest is that you listen to yourself when you talk about labor, and about people. If you notice yourself saying “people” when you mean “(white) men,” or if you seem to imply that there was a time when women didn’t work, start thinking about who you mean by people. who you mean by women, and what you mean by work.

 

“You were here long before any of us”

Tags

colonialism, Erin Bartram, Jackson, land, Native Americans, New England

The president’s use of the word “Pocahontas” to refer to Elizabeth Warren yesterday wasn’t new, but it has garnered a lot of attention because of the setting in which he used it: at an event honoring WWII Navajo Marine veterans known as “Code Talkers,” while standing in front of a picture of Andrew Jackson.

Navajo code talkers in the Pacific, 1944

It’s worth considering the context for Trump’s Pocahontas remark, because while his reference to Warren was clearly intended to be a slur, his “positive” language about the Code Talkers he was meeting is also problematic, and taps into ideas that have a deep history in North America.

And I just want to thank you because you’re very, very special people. You were here long before any of us were here, although we have a representative in Congress who, they say, was here a long time ago. They call her “Pocahontas.”

Trump, I imagine, thought he was humorously contrasting “real Indians” – the Code Talkers – and “fake Indians” like Elizabeth Warren. As many have noted, Trump is remarkably focused on genes as markers of actual and potential greatness, sounding like early 20th century eugenicists at times. Even in the speech yesterday, upon finding out how old the Code Talkers were, he noted they must have “good genes.”

But he also has a history of using genetics, and Anglo-American ideas about the “authenticity” of contemporary tribal affiliations and practices, to fight his competition in the business world, as Shawn Boburg detailed in a piece for the Washington Post last summer.

Donald Trump claimed that Indian reservations had fallen under mob control. He secretly paid for more than $1 million in ads that portrayed members of a tribe in Upstate New York as cocaine traffickers and career criminals. And he suggested in testimony and in media appearances that dark-skinned Native Americans in Connecticut were faking their ancestry.

“I think I might have more Indian blood than a lot of the so-called Indians that are trying to open up the reservations,” Trump said during a 1993 radio interview with shock jock Don Imus.

Trump is certainly ignorant of the history of New England tribes, and the broader history of economic, political, cultural, and personal relationships between European colonists, enslaved people, and Native Americans in North America more broadly.

But he’s not alone in this ignorance, nor in his belief that white Americans have the power to know and proclaim what and who is authentically Indian. His remarks also contain, in a line that some might read as innocuous, one of the beliefs that helps justify and sustain this white “knowledge” of authentic Indianness.

…you’re very, very special people. You were here long before any of us were here…

Jonathan Katz’s comments on Twitter outline clearly what’s problematic about these remarks.

The most racist thing about Trump's comments today wasn't the slur. It's that he doesn't understand the difference between a non-white person's ancestry and the person themselves.

— Jonathan M. Katz (@KatzOnEarth) November 28, 2017

In Trump's mind right then, he wasn't touching a man named Peter. He wasn't touching a U.S. Marine. He was touching an Indian, which was the same as touching any Indian who'd ever lived. Because he thinks they're all the same.

— Jonathan M. Katz (@KatzOnEarth) November 28, 2017

It’s insufficient for us to say “Trump’s racist so he thinks all Indians are the same.” We have to consider the very specific dynamics of this racism in North America. Certainly Trump’s emphasis on genetics suggests he thinks that’s enough to make them “all the same,” but by pointing out that they “were here long before any of us were here,” he’s using language that would be familiar to his hero Andrew Jackson.

Early 19th century Anglo-Americans increasingly framed all Indians as relics of history whose traditions and values could be carried on and refined by the next stage of civilization while they themselves vanished into the past. If they were soon to vanish, surely dispossessing them of their lands was nothing more than hurrying along a historical process by turning over that land to the next stage of civilization, one more capable of putting it to good use through agriculture.

This argument required, of course, a complete reimagining of European-Indian relations since colonization, one that erased clear Euro-American awareness of and participation in Indian agriculture and land sales. The cultural reimagining was given legal weight through treaties and through Supreme Court decisions like Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823).

In his decision, Chief Justice John Marshall, himself deeply invested in the project of Western land speculation, argued that European powers had, through their “discovery” of the land, claimed “ultimate dominion” over it, and any tribes allowed to remain there simply had the right of occupancy. The text of Marshall’s decision reveals this rewriting of history to consign Indians to history and make way for the next stage of civilization.

We will not enter into the controversy, whether agriculturists, merchants, and manufacturers, have a right, on abstract principles, to expel hunters from the territory they possess, or to contract their limits. Conquest gives a title which the courts of the conqueror cannot deny…

The tribe at issue, the Cherokee, were agriculturalists. Not only did they farm, they had adopted slavery. Moreover, the colonial system of land ownership that white Americans had inherited rested on sales that were valid because the original parties owned the land.

Yet this reimagining was so successful that most contemporary white Americans – especially those in New England – would have no problem stating, in one breath, that Indians were hunters and gatherers with no sense of property ownership, and in the next, talking about how Squanto and Samoset taught the Pilgrims how to farm.

The “knowledge” that Indians were from an earlier stage of history, without the capacity to understand property ownership or agriculture (both markers of the next stage of civilization), helped white Americans make the argument that all North American tribes were naturally disappearing.

From there, it was not too far to make the argument that Indians were not just “historical,” they were relics or living fossils, persisting past their appropriate time in human history yet incapable of changing and integrating with modernity. They weren’t simply historical, they were ahistorical. Lewis Cass, who was governor of the Michigan Territory at the time, introduced his 1829 report on the progress of “a Board in the City of New York, for the Emigration, Preservation, and Improvement of the Aborigines of America,” with this famous passage:

The Indians have gradually decreased since they became first known to the Europeans. The ratio of this diminution may have been greater or less, depending on the operation of causes we shall presently investigate; but there is no just reason to believe, that any of the tribes, within the whole extent of our boundary, has been increasing in numbers at any period since they have been known to us. . . .

