Slack Chat: Historical Fiction

Tags

Chris Bouton, Erin Bartram, historical fiction, slack chat, Sondheim

Chris Bouton: Welcome back to our weekly Slack Chat. For this week, we thought we’d do something a little lighter in subject matter by talking about our favorite works of historical fiction. To set some boundaries, I’d say that historical fiction can include literature, film, or other media that addresses a historical event, person, or time period.

I’ll kick things off with a favorite historical movie on mine; 12 Years a Slave.

Erin Bartram: I have still never seen this. I had to ILL it because my local public library didn’t have it, and it took months to get it, and when it finally arrived, it was finals season and I never watched it

Chris: It’s the best representation of American slavery that I’ve seen on film. It captures the horrors of enslavement and Michael Fassbender does a fantastic job portraying Edwin Epps’ casual and cruel dehumanization of his slaves.

He lurks about at night, invites his slaves to dance for him in the middle of the night in his house, and casually beats them. It’s a realistic depiction of the wonton cruelty and power of slaveholders.

Shocking that I started with a movie about slavery.

Erin: This what I’ve heard from historians, and it makes me more likely to watch it. I think people think historians are persnickety about depictions of the past because we get really hung up on whether people’s collars were right. But I think we’re bothered by the way things like slavery are portrayed because whitewashing and softening it is dangerous.

Chris: It’s especially powerful as a rebuttal to the Moonlight and Magnolias romanticism of the Old South.

I can’t stand to watch a single minute of Gone with the Wind.

Erin: For me, if it serves as a touchstone for my students that displaces Django Unchained, that would good.

The movies we’ve just cited show the range of what we can even call “historical fiction”

Chris: The violence against African-Americans in Django Unchained is the only realistic part of it.

The opening crawl of that movie had a factual error in it.

Erin: Cripes

It seems like all of QT’s movies are the same white male violent fantasy dressed up in new garb, increasingly “historical” garb

Chris: It placed the Civil War in the wrong year and then suggested that slaves escaping from bondage in Texas would flee to the North.

Erin: What?

Chris: They wouldn’t go North, they’d go west or towards Mexico.

Yeah, that took me out of the movie immediately.

Erin: I mean, this is why people are unwilling to give the Confederate writers the benefit of the doubt

Chris: We’ll see what happens with Confederate, especially since those guys aren’t finished with Games of Thrones yet.

And the immediate backlash the announcement caused.

I realize my complaints about Django may be pedantic, but they weren’t hard things to check.

And that’s what annoys me about it, how easy they were to fix.

Erin: I mean, such obvious errors at the start suggest that the people making the film see history as a thing to play with, not to understand

Chris: Right, and there was also a mention that the slaves in the coffle could testify against the white slavetraders in court. Which of course, they couldn’t.

Erin: I think this is what I’m often thinking about when I’m watching/reading historical fiction.

Is setting something in the past just a way to put it in a different world without doing the labor of world-building?

Is the story deeply informed by the historical conditions its supposedly drawing on?

Chris: That last question is especially important.

All of those Mel Gibson history movies fail at that. The Patriot, Braveheart, they’re just the same movie/themes of revenge and grotesque violence transported to different time periods.

Erin: I don’t have a particular love for historical fiction, but I like the genre that is historical sci-fi/fantasy, if that descriptor makes sense. Things set not in this world but in societies that resemble some parts of the human past.

Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians springs to mind

Or a children’s book like Natalie Babbitt’s The Search for Delicious

Chris: Yeah, I don’t read a lot of historical fiction. That probably has something to do having to read so much history that reading historical fiction isn’t different enough from what I do normally.

Erin: Yep. I think what I consume more, tho still not much, is contemporary adaptations of older books

Even with books set in the moment in which they were written, contemporary adaptations are sort of doubly removed from the historical moment they discuss

I was just thinking of Austen novels and the O’Brien books there are a million of – the Master and Commander guy

1. A) Do Austen adaptations pass the Bechdel test as much as movies set in our own period?
2. B) Do historical settings allow some creators to produce all-male works for an audience that wants them and have it “justified?”

Chris: Regarding B), sci-fi settings allow authors to play with gender roles (for good and bad). I read a lot of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series when I was a teenager. I stopped reading it because it was clear that he had no intention of finishing the series and as I later realized he had deeply sexist views of women.

Erin: Oh yeah, I definitely read things like that. But then I read things like Dreamsnake by Vonda McIntyre which was awesome. I suppose a lot of the post-apocalyptic sci-fi/fantasy I read when I was younger played with the same things historical fiction can.

I did finally watch the 2004? adaptation of Gaskell’s North & South this summer, which I loved.

I think it’s a good example of the difficulty of making things historically accurate and appealing.

Chris: Well the 80s version with Patrick Swayze is terrible.

Erin: No “love story” from the 19th century would read as a love story to 20th century audiences, the same way any real depiction of 19th century American slave society would be almost too much for audiences.

Oh no no! Not that one!

I mean the 19th century novel about industrial England

It’s so confusing

Chris: Oh, different thing. My bad

Erin: I have not seen the one with Swayze (and Jonathan Frakes?) but I have heard it’s wretched

Chris: North and South is really bad, but it is the reason that Jonathan Frakes grew a beard.

Erin: Every cloud has a silver lining

Chris: He played the sleazy brother of the Northern lead character. Frakes sold defective shells to the Union army.

Erin: I think the reason I liked North & South much better than a lot of period dramas I’ve seen is that a good chunk of it dealt with issues of labor and politics and poverty, and they had impacts on the story, they weren’t just there as backdrop. It is far more grim.

The main couple didn’t just have a series of misunderstandings over nothing, they had seriously different understandings of how the world worked, neither of which were without problems.

Chris: I think we agree that the best historical fiction uses the specific historical time period for something more than just background.

Something that engages with that historical person/moment however you want to put it to advance some sort of argument or story.

Erin: I think striking the right balance is very hard.

Chris: That’s why there’s so much bad historical fiction.

Erin: Even though I know the realities of the past, I remember watching the 2000 adaptation of The House of Mirth and just screaming “oh ffs just get a job!”

I mean, the imperative to have some sympathetic white character for white audiences to cling to is the thing that pulls me out of movies set in so many parts of the US/UK colonial past

Chris: Right, that the only way a modern audience can understand the past is through a present analogue.

Erin: That’s probably why Americans love movies about the Irish fighting off British colonial oppression

Chris: It also leads to so many terrible white savior narratives.

I’m looking at you Tom Cruise in the Last Samurai.

Spoiler alert: somehow the last samurai is Tom Cruise.

Erin: Ugh

Chris: In terms of historical fiction, I gravitate more towards movies and musicals, mostly because I’m interested in experiencing history through other media especially in a visual sense.