 
To the operation of the physical causes, which we have described, must be added the moral causes connected with their mode of life, and their peculiar opinions. Distress could not teach them providence, nor want industry. As animal food decreased, their vegetable productions were not increased. Their habits were stationary and unbending; never changing with the change of circumstances. How far the prospect around them, which to us appears so dreary, may have depressed and discouraged them, it is difficult to ascertain, as it is also to estimate the effect upon them of that superiority, which we have assumed and they have acknowledged. There is a principle of repulsion in ceaseless activity, operating through all their institutions, which prevents them from appreciating or adopting any other modes of life, or any other habits of thought or action, but those which have descended to them from their ancestors.

When Trump told the Marines he was speaking with that they were “here long before any of us were here,” he was not only separating them from “us,” he was subtly drawing on 19th century narratives of Indians as historical and, by continuing to exist rather than vanishing as white Americans had foretold, ahistorical.

Critiquing Trump for his use of the term “Pocahontas” is easy; it’s a clear racial slur, and many of us can unequivocally state that we’d never do such a thing. Examining the ways that he draws on broader stereotypes about the (a)historical nature of Native Americans might be much harder for many of us.

These stereotypes are fundamental to our dominant narratives of Indian dispossession, and have been spun into romantic narratives about one-with-nature, anti-capitalist Indians who were too pure for the modern world but who you can honor by purchasing a dreamcatcher. These ideas, whether framed as positive or negative, are why the New England Indian Council, when it formed in 1923, took as its motto the phrase: “I still live.”

______________________

If you’re interested in how this idea of “authenticity” plays out in later 19th century America, I highly recommend Paige Raibmon’s Authentic Indians: Episodes of Encounter from the Late-Nineteenth-Century Northwest Coast.

 

The real “living expenses” of graduate education

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academia, Erin Bartram, higher ed, taxation

Yesterday, Chris discussed why the GOP tax bill moving through both houses of Congress threatens the future of graduate education in the United States, and provided us with real numbers to show how devastating this would be.

Using myself as an example, I’m going to do some back of the envelope calculations to highlight the potential damage that this GOP bill could do. I made about $16,000 a year as a teaching assistant at the University of Delaware. I also received a tuition waiver worth about $26,550. Since I only earned $16,000 that’s what I was taxed on, amounting to about $1,768. Under the GOP plan, I would be taxed on my income and the tuition waiver, totaling $42,550. As a result, my tax bill would rise to $7,581. I would go from paying about 11% of my income in taxes to paying 47%. Leaving me approximately $8,400 (not counting the hundreds or even thousands of dollars that gets paid back to the university in the form of fees) to pay for housing, food, health insurance, and other household expenses.

My own graduate education at a different state university would have produced a tax bill that looked much the same. Grad students already pinch pennies and take out loans and work second/third jobs to get by, even though programs often state that work outside the terms of one’s assistantship is not allowed. Under this proposed configuration, many would simply drop out, throwing away years of work, while most potential students would not attend at all.

Why not just take out loans and push through, though? Chris noted that he would be left with $8,400 for “housing, food, health insurance, and other household expenses.” But there’s more to be paid for out of that paltry sum, and it’s these costs, often obscured from public view, that need to be recognized. They’re important not only for their implications for graduate students in this situation but also in responding to the general public perception that scholars don’t actually work very much.

One major cost that is shared by all scholars – graduate students, non-tenure track professors, tenure track professors, and scholars working outside the academy – is that of attending conferences. These professional gatherings are vital for presenting and workshopping new research, and show committee members and deans that you are “progressing” in your work even if you haven’t published it yet.

This year, I’ve gone to three conferences, which is a bit more than I usually do, but as I’m in that space between finishing my dissertation and publishing my book, they’re extra-important to show I’m doing things. Between the cost of transportation to and from (two flights, one five hour drive), ground transportation and related issues (airport parking, public transit, and cab fares), accommodations (two hotels, one college dorm stay), meals (one can only eat so many granola bars), and conference membership and registration fees ($100-$200 for each one), I’ve probably spent $4,000.

As a grad student I was eligible for some department funding, but not enough to cover even one of the conferences that involved flying. As a tenure track faculty member I’d be eligible for more, hopefully, though I’d also be making more money than as a grad student. Non tenure track faculty are not necessarily eligible for any reimbursement, and even if departments can scrape together some money for these faculty members – the ones who are often doing the lion’s share of the teaching in addition to their own research – they’re not being allocated those funds. Yet the only way these non tenure track faculty members can ever hope to find tenure track employment (so the argument goes) is to keep presenting and publishing.

For many scholars in the humanities, social sciences, and hard sciences, the more insidious cost is that of the research itself, without which there is no presenting or publishing. For historians, this specifically means the cost of traveling to and staying at archives, both domestic and international, and the cost of the technology necessary to do that work, both hardware and software.

Yes, there are grants and fellowships, both external and internal, and yes, it’s important to apply for them and get them. But they are often very competitive, and don’t cover the full costs. And yes, graduate students do get funding for their research, but they’re often competing against their peers for a pot of money that hasn’t been enlarged since the mid-90s. Whether you get enough money at the right moment in your grad career – which is mostly out of your control – can make or break your dissertation. As a result, grad students (and non tenure track faculty, who are generally ineligible for research money) pay out of pocket to do their research.

What this means is that the $16,000 stipend Chris talked about is framed as money for living but is always expected to be more than that. Essentially, many grad students get paid to teach and are expected to use that money both to live and to do research. If their research requires traveling, they have to squeeze it into the parts of the year that they’re not teaching – the parts of the year when they’re also not getting paid.

This is why grad students argue for advanced money rather than reimbursement, and why they can’t just shrug off a payroll snafu that delays the first paychecks of the semester into October. It’s why the last week of August is the most terrifying time of the year for a grad student, the point where you find out if all your careful budgeting is going to be undone by a delayed reimbursement or first paycheck or literally any unexpected expense. There were late Augusts where I had less than $100 to my name, and I know many friends who were regularly in far more dire straits.

As Ralph Wiggum would say: it’s funny, but not ha-ha funny.

Academia already demands graduate students perform their devotion to their education by making deep financial sacrifices, yet when those students finish their PhDs, they encounter an academic job market unwilling to recognize the value of that education by paying them a living wage. 

This is why the proposed taxation of graduate tuition – which grad students “receive” even when they’re completely finished with their coursework and are only working on the dissertation – would end graduate education as we know it. Were the proposed GOP tax bill to go through, it would so undercut the already-tenuous system of graduate education as to destroy it completely. Even if students could still “live” on the salary they earned (which is highly unlikely), they’d never be able to do what was required of them to earn their degree.

Circulating the same old claptrap

Tags

Erin Bartram, historical writing

In his review of Ron Chernow’s new biography of Grant, George Will tossed out a bold, fresh take on academic historians and why we are terrible.

Chernow’s large readership (and the successes of such non-academic historians as Rick Atkinson, Richard Brookhiser, David McCullough, Nathaniel Philbrick, Jon Meacham, Erik Larson and others) raises a question: Why are so many academic historians comparatively little read? Here is a hint from the menu of presentations at the 2017 meeting of the Organization of American Historians: The titles of 30 included some permutation of the word “circulation” (e.g., “Circulating/Constructing Heterosexuality,” “Circulating Suicide as Social Criticism,” “Circulating Tourism Imaginaries From Below”). Obscurantism enveloped in opacity is the academics’ way of assigning themselves status as members of a closed clerisy indulging in linguistic fads. Princeton historian Sean Wilentz, who is impatient with academics who are vain about being unintelligible, confesses himself mystified by the “circulating” jargon. This speaks well of him.

To quote Seth Meyers, there are about 54 things wrong with that statement, but let’s just do three:

1. As many historians have pointed out, the theme of the conference was “Circulation.” Conferences – regardless of discipline – are professional meetings of experts in a field. The papers given there are different from books. Do you think paper titles at STEM conferences use non-specialized language? “Cancer: Let’s Fix It!” “Sewage Treatment Systems I Have Known.”
2. None of the historians of merit or historical subjects of merit he can name are women or people of color. That should be a big red flag.
3. He seems unconcerned with the cost of accessing most academic work, and the profits reaped not by the scholars who produce it but by sprawling corporations who charge everyone to read it.

Turns out, George Will isn’t concerned at all about whether academics are writing for the public or whether that work is accessible and affordable or whether marginalized academic voices are being heard by the general public. If he were concerned with those things, he’d have written a different article. Or, as we might write in the margins of a paper: “Your evidence here seems to be supporting an argument that’s different from what you stated in your introduction. Which is it?”

One suspects that George Will just doesn’t like most of the historical work being done by scholars. Every writer of history he mentions is a white man, every historical figure he mentions is an extremely famous white man. His column suggests he thinks academic historians deserve to remain unread since they’re not writing it the way he wants: biographies of great (white) men, the only ones who can really tell us about the past.

George Will is recycling the same old garbage he’s fed us before but under a different name, and in doing so, participating in a tradition only available to the sorts of historians he respects. The rest of us will be here researching new things and making new arguments and adding to our knowledge of our complicated past. If he wants to have a conversation about how to make that work more accessible to the public, he’s welcome to talk to actual academic historians about it. We’re really frustrated and have lots of ideas. Maybe Sean Wilentz can give him some names.

NB: Want to read great history that’s not by this small Will-approved cadre? Try these or these.

 

 

 

 

 

Slack Chat: Contextualizing the Mueller Investigation

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Chris Bouton, Erin Bartram, mueller investigation, slack chat

Chris Bouton: The indictments on Monday of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his business partner Rick Gates and the revelation of a plea deal for former Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, marked the first charges stemming from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election led by special counsel Robert Mueller. This growing political scandal naturally cries out for some contextualization, especially in terms of other major political scandals in American history. The ur-political scandal–against which all others are judged–is Watergate. Yet, we need to ask the question, how applicable is this Watergate comparison? Is it appropriate? Should we be making historical comparisons in the midst of what seem to be major historical events?

And if so, what kinds of comparisons should we be making?

Erin Bartram: I’ve become increasingly uneasy with the Watergate comparison of late

Just as I’ve become uneasy with the comparisons to “corrupt” administrations of the past – Harding, and especially Grant

Because I think those comparisons are now being used by pundits to consciously or unconsciously frame what’s happening now as within the bounds of normal, if awful, American political behavior

Chris: And many of the comparisons and efforts at contextualization are at the most basic level.

There’s corruption, therefore Watergate or Teapot Dome

With no effort to compare and contrast the depth and scope of these scandals.

Your comment also raises the issue of how do we contextualize something that has no historical prior?

Erin: That’s sort of where I’m bothered by these comparisons: I think people don’t want to confront that this is uncharted ground in the US, to a great extent.

And Americans believe their system to be so exceptional they won’t accept comparisons with other countries

Especially countries they consider “lesser”

Chris: And we often refer to the Mueller investigation as a form of shorthand, but that obscures what he’s tasked with investigating.

He’s tasked (amongst other things) with investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and whether the Trump campaign sought contact or aid from the Russians in order to help elect Donald Trump as president.

The implications of that are much grander in scope than Teapot Dome or Watergate.

And thanks to the Papadopoulos plea we know that the Trump campaign did communicate with representatives of the Russian Foreign Ministry about “thousands of emails” related to Hillary Clinton.

Erin: I saw one political commentator this morning say we should stop saying “potential collusion”

“Collusion” as a broad term is not a crime, so we don’t need to cover ourselves saying “alleged” anymore

Chris: The Papadopoulos plea makes one thing clear. The Mueller investigation has Papadopoulos’s emails detailing these contacts. That’s real proof.

Let’s turn back to something you pointed out a few minutes ago, the inability to confront this unique historical moment.

What do you see as the cause of that? Some form of American exceptionalism?

Erin: I mean, some warped kind

A belief that our system is the greatest in the world, and the most flexible, and therefore nothing could ever break it.