Erin: Me too

Even before Hamilton, lots of historians loved 1776, again despite its inaccuracies and problems in interpretation

Chris: I’m going to gush about Stephen Sondheim for a minute here.

Erin: Assassins?!

Chris: That’s second.

Pacific Overtures

Erin: I haven’t listened to that in ages

Chris: It’s a strange musical about the arrival of the Perry expedition and the opening of Japan. But it’s told from the Japanese perspective, using Japanese musical forms.

It almost never gets revived because it’s such an idiosyncratic piece. Though I saw that there was a month long revival on Broadway a few months ago.

Starring George Takei

There’s a song in Pacific Overtures that I love called “Someone in a Tree” and it’s about the drafting of the Treaty of Kanagawa.

There’s no historical record of what occurred in the treaty house and the song addresses how do you what happened if there’s no record of it.

The song takes the form of an old man recounting his memory of sitting in a tree overlooking the treaty house and he’s accompanied by a younger version of himself and later a soldier stationed under the treaty house. The old man and his younger self argue about their memories.

And it has this wonderful line that I love: “Without someone in a tree / Nothing happened here”

The idea that for an event to have happened, someone had to be there.

Erin: And that’s amazing – not just engaging with the past, but engaging with how we make/know the past

Chris: And if he weren’t there, then who’s to say what happened

Exactly, the song is about how we create the past

Erin: I think you take that and what he does in Assassins, and you see a creator who is engaging with the past and the nature of historical thinking in a way that historians really like

Chris: Yes, I love Assassins.

“Lincoln who got mixed reviews / Because of you John now gets only raves” is a brilliant line

Because it’s true!

Erin: It’s an examination of “historic” figures in the way historians use the term – interesting and impactful – rather than as a descriptor of great men

Chris: The Ballad of Booth is about how Booth tries to shape his own historical narrative and fails.

Erin: “Unworthy of Your Love” is one of my favorite ballads and it is so messed up

“The Gun Song” is about connectedness and complicity

I was fortunate enough to see the 2004 revival with Neil Patrick Harris and Michael Cerveris, that ran for a few months at Studio 54, and at the time, I didn’t love that they’d added in “Something Just Broke,” about the reaction to the Kennedy assassination

But in the past six months, the song has grown on me

Chris: I thought that song was about people in different time periods reacting to the various assassinations?

I’ve never seen Assassins staged.

Erin: It is right near the end, after the Narrator becomes Lee Harvey Oswald

Before the reprise of Everybody’s Got the Right

But again, it’s thinking about how individual experience becomes dominant narrative, and the importance of “Where were you when” in engaging with the recent past

Chris: For our parents it was the Kennedy assassination, for us it’s 9-11.

Erin: Yep – and 9/11 is the thing I use to show the “distance” between me and my students, despite us being in the same generation

Is our consensus that all historical fiction should be Sondheim?

Chris: I’m okay with that

Or at least employ the same critical analysis and thematic development

Erin: Assassins also features my favorite depiction of a president – Big Bill McKinley enjoys beef and stamp collecting!

Chris: McKinley is so generically American in that song

“In his spare time he enjoys collecting coins!”

Erin: oh yes, it was coins

Chris: McKinley in that song is espousing the version of the American dream that we all hope to aspire to

Erin: I would like to be able to afford to buy beef, it’s true

Chris: The Horatio Alger, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps narrative, that the show acknowledges isn’t real

Erin: The ways in which Assassins and Pacific Overtures ask the audience to question not only their ideas about the past but their ideas about history really make the musicals stand out from everything else we’ve talked about here. (edited)

I have done stuff with Assassins in my teaching before, and now I want to bring it back.

Chris: That’s probably why we like them so much. They’re also ingenious pieces of music.

He also worked with the same playwright for both those musicals, John Weidman.

Weidman also is a writer for Sesame Street.

Erin: That is excellent.

Chris: Weidman has a degree in history from Harvard as well.

So I guess to sum up, we really like Sondheim?

Erin: Seriously

If you’ve made it this far reading the chat and you haven’t gone and listened to this, stop right now and do it!

Chris: That’s the reward for reading this far.

Why are people so upset about Confederate?

Tags

civil war, Erin Bartram, memory, narratives, race, slavery

Last week, HBO announced a new show called Confederate, from the showrunners of Game of Thrones, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss. This is how HBO described the show in their announcement:

CONFEDERATE chronicles the events leading to the Third American Civil War. The series takes place in an alternate timeline, where the southern states have successfully seceded from the Union, giving rise to a nation in which slavery remains legal and has evolved into a modern institution. The story follows a broad swath of characters on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Demilitarized Zone — freedom fighters, slave hunters, politicians, abolitionists, journalists, the executives of a slave-holding conglomerate and the families of people in their thrall.

The response was…mixed, to say the very least. There are several different layers of problems with the concept and potential execution that made people angry. Rather than delve into any of them in particular, I just wanted to sketch out the different issues, and talk a bit about things that make some historians (not all) wary of the project.

First, there was concern about the two white men at the head of the project for a couple of reasons. Game of Thrones has featured some problematic racial imagery and a lot of sexual violence, and many have been disappointed with the response of the showrunners to complaints about both issues. This alone is enough to suggest to many that Confederate will be at the very least tone-deaf and more likely offensive and exploitative.

Others were wary because of the history of white filmmakers providing and white audiences expecting particular narratives about the Civil War that are dishonest, whitewashed, and factually incorrect. This led to some on-the-nose imaginings of what we’ll see in Confederate, since white Hollywood and white Middle America alike can’t abide or even conceptualize media without a dashing white hero and a love story.

wow, the first page of HBO's Confederate has leaked!!!!!!! excited to share it with you all!! pic.twitter.com/FIaY9wa3KK

— Nicole Silverberg (@nsilverberg) July 20, 2017

if hbo is really going to make a godawful show about confederate slaves in an alt-2017 let me save you the trouble here is what happens pic.twitter.com/u5ycC5t2IS

— DOCFUTURE (@topherflorence) July 19, 2017

Many also pointed out something along these lines already existed, produced by a black filmmaker: the mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America. An independent film that is available to watch on Netflix, and which I highly recommend, C.S.A. never got the distribution and would never have gotten the funding or the splashy rollout that Confederate has already received. 

The history of awful Civil War movies and TV produced by white writers and filmmakers, the need for white male heroes and protagonists in all media, and the issues that Benioff and Weiss’ previous show has had with race and sexual violence were more than enough to create a huge backlash.

But there’s another set of problems operating in tandem with these issues, problems rooted in the way the showrunners seem to understand the past and just how “past” it is.