I had a student recently who took issue with my framing of the A of C and the Constitution as documents that reflected the concerns of their respective moments but were also deeply flawed.

In particular, that there was any merit to the A of C and any problems with the Constitution because, as his politics class had told him recently, one failed to hold the country together and the other succeeded.

I pointed out to him that when the A of C “failed,” people wrote a new constitution and there was a moderately peaceful transition. But when the Constitution failed, we had a Civil War.

Like most people, he doesn’t think of the Civil War as a failure of the Constitution, but I think we need to frame it that way more often.

Chris: I agree there. And that was what was infuriating about Kelly’s idiotic compromise comment early this week.

There were compromises on slavery written into the constitution, there were a host of compromises that followed (1820, 1850) etc. They all failed to solve the issue.

Erin: If you asked most Americans, they could name at least one thing explicitly called a compromise that led to the war

That he felt there should have been more compromise borne by black Americans was pretty disgusting.

Chris: Right and that, as you pointed out, is the really appalling part of his comments.

Compromises over what? Whether it should be permissible to own other people as property.

When some people say yes it’s okay and others say no it’s not. Then there’s not a lot of bridging the gap there.

And this is where I get fed up with the Democrats have abandoned the white working class and need to reach out to them more line of thinking.

Yes, the Democrats should promote policies that benefit the white working class. But they should not do it by selling out values like racial, gender, and sexual equality. Because that the logic that often undergirds those comments.

It reminds of me of Arlie Hochschild’s conversations with Tea Party members, if they don’t believe in equality, then what’s there to compromise on?

Erin: Yep.

I think addressing America’s racial past realistically would help us be more realistic about the flawed nature of the system

Lots of people seem to think the situation we’re in will be “fixed” in the normal course of events. It’ll be a bad time, and we’ll be stuck with tons of horrific judges forever, but it’ll be okay.

When confronted with the fact that one party consistently wins more votes but remains the minority power, people just seem to think it’ll work itself out.

It won’t, and to be okay with that is to be okay with a failed system.

Chris: If there’s a benefit to the Trump era, then it’s laying bare the largely unchallenged assumptions about our republican form of government.

The question is will recognize those challenges or rationalize them away?

Erin: I fear that we are seeing historical comparisons stretched beyond the point of credibility in order to rationalize away what is happening

Chris: Right and I think it reveals the weaknesses in one of our biggest institutions: the media

Erin: There are some supremely stupid people in positions of power in the media. People who don’t know enough to know that Uzbekistan isn’t in the Middle East, or are incapable of thinking critically about that narrative before repeating it.

Chris: This is a media whose flaws are glaringly apparent: the need to fill a 24 hour news cycle, the treating every news story in terms of winners/losers, and most importantly an unwillingness to think critically about what they’re being asked to cover

Reporters are not stenographers.

Yet much of the news media acts that way. “Well it’s not our job to interpret” Yes, it is. If I say the Earth is flat and you say it’s round. The headline is not “People disagree over the shape of the earth” It’s “Chris is wrong about the shape of the Earth”

Erin: The overarching narrative is that America is a constitutional democracy and that our system has the capacity to deal with anything

They can’t break out of much smaller narratives, so it’s not surprising they can’t break out of that one

Chris: And, as you’ve pointed out, that narrative doesn’t hold up under scrutiny

Erin: They called the firing of Comey the Saturday Night Massacre

And now they’re saying the firing of Mueller, and whoever else has to be fired to get to someone who’ll fire Mueller, will be the Saturday Night Massacre

Chris: At least Mueller would be closer to that reality than Comey

Erin: The shocking nature of the Comey firing has been normalized, because if it really had been the horrible thing they compared it to, surely Republicans would have stepped up

We’re seeing history used to suggest that in America, when things get really bad, the system – guided by good people – gets things back on the rails

Anyone in the system is, at heart, a good American

Even Robert E. Lee, taking up arms against his country to fight for the preservation of slavery, is a good American!

That’s how senators preface criticism of their peers and of nominees “My colleague is a patriot, but also wrong in almost every way”

What if he’s not a patriot, though? What if he doesn’t actually like American freedoms and would be happy to erode them? Because news flash: he isn’t, he doesn’t, and he is trying to do just that.

Chris: Is there anything about Jeff Sessions’ political career that screams support for American freedoms?

Erin: Seriously.

Chris: Or, the point we could make, is that people like Sessions do support a version of American freedoms, they just don’t apply to everyone.

Erin: But the narrative that ours is a great system of freedom helps bolster those claims, and paper over the fact that our system was based on and mandated political inequality for most of its history.

Chris: They apply to me and people like me, but not others.

Erin: I think it’s no mistake that Andrew Jackson hangs in the Oval Office.

I mean, this is the problem with the contagion of liberty

The idea itself, I mean

We eradicated smallpox, after all.

Chris: I mean go back to the Founders and well before that into Antiquity, notions of freedom rest on ideas of slavery. How can we know what freedom is without its counterpart to compare it to?

Same with ideas of equality.

Erin: Yep.

I’m struck by how much our national narrative that we are the freest country in the world has enabled us to rationalize eroding freedoms as the status quo

Chris: There’s the great Samuel Johnson quote: “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”

One of the struggles of American history has been the establishment of these ideals of freedom and liberty and our constant and utter failure to live up to them

One thing that’s always struck me about American exceptionalism is just how contingent on geography it is.

Of course Americans think they have the greatest country in the world.

Erin: I asked my students to draw the shape of the US in 1787, and we talked about how they couldn’t do it without drawing the whole continent.

Chris: So do the Russians, English, French, South Africans, Egyptians etc.

Erin: Shoutout to Kariann Yokota’s Unbecoming British here

Chris: It’s like rooting for sports teams. I root for the Red Sox not because the Red Sox are inherently better than any other baseball team, but because I grew up 20 minutes from Boston.

Erin: Yep.

Chris: There’s nothing inherently greater about Boston’s team than any other team, nothing innate in their character or anything else. I like them because it’s where I grew up. Other people grew up in different places and have different favorite teams.