In an interview with Vulture in response to the backlash, the showrunners, were asked about how they came up with the idea for the show. [NB: The interview includes Malcolm and Nichelle Tramble Spellman, two black writers involved with the project who Benioff and Weiss describe as full partners. I’m only touching on their contributions a little in this analysis, not because I don’t think they’re important, but because I don’t actually think all four contributors are on the same page nearly as much as they say they are.]

Tell me more, though, about exactly how you came to do this idea. Did you do a whole bunch of research? Maybe go out one day and smoke peyote like Jim Morrison?

David Benioff: In a dorky way, I guess it goes back to — we’re both history nerds. I remember reading a history of the Civil War, I think it might have been the Shelby Foote one. And there’s a famous story, which I’m going to mash up, because my memory’s not what it used to be — but there’s a famous story of when Robert E. Lee was invading the North. Not the Gettysburg invasion, but an earlier one. And the set of orders got misplaced and were found by a Northern soldier. And it ended up ruining Lee’s invasion. A lot of people think if the orders hadn’t been lost, things might have been different: The Confederates might’ve sacked Washington, D.C., it’s possible the South could’ve won the war. So that notion of, what would the world have looked like if Lee had sacked D.C., if the South had won — that just always fascinated me. And history as a genre has always been interesting to me. That was really the initial thing. I wish I had a more specific trigger moment for you, but I don’t.

D.B. Weiss: Yeah, on top of what David said about history and how we’ve both been heavily invested in it since kids — it goes without saying slavery is the worst thing that ever happened in American history. It’s our original sin as a nation. And history doesn’t disappear. That sin is still with us in many ways. Confederate, in all of our minds, will be an alternative-history show. It’s a science-fiction show. One of the strengths of science fiction is that it can show us how this history is still with us in a way no strictly realistic drama ever could, whether it were a historical drama or a contemporary drama. It’s an ugly and a painful history, but we all think this is a reason to talk about it, not a reason to run from it. And this feels like a potentially valuable way to talk about it.

The question suggests that the idea of the show is so far out only an altered mind could have come up with it. The answers, taken together, reveal people interested in playing with the past but not interested in really understanding it. They know they’re supposed to say slavery was the original sin, it’s still with us, blah blah blah, but that awareness doesn’t seem to have informed them or humbled them in any way.

It’s notable that their most specific “what ifs” are around how different military choices might have changed the direction of the war, not about the political, cultural, economic, or intellectual choices that led up to and followed the war. Perhaps the show examines those choices too, but that doesn’t seem to be the direction they’re going in. The “what if” that created the conditions for the show is sort of an afterthought, rather than a way to think about why things might have actually happened differently.

Perhaps they’ve read more than Shelby Foote, whose three-volume history of the Civil War was published between 1958 and 1974. But I don’t think so. If they did, they’d know that historians argue chattel slavery was a “modern” institution, one that arose with and helped create the very ideas and material conditions of “modernity” itself.

[Benioff and Weiss use “present day” in the Vulture interview, while the HBO announcement talks about slavery as a “modern institution.” Perhaps I should give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they had no control over how the show was framed for the announcement.]

Several times they push back against the accusation that this show will be wish-fulfillment or straight up pornography for the alt-right and those who carry the banner for the Lost Cause. Repeatedly, all of the people involved push back against the idea that this will be pornography, stating that it won’t be “whips and plantations.”

This reasoning concerns me because of what I see and hear in the classroom every time I teach anything about slavery. Most of my students – and most of the people I talk with outside of the classroom – first point to the physical abuse as what was “bad” about slavery, rather than that people were legally owned and treated as property, their humanity ignored when it was problematic and exploited when it could be made to benefit those who owned them.

Abuse and control in American slavery took a wide variety of forms, and the idea that removing the whip means there’ll be less on screen to titillate racists falls flat. Moreover, slavery was never simply a plantation institution; portraying “urban” slavery isn’t science fiction, but believing it is shows that lack of understanding of the very “modern” history of slavery in the United States.

Taken together, these two things really matter, because over the years, many of my students have suggested that slavery could have been “reformed” to avoid the Civil War.

I usually have them outline what that would look like. Sometimes, they lay out the terms, realize they’ve just described free wage labor, and feel embarrassed. Other times they lay out something that looks like “humanitarian” views of slavery from the 19th century, in which case I ask them if they’d accept those terms for their own enslavement. Of course they refuse, but many try to avoid confronting why they thought such a system would have been a fair price for black Americans to pay in order for white Americans to avoid a civil war.

Getting rid of whips and plantations won’t prevent the show from being wish-fulfillment for some people, since a sleek, “modern,” white supremacist slave system, one that operates without the need for whips because all people know their place and stay in it, is the actual thing they wish for. 

I imagine these criticisms would be framed by the showrunners as harshing their buzz. They might say: “At the end of the day, it’s just a TV show, and it’s science fiction at that.” Setting aside the awful fact that we’re living in a moment when white nationalism has a place in the White House (a wrinkle to this story I can’t even tackle right now), whether the showrunners like it or not, people get their ideas about the past, slavery, and race from TV shows and movies. It’s why I always have students who ask, in all seriousness, why every slave didn’t just do what was in Django Unchained. 

None of this is to say that a project like this can’t be done well, or that this specific project won’t be done well. But something framed as an alternative history needs to know the both the history it claims to diverge from and why there’s been a 150-year struggle to control that history. Neither the initial announcement nor the Vulture interview on the “backlash” convinces me the project is there yet.

White faces, New England faces

Tags

Erin Bartram, narratives, New England, race, slavery

In earlier posts, we’ve touched on several aspects the Civil War and how it’s been remembered and memorialized, but it is important to remember how pervasive and unshakeable that mythologizing is among those in “the North.”

A spectacular example of appeared in the Republican American, a paper out of Waterbury, CT, an old industrial city on the Naugatuck River. It’s one of the regional papers for people who grew up in Litchfield County like I did. Matt DeRienzo, a local publisher, photographed the piece for our benefit, as part of his response. Before you read John White’s “Slavery and liberal outrage,” make a list of all of the tropes of slavery apologism you can think of, and tick them off as you read.

DeRienzo’s response is excellent, but it barely scratches the surface, not because it’s not thorough, but because White’s piece is chock-a-block full of ahistorical and deeply offensive thinking. I don’t intend to critique it point by point, because I’d spend months on it, because other people have done it better, and because I’d probably quit in rage trying to tackle that horrific family story about how “nice” his ancestors were to the people whose bodies they exploited and whose labor they stole.

Frankly most of the points I’d make are already known, even by people like White. He just desperately doesn’t want them to be true, and has the social power to insist that his reality – one devoid of facts and historical interpretation – is the right one.

There is one passage I’d like to dig into, though. I’ll excerpt it here.

Now, I do not condone slavery; there is no justification for it whatsoever. But slavery was not the whole of Southern culture. The South deserves respect and appreciation for being much more than the Confederacy. For example, Southern music and cuisine were around long before the war. And Southern courtesy and hospitality are legendary. The Confederacy is long gone, but they’re still with us.

Put simply, White gives away the game with that last sentence. He very much wants “slavery” to be separable from “the South” and even further, from “the Confederacy,” and yet can’t successfully separate them in his own mind or writing because they’re inseparable.

He claims slavery is not the whole of Southern culture, but I challenge him to find an aspect of the Southern music and cuisine he claims to celebrate that wasn’t deeply shaped by slavery, if not wholly appropriated from the culture of enslaved people.

And claiming Southern courtesy and hospitality is culturally separate from the history of slavery? Seriously? SERIOUSLY?

It’s clear that the “culture” of the South isn’t just the parts where he imagines slavery didn’t exist, it’s a version of the South in which enslaved people, their labor, and their culture were plundered with impunity and erased, and his arguments attempt to perpetuate that plunder and erasure.

There’s a reason he wants to erase the realities of slavery. The heartwarming family story he tells reveals why. His family story is the story of the Lost Cause. Enslaved people were happy, loyal, and finally had the chance to find Jesus.[1] The war ruined all of that, but his family kindly offered the “opportunity” of participating in an exploitative labor system to the people they were no longer able to exploit fully, people who were mysteriously “uneducated” (and therefore incapable of self-governance).

Ultimately, despite his meager protestations, White doesn’t think slavery was bad for Africans and African-Americans. His perspective is fundamentally rooted in and shaped by what DeRienzo correctly identifies as white supremacy. There’s no getting around that.

One reason why White’s piece undoubtedly found a sympathetic audience in Connecticut is that, even as it tries to separate Southern culture from slavery, it plays on the idea that slavery was a discrete system that happened somewhere else and then ended. I have no doubt that view shaped the poor decision to run this piece.

There are lots of ways to respond to this willful refusal to confront the historical reality. I could point out that slavery existed in “the North,” though I’m sure he knows that. Maybe he doesn’t know that in the 1790 census, every town in Connecticut had at least one slave. Maybe he, unlike children in Connecticut schools today, never learned of Venture Smith. Maybe he doesn’t know that because of the gradual nature of emancipation in Connecticut, the 1850 census was the first one in which New Haven County, in which Waterbury sits, didn’t record the existence of any enslaved people. Given that the town’s website talks about the effects of King Phillips’ War without acknowledging what the war was about, I’m sure he has no idea that it resulted in the sale of defeated Native Americans into slavery by pious Christian New Englanders. 

And maybe, just maybe, he’s never heard “Molasses to Rum.”

More problematic, though, is the refusal to acknowledge the way that slavery was the economic system of the United States, whether you personally held someone in bondage or not. To say people in Connecticut didn’t participate in slavery is like saying in 2017 that you don’t participate in the minimum-wage economy. It’s the economy, stupid. It’s one of the reasons radical abolitionists found it so difficult to extract themselves from the slave economy; how do you “boycott” something that is part of everything you buy?

But it’s more than that. It’s not just about whether or not white Americans who didn’t enslave people bought goods produced by enslaved laborers. Slavery drove the American economy in the 19th century, it was the American economy, and its profits were central to the continued existence of the new republic. The United States was established on and survived through a system that depended on the forced, uncompensated productive and reproductive labor of enslaved black Africans and African-Americans.

Why does White think his family “could not afford to pay them to farm” after the war? It wasn’t just because they were “broke,” it was because the business model of plantation agriculture depended on not paying for the labor. White wants us to see his family’s story as white benevolence; we should read it for what it is: his family’s attempt, fully supported by Northern white Americans who were “tired” of thinking about newly-free African-Americans and who liked their cheap cotton clothing, to establish a system as close as possible to the one they were now barred from using by the Constitution.

White insists we can separate slavery from Southern culture, but we can’t even separate it from Northern culture. We can’t separate it from American culture, and his insistence that his readers should, as a way of forgiving and moving on, is as historically inaccurate as it is offensive and injurious.

There’s lots of good new research lately about slavery and American capitalism, if White would like to dive into it. Ed Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism and Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History are two different takes.

[1] His absolute refusal to acknowledge the ways that Christianity was used to justify enslavement is one of the most perverse elements of this piece, and unsurprisingly misses the fact that there were Catholic and Muslim Africans among those enslaved by his beloved white saviors.

“Work is at the core of what it means to be a man”

Tags

education, Erin Bartram, gender, health care, labor, teaching, Women

A recent piece in the New York Times proclaimed “Men Don’t Want To Be Nurses. Their Wives Agree.” Yahoo! Finance cribbed the story with the more provocative title “Wives are partly to blame for the fact that men won’t take ‘female’ jobs, professor says.”

The crux of the article:

Ofer Sharone, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, has studied middle-aged white-collar professionals who have lost their jobs. He found that some men who might have been willing to consider lower-paid jobs in typically feminine fields encountered resistance from their wives, who urged them to keep looking.

“Marriages have more problems when the man is unemployed than the woman,” Professor Sharone said. “What does it mean for a man to take a low-paying job that’s typically associated with women? What kind of price will they pay with their friends, their lives, their wives, compared to unemployment?”

That may be, he said, because other sociologists have found that while work is important to both men’s and women’s identities, there remains a difference. “Work is at the core of what it means to be a man, in a way that work is not at the core of femininity,” he said.

While there are lots of ways to think about the arguments presented in this piece, I think there are three major layers of culture and history here that we should separate and consider.

First major point to get out of the way: what does it mean to say wives are “to blame” because they discourage their husbands from taking jobs that are culturally associated with women, and therefore weakness? What’s unspoken but clear here, at least as the article presents it, is that somehow it’s not really sexism because women are perpetuating it. Women can and do perpetuate patriarchy; that’s actually part of how and why it works. Women naming and shaming other women as promiscuous is a pretty clear example. That the women in this study also see woman-associated jobs as lesser is part of the problem, not the explanation.

 

Gabriel Nicolet’s Good Samaritan, not Highly Skilled Professional

The second thing we need to consider is how ideas about men and women’s appropriate roles and natural differences have shaped what has been considered a “pink collar” job in American history, and how those shifting associations have shaped our ideas of gender difference in turn. Anyone familiar with Laurel Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale knows of the late 18th and early 19th century “professionalization” – read: masculinization – of the job of helping women give birth.[1] But another “pink collar” job – teaching – can also be instructive. Its feminization in the 19th century, and the resulting backlash, show both how impermanent these ideas of “natural” roles can be and how “natural” characteristics can go from being good to bad as conditions change.