How is this different from our national affiliations?

This is also explains why sports radio and political radio are so intolerably bad.

Erin: I think that is an indisputable point.

Rather than use history to convince ourselves that we can get through this, full stop, we should look at our national past to see how “getting through this” has often meant “sacrificing the political and human rights of some people.”

And how we actually didn’t get through everything okay. The nation had a civil war. The state put people in camps. White Americans tolerated widespread lynching. Women haven’t had the vote for most of our history.

Chris: Historical contextualization is really difficult and as I said earlier, I don’t think that our media, who are driving many of these narratives about the Mueller investigation, are particularly good at it.

Erin: Not at all.

I think the presence of people who “lived through Watergate” as uncritical experts is not helpful. The actual Watergate insiders I’ve seen have been really useful in qualifying differences between then and now.

Chris: The Mueller investigation is unprecedented. We have the campaign chairman of a major political party charged with laundering $75 million from a pro-Russian Ukrainian government.

No matter what else follows, you can’t whitewash that away.

Erin: Nope. And I think perhaps the most compelling comparison is Nixon in the 1968 election – interference that was so destructive to our ideas of political norms that it was hidden, basically.

Chris: And something that gets overshadowed by the Democratic Convention.

Erin: So are we basically asking the media to stop using history as a coping mechanism?

Chris: Or if they’re going to do it, they need to do a much better job at it.

Erin: These are the same people who say Sessions did the “honorable” thing by recusing himself from the Russia investigation. Bad people get punished in our system, so if someone hasn’t been punished, they can’t have done anything that bad.

There’s your real slippery slope!

Chris: Meanwhile his DOJ has argued that trans-Americans don’t deserve legal protection

Erin:

“Slaves who are happy and contented”

Tags

civil war, Erin Bartram, narratives, race, slavery

My friend Rebecca, frequent reader of the blog, posted this story on my Facebook timeline last week and wanted to  know “So how accurate is this? (I.e. Were textbooks seriously describing slaves as happy?)”

To Rebecca’s specific question, I’d answer “yes,” broadly speaking. The role of the UDC in shaping dominant narratives about the Southern past – and in shaping the landscape itself – is something a lot of historians have dug into. If you want to read more, start with the work of Karen Cox: Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture.

Moreover, as we’ve seen recently, problematic descriptions of enslaved people’s lives and experiences in textbooks are still with us, even repeated by members of the cabinet. Just like “Confederate memorials” that were put up by the UDC, these textbooks reflect the agendas of specific segments of the American public, groups with whom historians often find themselves in conflict.

But we should remember that the UDC didn’t invent narratives out of thin air and hoodwink the white American population into believing them. As the Vox video notes, proponents of the “Lost Cause” ideology – many of whom had been active Confederate leaders – began rewriting the narrative of the war almost immediately. They were able to do so because the threads of the Lost Cause ideology were already woven into white American beliefs about racial difference and enslavement.

The second thread that the Vox video highlights is the one we want to think about. While the text says “Enslaved people were happy,” the voiceover says it was about the idea that slavery was a benevolent institution. We want to be clear about the belief that is at the root of both related ideas: that black people were fundamentally incapable of independence in any sense. Childlike and uncivilizable, they needed the direction and structure of enslavement to be safe, happy, and productive. Therefore, Lost Cause proponents argued, the Civil War had ruined a system of happy relations, where everyone knew their place and was taken care of.

The narrative of the Lost Cause stuck because it played on ideas that had existed before the war to justify slavery’s continuation. While the ideas intensified as the cotton economy intensified, from the 1790s on, we see them from the earliest days of the republic. In 1786, George Washington confronted burgeoning anti-slavery sentiment by worrying about “slaves who are happy and contented with their present masters, [who] are tampered with and seduced to leave.”

My own research subject, a white woman from New England who held moderate anti-slavery sentiment, noted upon her first visit to a Virginia plantation in 1841: “They talk about the negroes being such a happy set of people, but I had not seen one in the district who, if they did not look too utterly stupid to have any expression at all, did not appear from their countenances to be…miserable.” Even if this woman didn’t buy that enslaved people were happy, she didn’t see them as intelligent people equal to her, as least in their present context.

All of this is also mixed up with the fact that enslaved people were also legally property. For white Americans, whether slave owners, slave traders, or young white girls working in New England cotton mills, the privilege of racial power meant thinking of and treating enslaved people as property or people, whichever was beneficial in a given moment.

Imagining slavery as a benevolent institution is only possible if you imagine black people were not and are not fully people. This is key to the three elements of the Lost Cause ideology that has so profoundly shaped white American remembrance of the Civil War. If enslaved people weren’t people, the institution was benevolent. If enslaved people weren’t people, it wasn’t horrific to take up arms against your country to defend a system of enslavement. If enslaved people weren’t people deserving of freedom, the root cause of the war can be about a “lack of compromise,” in the words of General John Kelly, our current White House Chief of Staff.

Kelly believes the Civil War came because “men and women of good faith on both sides” could not compromise, suggesting that had they compromised, war could have been avoided. True compromise involves each side giving something up, but Kelly knows as well as anyone that the real compromising in the decades before the Civil War was done on the backs of the enslaved black population. Their rights and freedoms and bodily autonomy and happiness were compromised away.

We should not simply write off Kelly’s words as historically ignorant, nor should he be allowed to claim ignorance; no one who was truly that ignorant of the American past should be permitted to continue holding the office he holds. He was espousing Lost Cause ideology, which only “makes sense” if you do not believe that black people are fully deserving of and capable of the human and civil rights that white people – particularly white men – have long enjoyed in the United States.

Either John Kelly believes black Americans were better off and happy in slavery, and therefore “compromise” would not have harmed them, or he just thinks they didn’t (and don’t) deserve equality, and therefore “compromise” would not have harmed them more than they deserved.