Teaching, especially the teaching of young children, was not always a female job. The expansion of compulsory public school education in the early 19th century brought with it the need for, as Catharine Beecher put it, an “army of teachers.” She argued that, as men would much rather prefer the exciting and lucrative world of business, women should take their place as teachers.

Men will be educators in the college, in the high school, in some of the most honourable and lucrative common schools, but the children, the little children of this nation must, to a wide extent, be taught by females, or remain untaught. The drudgery of education, as it is now too generally regarded, in this country, will be given to the female hand.

Men and women alike lauded the “natural” fitness of women for the teaching profession, natural because of their inherent drive to care and nurture, not because of any particular skill or education for which they would have to be compensated. Teaching young children was already reframed as drudgery to which men wouldn’t lower themselves.

By the end of the century, however, as women came to dominate the teaching profession and embrace it as a profession, not just a temporary vocation to be abandoned upon marriage, male educators pushed back, railing against white women teachers for their “feminizing” effects on young boys and arguing that their selfish refusal to give up teaching to act solely as wives and mothers would contribute to “race suicide.”

In this period, when men and women taught together in the same school, women were paid less. One argument that persisted into the 20th century was that women were paid less because they needed the money less, because they were working for “pin money,” not to support a family. [2]

This is, of course, complete bunk, but it brings us to the third important aspect of this piece, the assertion that “[w]ork is at the core of what it means to be a man, in a way that work is not at the core of femininity.” In many ways, this statement is the worst part of these articles.

The most generous reading of this is that the scholar is attempting to state a dominant American cultural belief that shaped the statements of the respondents, rather than some Truth about “what men and women want.”

Even allowing for that generous reading, we should nevertheless take issue with the statement. Much like the idea that wives are to blame for men failing to take pink collar jobs, this framing inverts the issue to obscure the actual problem. The association of work with men makes work associated with women “beneath” men, because it can’t be real work.

The idea that work is central to masculinity and not femininity makes the unpaid labor that women do invisible. It must not be “real” labor, or men would do it, and it would be paid and highly valued. If you think about labor as “something you’d have to pay someone else to do if you didn’t want to do it,” rather than “something you get wages for,” a lot of the way we talk about what’s work and what isn’t falls apart. Moreover, our contemporary divisions of tasks into men’s work, women’s work, and women’s duty, based on “natural” gender roles, also fall apart when put in a little bit of historical context.

This is just a brief dip into the complexities of gender and labor that bubble to the surface with an article like this. Want to read more about the history of gender and labor? Check out the labor tag over on Nursing Clio. I have also written a bit more about the problems of the American vision of “the worker” as a white man with a wrench over here.

[1] Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 65-6, 254-8.

[2] Catherine Clinton, The Other Civil War: American Women in the Nineteenth Century, rev. ed. (New York: Hill & Wang, 1999), 126-9. See also Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), Chapter 1.

“It must be nice to have summers off!”

Tags

Erin Bartram, higher ed, teaching

My post this week comes to you from the road. Am I on vacation? Nope. I’m working.

This is not a post where I complain about how hard academics have it in the summer. There are many things about an academic life in the summer that are pretty great, and no one’s going to deny they exist. [Two words: yoga pants.] But I do find that many people I know are unsure what exactly academics do during the summer, so I’m going to tell you what I’m doing.

Mostly I’m doing three things I have done every summer since around my third year of graduate school: I’m conducting research in archives that are not within easy driving distance of my house, I’m reading, and I’m writing. Since I am currently a contingent worker – meaning I teach courses but don’t have a permanent, tenure-track job – this work is all done using the money I saved from my teaching job during the year.* Sometimes there are grants you can apply for to help you with travel for research, but they’re competitive, and they never even come close to covering all the costs, and if you don’t get them, you have to do the research anyway.

What am I writing? Well, I’m writing a book. I wrote a dissertation, which might sound like a book and weigh as much as a book and even look like a book when it’s printed out, but it isn’t a book – at least, not to the people who get to decide whether I ever get a job and then get to keep that job. Essentially what I’m doing is reworking the research I did for the dissertation into something different, which in my case means a lot of brand new writing.

That leads to the other two things: the reading and the research. My book will still contain all of the arguments and ideas of my dissertation, but I’m also talking about some bigger, broader themes. More specifically, my dissertation was about female converts to Catholicism in 19th century America, my book is about how those converts show us the difficulties 19th century women had in a culture that celebrated the self and the individual but didn’t really seem to think women could or should have or be those things.

All of that means I have to read a lot more books and journal articles to help me hone my argument, beyond the hundreds I read when I wrote my dissertation. So one of the things I’m doing is reading and taking notes. I absorb the most when I take notes by hand and then type them up later. I’ve filled one-and-a-half 80 page notebooks with notes since the end of May. I’ll easily do two more by the end of the summer.

It also means that I have to do more research. This week, I’m researching at the place where I did most of my dissertation research as well: the Massachusetts Historical Society. I did and will do research in places much further from where I live in Connecticut, but most of my research was in the Boston area, which hits that sweet spot – too far to drive every day and get in a reasonable amount of research, but close enough to make you feel silly that you’re in a hotel/sublet c. 2010 or AirBNB c. 2017.**

The Massachusetts Historical Society

Technology’s changed a lot about doing research, even since I started my dissertation work in 2010. I had a digital camera back then, but it wasn’t easy to get great shots without a tripod (which many archives don’t allow), and easy and relatively-inexpensive cloud backup for 45 gigs of photos wasn’t a thing. That meant reading documents and transcribing them in the archive. That’s still what I do in many archives, and what many of my colleagues do in all their archives, because photography is not allowed, or you have to pay for it, or you just can’t do it well without damaging the material.

It’s me and Charles Sumner! This is my favorite table at MHS and I get very put out when someone else is using it.

Today, I took 465 photographs, and transcribed all or part of a hundred letters. I’ll do the same tomorrow and every day through Saturday, by which point my body will be bent into a permanent hunch. Then when I get home, I will go back to the reading, and the writing, while I also read the thousands of pages of letters I photographed and think about how they add to and change the book I’m writing.

Gratuitous cross-hatch writing shot! This is actually one of the clearer versions of this technique in the collections I’m working in. Many of them are on thinner paper.

All the while, I’m also thinking about the courses I’m teaching in the fall. I need to revise lessons, readings, and assignments, and start thinking about the new course I’m teaching in the spring.

So that’s what I’m doing this summer. And I’ll keep doing it all when school starts again. I’ll just add the teaching back in and try to keep all the plates spinning.***

Every academic at the end of August. Actually this is a really optimistic portrait, but I couldn’t find a GIF with all the plates falling in succession and the plate spinner cutting her hand on the shards trying to clean it up.