Neither Kelly nor any other American can blame this on bad textbooks. The narrative pushed by the UDC through textbooks and memorials found fertile ground in the minds of white Americans throughout the United States who already believed black Americans to be inferior and undeserving of equality. With statements like those he gave last night, Kelly was watering and cultivating these deeply-rooted ideas.

 

When you haven’t finished your conference paper…

Tags

academia, Erin Bartram

This week, we’re all talking about academic conferences. I am presenting at one next week. I have not finished the paper for that conference, in part because I was finishing up another article with a colleague that was published yesterday. This is the sort of cluster of deadlines that academics try to avoid so much, but when you’re dealing with outside organizations and news outlets, there’s only so much you can do. In lieu of a fuller post on conferences, I give you a snippet of and link to the article I have been writing.

The only other point I’d make is that much of what academics do is “invisible,” not just because it happens at conferences that are of little interest to the general public, but also because it happens in private, and because it is unpaid. None of this work – the article in the Washington Post, my writing for this blog, the conference paper I’m writing, the book I’m writing – is paid, and much of it depends on research I have to pay for myself. It is still part of my job and I’m expected to do it to get and maintain employment.

In July, an international group of 62 Catholics delivered a challenge to Pope Francis, charging him with propagating heresies in his 2016 suggestion that divorced and remarried Catholics could receive Communion, a sacrament from which they are currently barred.

After they had received no satisfactory response from the pope, they released their “Filial Correction” to the public in September. Since then, the number of signatories has grown to 235.

The incident — Catholics challenging the pope, even accusing him of heresy — no doubt seems shocking. But challenges to papal authority are nothing new in the Catholic Church. Laypeople, theologians and priests have claimed the right to define the nature of Catholicism throughout its 2,000-year history.

Read more here: A group of Catholics has charged Pope Francis with heresy. Here’s why that matters.

 

Slack chat: how do historians build their courses?

Tags

Chris Bouton, Erin Bartram, slack chat, teaching

Erin Bartram: Several years ago, when I was a grad student teaching at UConn, my roommate commented on how much work I put into writing lectures. She had done her undergraduate work at UConn, so she wasn’t unfamiliar with college courses, or even this specific university. I asked her what she meant, and she said “I guess I never thought about it before. I thought professors just got up and talked from what was in their head when they lectured.”

The work that goes into conceptualizing, planning, and writing the material for a course is largely invisible to the students in the classroom, let alone the general public, and that invisibility matters.

So today we’re going to chat about how academics, specifically historians, do this work, and how the invisibility of the work itself enables exploitation which leads to bad learning experiences.

Chris Bouton: Your anecdote speaks to a very common experience from students. They tend to only think of lecture as a pretty straightforward endeavor. Step 1. Professor provides information. Step 2. Student writes it down. 3. ?????

When in fact, regurgitation of information is a basic skill that isn’t particularly useful in and of itself. Especially in a history classroom. When we have higher goals than just handing out info and having it given back to us. At their most fundamental, lectures are arguments.

Erin:: That’s why it’s important that we don’t think of lecturing itself as regurgitation either

They are themselves sub-arguments of the larger argument of the course, which I think is where we start when planning a course.

Chris: If we’re approaching a course from a macro-perspective, then we start with key themes or arguments. For example, what does freedom mean in American history and how does it change over time? Who defines it, who gets it, and who doesn’t?

Erin:: Let’s start a few steps back from there, even – how do professors get to teach the classes they teach?

Chris: We’re going real macro now.

Erin: I mean, I think it matters because it’s important to know that we don’t just say “I’m going to teach this thing that I’m a specialist in this semester” and that’s what happens

Chris: Absolutely.

Erin:: All courses that are taught have to be approved and in the course catalog – the listing of all the courses that can be taught at the university. Getting a course approved means a professor has to design it, explain its purpose, its objectives, what need it fills in the department and the college, think about who will take it and why, and then get it approved by several layers of bureaucracy, both within the department and at higher levels.

Getting a new course approved is a lot of work, but once a course is in the catalog, it can be taught at any time, but even so, what gets taught when is a thing department think carefully about (or should)

Chris: Some courses are permanent features of the course catalog, they’re offered every semester and taught by different members of the faculty: American History (generally split into 2 courses with a division occurring somewhere around the Civil War/Reconstruction period), Western Civilization etc.

These are introductory courses that fulfill university distribution requirements. Then once you take those courses, generally you can take higher level courses that are more specialized in their focus and are taught by specific faculty and are related to that faculty’s historical specialty.

Erin: Those courses often fill general education requirements, which means lots of students will take them, which means they fill up and justify their existence. There’s nothing inherently useful about them, and many historians say there’s actually little useful about them.

Chris: From a departmental teaching perspective, they’re the least appealing classes so the most accomplished faculty rarely teach them.

Erin: Some universities won’t have prerequisites for upper division history courses, though, which contributes to how faculty teach those courses. That’s the situation I’m in at my position – I can teach a 300 level course on the Civil War, but you don’t have to have taken college-level US history to enroll.

That shaped how I planned the course – what stuff that they might have learned in a 100 level course did I need to teach in this course?

Chris: The teaching responsibility then falls on the rest of the faculty. Generally meaning graduate students or adjuncts.

Erin: The reason introductory courses are often considered least appealing? They’re the hardest to teach. They require professors to master huge amounts of content and, from that, make a big argument without actually teaching all the content itself.

Chris: You have to cover several hundred years of history in 14 weeks, teach some kind of historical thinking, and design assignments that take into account the vastly different types of students you’ll find in the class.

If you don’t care about teaching, you don’t have to do these things. You can just lecture, assign 2 multiple choice tests and a paper.

We’re talking about the difficulties of making a good class

Erin:: Even if you just lecture…that’s still a ton of work

Chris: True, but you only have to do it once and then never change it. I’m just trying to suggest that the good teachers put a lot of work in on top of that.

Erin: Yes. You can never revise it at all, in response to either new scholarship or students not understanding stuff

Thinking about that first step, though, when you’re writing a class for the first time: once you’ve got a sense of the argument you’re making with the class, you have to figure out how to make it. Each topic you cover, lecture you write, and document you assign relates to the others and to the broader course.