*I know that TT folk don’t live in a land of milk and honey. But as a contingent worker I get nothing for research, so I think it’s fair for me to say that’s a different experience. Because of a paperwork mixup, I lost library access, email access, and health insurance this summer. It’s different down here.

**Yes, colleagues whose archives are further away/in another country, I hear you and I see you and I recognize that your challenges are different and often greater than mine. I am in no way trying to say I am the most beleaguered.

***There is also service work to keep programs/departments/colleges/universities running. I do departmental stuff all year round, but that’s about it because I’m not permanent. TT people have more committees and things.

Related: Why don’t archivists digitize everything?

Slack Chat: Academic Burnout

Tags

Chris Bouton, Erin Bartram, slack chat

Chris Bouton: In this week’s chat, we’re going to talk about what happens to academics/intellectuals when they start to feel tired or burned out. For those of us, whose work is primarily mental in nature that feeling can manifest itself in different ways. For me, I know I’m starting to feel burned out when I just stop typing and stare at the screen. Normally when I write, the process between brain and page is continuous. When I’m tired, it takes effort to translate thought to page.

And I know I need to stop, when I can’t make the connection at all.

Erin Bartram: I have been doing a lot of reading lately, and re-examining of all the research notes I took during my dissertation years. I take notes by hand, because that’s the method that works best for me, and yesterday I used the last page of an 80 page notebook I started on June 9th.

I’m not denying that a job with physical labor is exhausting, but this is also exhausting. You can rest your body at the end of the day, hopefully, but resting your mind is much harder.

Chris: Yeah, we’re not comparing mental labor to any other kind and making better/worse judgments. We’re just talking about it in the context of how we and other academics work. And how we deal with it.

For me, generally when I reach that point, like I did yesterday, I need to get up and walk away from the computer.

And I won’t come back to the computer until I’m ready.

I’ve tried forcing myself to do that in the past and it doesn’t work out well in my case.

Erin: I have dyslexia (though fairly mild, by comparison), and I know that I need to stop when I start mixing up letters in my own writing, not just my reading.

And being an academic has given me a new appreciation for housework, in a sense.

There’s always something to be cleaned when your brain needs a break.

Chris: Yes, I’ve found that housework can serve that same purpose.

There’s always dishes in the sink or the dining room table that needs to be wiped down. Shoes go back in the closet, clothes in the basket etc.

Also, when I start a new project or a new part of a project, I clean my desk.

I generally keep a sparse desk, but the longer I work on something, the more it gets clouded by pieces of paper, books, and legal pads.

Erin: Yep. There are academic heroes on Twitter with immaculate workspaces. That is not me, but I know the line between productive clutter and “I can’t move for stacks of paper and old tea cups”

Chris: So I need to clean it up and start from a blank slate as it were.

Erin: That’s why I usually grade at the library or the cafe down the street. Nice big square tables where I can make piles. My desk at home just isn’t big enough for that.

Chris: Now that I have pets, I find making a visit to the bunny or the dog to be useful.

I usually don’t have to go far to find the bunny since she lives in my office. Right now she’s laying alongside the baseboard sleeping.

Erin: I will go find the cat who lives with me (my roommate’s cat) and talk to her for a while.

I think academic culture isn’t great at acknowledging/making a space for the fact that thinking happens in lots of ways and takes time.

That’s why a hike is good whether I spend it thinking through what I’ve read or whether I listen to a new episode of Mission Log or just look at trees.

I give my students an assignment that’s designed to make them read a primary source closely and then take time to let it percolate

Chris: I exercise every day.

And I don’t consider it lost time or time taken away from my academic work. Rather I consider it part of my academic work.

It keeps me healthy (or healthier), burns off energy and stress, and makes me happier in general.

That means I work better.

Erin: It’s a reverse-lyceum

Moment to brag here. A year ago next week I started working with a personal trainer, my treat to myself now that I was earning a slightly higher salary. When I started, I could only do 3 sets of 20 lb. deadlifts. Yesterday I did 3 sets with 130 lbs.

Chris: It’s an important part of being a person.

There’s a false perception in academia that all you are is your academic work and that should be your whole life.

I reject that narrative entirely.

Erin: I was joking with my trainer yesterday that in my academic work, the heaviest thing I lift is a dry erase marker, but now I’ll be able to hold it up for the whole class!

Oh absolutely.

I also sing, and sat on the board of my choir for three years. I was brought into it by one of my professors at UConn. It helped me get through grad school, no doubt, and keeps me happy now.

Chris: Exercising, running errands, taking care of pets, cleaning, cooking, these are all parts of being a successful person. That makes me better at what I do.

I like sleeping, I like cooking. I like walking the dog. And I don’t apologize for making time for those things.

Erin: They’re also necessary for being a person.

I’m uncomfortable with the old but still present narrative of “thanks to my wife for taking care of the kids, translating my sources, and typing my manuscript”

But also I’m a single person. Even if I wanted to dump all of the things that make life run onto my partner, I couldn’t.

Chris: Yeah, there is/was a Twitter feed that highlighted all of those lines in acknowledgments.

I love work, but I also love watching Fargo or a Red Sox game.

Erin: Yep.

Chris: I’ve also divided my life into separate spaces.

So I have a space where I work, a different space where I exercise. My bedroom is for sleeping, the couch is for watching TV. My chair is where I read.

I found that necessary since we do so much work from home.

Erin: The kitchen is where my roommate and I shout about politics while the cat looks confused.

Chris: Now I have the space to do that, not everyone does.

But having separate spaces allows me to keep the different parts of my life separate. When I’m in the office I’m working etc.

Erin: Absolutely. I’m incredibly lucky to have found the space I have, even if I did have to suffer through 2 months of plasterers and lead abatement people walking through my office and bedroom last year.

Chris: When I eat, I go out to the kitchen.

But it’s an important way to put up barriers between the different parts of your life.

Erin: I am less good about that

But I also think it’s hard to put up intellectual barriers

Chris: Definitely. I can’t turn that part of my brain off

Erin: Years ago, a fellow grad student told me and another grad engaged in a discussion of feminism at a party that we really needed to “leave that stuff in the classroom”

Chris: The skills I’ve learned earning a PhD apply everywhere, not just in the classroom.

I’m currently trying to perfect a roasted potatoes recipe. Because I cook it once, think what I can do better and then try it again next time.

Currently, I need to cut the potatoes bigger to get the crispy outside and fluffy inside that I’m looking for.

Erin: Are you half-cooking them to start?

It’s so hard to get that balance

Chris: Boiling them in baking soda for 5 minutes

Then roasting them at high heat, though I’m sure my electric oven runs hotter than advertised.

Erin: I think the past year or so has been particularly hard for historians, and probably all academics, because so much of the political climate has been contestation of the ideas that we hold dear

The importance of evidence, interpretation, deep understanding, and connectedness to the past

Chris: Yeah, it’s hard to see the values that you believe and espouse publicly rejected.

And not just rejected, but ridiculed.

Erin: People talk very glibly about how history is written by the winners, but I think we need to be clear that history and “dominant narrative advanced by those with the power to make it true” are different

There’s ultimately no “relaxation” for a historian in this climate.

Chris: The history is written by winners comment, almost absolves people of their responsibility to challenge or create their own narratives.

It’s a “well there’s nothing I can do about it” reaction.

Erin: And it sort of allows people to set themselves outside of the “winners” category, when a real interrogation of the past would force a confrontation with how each of us benefits from it

Chris: The key part of that is the confronting our own benefits.

People don’t want to confront their own, largely unacknowledged privileges.

They’d rather ascribe it to something unique about them. “I work hard.” “I pay my taxes.” “I play by the rules.” whatever it may be.

“I’m smarter/better/more charming”

Erin: Like that thread on the Louisiana couple who are mad about black Americans gaming the system by working and getting the EITC…

I am uncomfortable with the notion that the only way for me to relax my brain fully for more than an hour or two is for me to drop out of awareness of what’s happening in the world.

Usually I can manage two hours of disconnect in a movie. Last week I went to see Wonder Woman, and as much as I loved it, I couldn’t disconnect. (Same with seeing Rogue One in the aftermath of the election)

Chris: I think it is necessary to try. I only have a finite amount of energy in the day and sometimes I need to make sure I get through the day.

Or at least find a new or different way to engage.

Erin: I think the profession tries to make us feel guilty for not working and producing all the time. I tend to feel personally guilty for not engaging my mind and heart all the time in the current injustices produced by the things we study in the past.

Like, how can I disengage from this?

I know, I know, I can’t do anything if I’m burnt out, but a lot of people have done more than me being far more burnt out than me.

Chris: That gets back to the larger question we started with how do we function as academics and people

And the un-comforting realization that there’s very little in our lives that we can actually control.

Erin: That’s why the “inspiration” for the shape of the book I’m working on was A.Burr singing “I am the one thing in life I can control”

Chris: I love that song because it’s a position that I often sympathize with on a personal (not a historical) level.

I completely understand where Burr is coming from.

Erin: I just shouted at my car speakers: “Tell that to the people who are owned or barred from owning property!”

One thing that would make bearing the stress of engagement and activism more bearable would be if academia actually placed value on it rather than dinging you for it. It would not only validate the worth of that engagement, it would bring more people into doing it and the burden might be shared.

Chris: Yes, that’s a great point.

Erin: It would also provide a greater diversity of viewpoints.

Chris: Academia has its own sets of standards and most of the activism from academics, at least those that get the most attention, are from those with tenure, who already have that security.

Erin: Yep.

Chris: So they can devote the time to it, because they have the security. For those without that security, that kind of activism is seen as distracting or detracting from the scholarly pursuits.

Erin: And I think it adds to the burnout as a result. Junior scholars and adjuncts can’t stop thinking about this stuff, but are penalized for expressing it.

Chris: And the only way to work through the burnout is by taking time off for yourself and that feels selfish in the face of everything going on.

Erin: Also it’s okay to have a good cry or rage-induced yell once in a while.

Chris: Or go see a movie, get a burger, or a pint of ice cream.

Erin: I approve!

Correcting the record

Tags

Erin Bartram, historical thinking, politics

Yesterday on the floor of the Senate, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) made good use of the historical record. He asked Joni Ernst (R-IA), who was presiding over the Senate at the time, to officially state the number of consecutive days the ACA was under consideration and the number of hours spent in consideration. In doing so, she cited the Secretary of the Senate and the Senate Library.

.@SenSchumer gets @joniernst to admit O-care got 25 consecutive days of hearings, 169 hours of consideration

Trumpcare: 0 days of hearings pic.twitter.com/odHYpgDYUx

— CAP Action (@CAPAction) June 19, 2017

Now, the idea that Obamacare was done in secret without contributions from Republicans is so pervasive that even official Senate records might not make a difference, but it is important to note that we have those records.

We haven’t always. While the current Office of the Secretary of the Senate is a big operation, it started as one person whose job it was to keep minutes, send messages, and make sure senators had paper, ink, and quills, i.e. to keep the Senate operating for the sake of the senators, not the public. Both the House and the Senate kept journals, as is required in the Constitution. These are basically the minutes, listing bills introduced, nominees proposed, and letters read into the record. In some cases, we see days on end of no quorum and swift adjournment!

The Senate wasn’t initially open to the public, and while the House was, there was no one officially keeping record of what was said. Instead, newspaper reporters recorded House speeches and debates, which is why 19th century newspapers are full of multi-column speeches.

As a result, the first official published “records” of the debates in Congress – the Annals of Congress – covered the 1st through 18th Congresses, 1789-1824, but were compiled after the fact from records and newspaper reports, and only published between 1834 and 1856. The subsequent Register of Debates (1824-37) was published contemporaneously, but is still primarily a summary rather than verbatim transcripts.

The Congressional Globe (1833-73) started with summaries and moved towards verbatim transcripts over time, and from 1873 on, the Congressional Record has provided the most comprehensive official account of what’s said in the legislative branch.

As my links indicate, the Annals of Congress, the Register of Debates, the Congressional Globe, and the first year of the Congressional Record are available through the Library of Congress. If you don’t have access to the full bound edition (though what home is complete without it), you can piece it together through several different sites, including Archive.org.

In 1979, C-SPAN made Congress even more accessible by broadcasting live, though as last year’s Periscoped Democratic sit-in reminded us, C-SPAN cameras can only be used when Congress is in session, and the party that controls Congress decides when that is.

So often, though, we hear things like “history is written by the winners,” and lots of historians work on the history of people who often left scant record – even people who were barred by law from reading! The records we have for Congress aren’t perfect, but they’re a darn sight better than what we have for lots of other things in the past.

Still, though, they don’t capture everything. One of the most confounding things about the Puerto Rican debt crisis is that Puerto Rico was explicitly excluded from bankruptcy protection when a law was rewritten in the 1980s, and while there’s at least one mention of someone raising the issue as the law moved through Congress, there’s no indication in the record of why the exclusion was inserted in the first place.

But the situation I started with is different. I said earlier that there was an “idea” that Obamacare was passed in secrecy.

But it happened less than ten years ago.

And many of the people involved in it are still in Congress.

And we have the Congressional Record.

And we have C-SPAN footage.

And we have the Senate Librarian.

And we have Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi and the rest on tape. 