You can think of it like inviting people to a wedding. Like, if we invite this person, then we have to invite that family, but if we invite them, what about this other person.

Chris: Right, you’ve started with the broader theme, taking my meaning of freedom as an example. And say the class is the first half of the U.S. survey. Then you have to think about the big moments of the first half of that survey, Colonization, the Revolution, Civil War etc. and how do they fit in? Then think about different groups or social trends–the experience of the poor, women, the enslaved etc. How do they fit into this theme?

Erin: This also means you don’t always teach everything in chronological order, despite it being a history class.

Chris: Yes, chronological order is flexible and it also means that you won’t touch every subject. Teaching a survey is about triage. Figuring what is absolutely essential and starting with that.

Erin: For instance, I don’t teach European colonialism in the first half of the US survey in a strictly chronological way. We do Barbados and the Chesapeake and New Netherlands and Canada and Mexico separately.

Chris: And by approaching the subject thematically, you’ve set up a basis for comparison.

Erin: I do the same with the 19th century, and I think lots of us do. It means things like the Missouri Compromise might show up “later” than you’d think, but that’s only because of how the material is arranged. It then provides us with the opportunity to do comparison work in discussion, rearranging the material and putting it together in new combinations.

And this is why lectures/lessons/documents have to be so carefully plotted: you’re setting up ideas and connections that will bear further fruit weeks and months later

Chris: You’re constructing something from the ground up, trying to make sure all the pieces fit together.

Erin:: And the hardest stuff to write, honestly, is the stuff you’re a specialist in. The idea that I could get up and just wing a 50 minute lecture on the Jacksonian period or women’s history or Catholic history…

Chris: Oh God yes. Teaching World History or Western civ was much easier. Without the insane depth of knowledge in those areas, it’s easier to focus on the broader themes that you’re trying to get across. Okay, I’ve got 50 minutes on the Meiji Restoration, guess I better figure out exactly what I want out of it.

Erin: And when we do this, we’re not just accumulating facts, or drawing on reserves of facts. We’re trying to weigh and synthesize arguments from dozens of books and articles we’ve read. Historians read hundreds of books and then have written/oral examinations on them at the end of their first few years of doctoral study, and most of us start teaching on our own after that. I’m quite sure I’d have done better on my comps if I’d done them after I’d been teaching.

Like, having to synthesize Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs for a 100 level class made me understand that book way more. I had to really figure out what I thought about the Revolution – ideological or economic – when I had to teach it.

Chris: Teaching puts these subjects into sharp focus and forces you to take a position on them in a way that comps don’t, even though that’s the point of comps. I don’t think comps are particularly effective at that, but that’s a subject for another day.

Erin: So, there’s one thing that I think is important here. We’ve talked about the increasing reliance on part-time/adjunct labor in academia, and that fact intersects with this conversation in two ways.

Adjuncts are often hired last minute. Like, the weekend before. Even full-time non-tenure track faculty, being at the bottom of the ladder and with fewer protections, can have their course schedule switched at the last minute.

All of the work we’ve talked about here, if you’re going to do it and do it well, takes HOURS and needs considered thought and time.

Chris: In CT, I was hired to teach a US-II survey in late December for a class that began in late January.

Having never taught US-II, I threw myself into course prep, outlining, writing lectures, selecting primary documents etc.

A few days before the semester started I found out that the class was cancelled because it didn’t have enough people in it.

Erin:: And that gets us to the second point: whether the class happens or doesn’t happen (ugh), adjuncts don’t get paid for the hours they spend designing and revising classes.

Chris: I didn’t get paid for a single minute of that course prep and that was time I could have spent on my dissertation.

Erin: You can see here the ways that this is exploitative and bad for students.

Either adjuncts do massive amounts of unpaid work (provided they even have the time/opportunity to do so) to make the course good or they don’t and students get a crummy learning experience.

Chris: And even if they put in the good work and make connections with students, there’s no guarantee they’ll be invited back the next semester.

Students naturally specialize in certain professors, but that’s impossible to do when you’re talking about adjuncts, so the students are missing out.

Erin: And if students are interested in your field, and might become majors, they don’t bother because they don’t know that you – and your (theoretical) specialty upper division classes – will even be there.

Chris: History departments complain about declining enrollments while they rely on adjuncts and grad students to handle more and more of the course load, 71% of all classes are taught by non-tenure track faculty, you don’t think those things are connected?

Erin: And we’re not just “I reckon”-ing over this. I have had students say this to me explicitly.

Chris: And it doesn’t take much searching to find evidence of this from articles in the Chronicle or Inside Higher Ed. So there’s a problem here that compounds itself.

Erin: And that’s how courses are made, boys and girls!

 

“Why don’t historians teach…?”

Tags

Erin Bartram, historical thinking, KKK

Over the weekend, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza dipped into a familiar narrative well: “Did you know the Democrats were the party of the Klan???”

Three major Democrats—Prez Harry Truman, Justice Hugo Black & Sen. Robert Byrd—were in the Klan; the GOP has no record that compares to this pic.twitter.com/rMxw4TCE6C

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) October 6, 2017

When historians said that we knew the complex history of the Klan and the major political parties, he asked why we weren’t teaching this true fact about how the Democrats were the party of the Klan. When we said we were teaching the complex history of the Klan and the major political parties right now, in classrooms across the country, he said clearly we weren’t or everyone would know this true fact about how the Democrats were the party of the Klan.

He basically challenged Princeton historian Kevin Kruse, who studies the history of race and Christianity in the American South, to some kind of historical duel, and then spent the whole weekend railing against leftist, “progressive” historians.

 

I had a whole post written out about how D’Souza’s “method” of historical interpretation is both invalid and makes no sense (either things change over time or they don’t, and if they don’t, there’s no such thing as history!) but I don’t need to get trolled for all eternity, so instead I’ll make a few points that bear repeating.

Change happens. Context matters. Words mean different things at different times. That’s at the root of historical analysis. D’Souza tries to pretend they don’t, and that’s his whole angle – that historians are playing word games. But simply by virtue of saying one definition of a word from a particular historical moment is the right one, he’s acknowledging the change while trying to deny it any meaning. [Historians do like playing word games in our spare time, though.]

Historians don’t just teach facts, they teach interpretation and analysis of evidence. Some people don’t like that, and call it politics, or intellectual mumbo-jumbo, or political correctness. It’s not. It’s the discipline of history.

When someone says “Historians don’t teach this!” you should consider whether they’re just mad that historians don’t teach the interpretation or narrative they want. When someone says “Historians don’t teach this!” you should also consider whether that person has seen the inside of a history classroom recently.

If all it took to unsettle a popular but incorrect belief about something was a few lectures in high school and college, that would be great. That isn’t the case, though. Do most of us understand probability properly? No, and that’s without it being treated like a political football like the stuff D’Souza’s talking about. Just because someone is talking about the past doesn’t mean they’re doing history. You should consider whether maybe they’re just trying rile people up to sell a book.

If anyone has any questions if/how/why historians teach specific things, we’re happy to answer them.

 

 

 

Surely we have an obligation to try

Tags

Erin Bartram, narratives, presidents

Right now, it feels like there’s only one thing to put into context, and so I gave it a try. I don’t know that I made much progress.

I made word clouds with all of the post-mass shooting speeches from the Clinton, Bush, and Obama years (lots of uses of the word “community”).

I plugged “thoughts and prayers” into Google N-gram (it does show a spike in the last twenty years).

I used Lexis Nexis to see how often “mass shooting” and “quiet town” showed up in the same article (a whole lot, usually linked by surprise that such a terrible thing could happen in a place like this).

I took screenshots of Google searches that revealed it’s not just The Onion that’s at the point of changing the figures and posting the same story (it eventually went up to 16 speeches, I believe).

I did all this while sitting in the same place I once sat stock still for hours, listening to Connecticut’s NPR reporters piece together the scraps of information coming out of Newtown.

There’s a sense now that nothing ever changes, but looking at some of these speeches, it’s clear that the way we talk about things has changed. Mass shootings, even school shootings, happened well before the Clinton administration, but before we talked about “the worst school shooting since Newtown,” we talked about “since Columbine,” despite a notable school shooting the year before that many people forget until they see the name of the shooter. Even this arbitrary starting point reveals how differently we talked about things twenty years ago.

Clinton’s speeches at Thurston High School in 1998 and at Columbine a year later are remarkably different from more recent speeches, not least because they were directed to students, rather than the community or the nation. Both are full of 1990s fears: violent movies and video games, social isolation, and Marilyn Manson, who, in an absurd twist of fate that could only happen in 2017, was recently injured on stage when two giant prop guns fell on him.

In both speeches, and in his brief remarks to the community in Jonesboro, AR, following the March 1998 shooting at Westside Middle School, Bill Clinton referred to “dark forces” driving young people to commit these terrible crimes. We don’t seem to talk like that anymore, whether because we have different understandings of the dynamics of teenage isolation, mental health, and violent fantasies, or because we’ve given up trying to change people, even young people with plastic minds.

That shift, however, appears in combination with an ever-firmer refusal to do what a nation of laws does to protect its people from danger: pass laws. This has led to truly absurd statements like that from Kentucky governor Matt Bevin, who yesterday said gun regulation was useless in the face of these tragedies because “You can’t regulate evil.” With his commitment to using laws to regulate women who seek abortions and interpretive dance majors, it seems clear the issue here isn’t whether regulation works, but rather over what is evil enough to be regulated. If we can’t change people, and ideology and political donations mean no one in power will ever change laws, it should be no surprise that the tone of speeches has shifted to consolation, resignation, and ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

In the late 1990s, Clinton emphasized that we now had to face that “it could happen anywhere.” No president needs to mention that anymore, because it feels like it has happened everywhere, and will happen everywhere. I was in Austria when Columbine happened, a junior in high school on a trip abroad; I watched the news reports with my best friend, depending on our mediocre German to try to understand what was happening. I later spearheaded an effort to plant columbine in our high school’s courtyard in memory of those who had died, because what had happened felt singular in some way. The effort seems ludicrous in retrospect.

In the classroom, one of the hardest things is getting students to realize that the world around them is historically-specific, just like the moments in the past that we’re looking at, and didn’t necessarily have to turn out the way it did. Right now, it feels like things couldn’t have ended up differently than this, because our nation just values some rights more than others, and always has. Nothing will ever change.

This is the tricky thing about the past, though. Despite it looking like things could never change, they still changed, in ways that we might like and ways that we might not like. And they don’t just change because, or because of chance, or forces totally outside of our control, they change because of the choices people make. One goal of terror organizations – be they the Klan, Al Qaeda, or those who bomb Planned Parenthood locations – is to change our behavior, make us too afraid to do things, force us to abdicate control over our fortunes to others, make us give up. I certainly don’t stand in judgment of people who changed their behavior in the face of direct threats from these groups. But we want to recognize that groups like this wouldn’t work so hard to get people to give up if human agency and organization wasn’t a powerful thing.

The national debate over gun regulation right now feels so closed that it’s tempting to say it was inevitable, and can never change, at least in the United States. It’s permanently ossified. Reflecting on the last 20 years, even shallowly, reminds us that the debate has changed. It’s changed drastically, in my adult lifetime, and I have to believe it can and will change again.

If we believe historical change has happened (and boy, I hope we do, or a lot of us will be out of our part-time, precarious jobs), we have to believe that it will continue to happen because of the choices that people make. Sure, not everyone has the same range of choices available to them, not everyone can or should have to commit themselves to every cause, and not everyone has the power to make a choice that will change the course of history. The discussion around and politics of around gun violence in this country have changed, and will change, whether you’re involved in them or not. Historical change will happen without you, but that doesn’t mean you have to let it happen without you. Surely, as Barack Obama said in the wake of Sandy Hook, we have an obligation to try.