Obamacare’s secret rushed passage isn’t an idea. It isn’t a myth. It isn’t a common misconception. It’s not something we can’t verify because we don’t have any contemporaneous records.

It’s a lie.

It’s a lie, and it’s also a reminder that history isn’t just about facts, evidence, and “the truth.” If it were, Chuck Schumer would never have needed to make Joni Ernst read the facts into the record. If it were, Joni Ernst reading the facts into the record would have mattered.

Slack chat: a teaching crisis in the humanities?!

Tags

Chris Bouton, Erin Bartram, higher ed, pedagogy, slack chat

Chris Bouton: As we’ve both written about this week, this seems to be the week of other disciplines dumping on the humanities. You wrote about that NPR piece and I tackled the article from Inside Higher Ed. So to start, I’d like to start with two related questions. First, is there a crisis in teaching in the humanities? Second, if there is, are these articles correct in their diagnosis of the problem and potential solutions?

Erin Bartram: It is almost impossible for me to tease apart the thousands of thoughts I have in response. To the first, I’d say “perhaps, though not restricted to the humanities.” To the second, I’d say “no” but through the loudest megaphone money can buy.

Chris: I’ll answer my own questions. On the first, I’d agree that there’s a lack of instruction and pedagogy taught at the college level. There are lots of universities and colleges that have teaching institutes, but they’re largely voluntary. By that I mean, graduate students seeking careers in academia aren’t required to take classes on classroom instruction. Second, the solutions offered by these authors are wholly and utterly wrong.

Erin: As an addendum to my second answer, I’d point out that one of the two articles said that teaching in the humanities sucked because it wasn’t enough like the sciences, and the other said it was trying too much to be like the sciences. Both are wrong for different reasons, but I think there’s a far more provocative point to be made with relation to the IHE piece.

Chris: To expand on my answer to the first one, I’d say that the lack of focus on teaching is a reflection of the way academic institutions view their own programs and their goals. Graduate programs view themselves as creating scholars first, teachers second. Research, we’re told, should be your primary focus. Even though, and I think Kevin Gannon pointed this point on Twitter a while back, 75% of academic positions are teaching focused.

We’re totally being academics right now by offering short answers and then going back and muddying them up.

Erin: And teaching helps your research, not just because you get to assign books you need to read (not a thing I get to do), but because you have to work through/talk through things with your students and your ideas bleed in. My teaching is all “active learning” or whatnot, and some of the best moments this past semester came when I shared something I’d just been reading about with my students and they wanted to know more.

Chris: Looking at both of these pieces together, it struck me how little knowledge the authors had of teaching in other disciplines.

Erin: I mean, here’s my question, which is sort of the question of the moment: Are they ignorant or are they lying?

Chris: I’d lean towards ignorant, combined with arrogance.

Erin: Which is, in fact, a question our students ask all the time when analyzing texts, and we as historians help them understand how it can be both and neither and something more interesting altogether.

Chris: I try to never underestimate the arrogance of academics. Especially when, as Jonathan Wilson pointed out, Schapiro as the president of Northwestern is making 2.4 million, and adjuncts are making 5K.

Erin: I’m sure this is exactly what they’d hate about historians, but I can’t think about what they’re doing without using Foucault.

Chris: Of course, I could be deluding myself into thinking it’s institutional arrogance, which is more understandable, than just lying or having some other more outwardly malicious intent.

Erin: I mean, I think there’s one thing that probably needs to be said about the IHE piece, and about a lot of these sorts of takes. I’d like to pull back the veil for a minute. I don’t think most people, especially people in power, are actually interested in teaching students the kind of critical thinking that the humanities engenders. At all.

The IHE piece argues that the humanities have tried too hard to be like the sciences. But I’d point to this piece in Harper’s from a few years ago. The piece deals with the ways that the humanities have tried to make the case for their value in a capitalist system.

So, this line in the IHE piece: “But if Shakespeare and Milton are no more important than any other “cultural artifact or practice,” and if they are to be studied only “insofar as” they connect with other social factors and not because of “some intrinsic interest or special aesthetic values,” then why invest the considerable effort to read them at all?”

They skip right over the reason. Like, they just erase it. The reason to read and think and do all of this is to understand humanity. But their vision of the humanities suggests that we can only do that by saying “these works are genius and better and represent what humanity should be” rather than what it is. What the humanities do for people is enable them to understand the way the world is and think about COMPETING ideas of what it should be. Yeah, it might inspire them to say “A Winter’s Tale” is great, but it might also inspire them to say “Wait…supply side economics sounds like a scam.”

Chris: The major problem I have with this entire line of critique is that critics begin with the assumption that we should evaluate the humanities solely in the context of capitalism.

Erin: Absolutely.

Chris: Why is capitalism the sine qua non for evaluating the humanities?

Erin: I mean, I think that evaluating it in that framework and constantly deeming it a failure is a way to contain its power.

Chris: And a way to elevate the power of those doing the framing.

Man we are deep into the discourses of power now (Thanks Foucault!)

Erin: Seriously!

Chris: I reject that entire framing device. As if capitalism is the only lens through which we should filter our evaluations of things. Human beings, in general, are terrible economic actors. By that I mean, they generally don’t act in their own best interest anyway. So why should the assumptions of that system govern everything?

Erin: [This is why I can’t stand the use of economic framing devices for historical arguments. I don’t think they explain economics well, so why should I buy them in their historical use?]

Chris: My favorite economists are those who detail how human beings act against the principles of economic theory. (Go behavioral economics!)

Erin: Historians, with their crazy ideas that we should look at what people actually said and did!

Chris: Yeah, why bother with that?

Erin: I actually don’t know how this conversation moves forward, though, without confronting this central issue that the skills of the humanities are actually not desired by most people.

Parents want their kids to go to school and learn how to critically think but also come out still agreeing with their parents

Chris: Well that I think is the tragedy that we’ve been tiptoeing around.

Erin: I have so many friends who are talented writers and thinkers, highly educated, but if your boss doesn’t actually recognize good writing, or if the forces of inertia in your organization are so strong that your co-workers will continue along with terrible procedures and structures rather than change, or if being 30 still marks you as an uppity child….

Chris: Morson and Schapiro decry the lack of people with good critical thinking skills and we constantly hear how employers want people who can think and write. Yet when it comes to the fields that teach those skills, there’s a disconnect there. It also doesn’t help that Morson and Schapiro bust out the tried and true straw-man argument and then spend their entire piece arguing against it.

Erin: As I think Caleb McDaniel said, nothing like a badly-argued essay to make the case for humanities education.

Chris: Congratulations you argued against a position that no one has taken. Well done.

Erin: One thing that really ticked me off was this idea that “analyzing” writing and thinking of it as a “text” somehow ruins it. I am not sure whether they hate historical methods all together or just “cultural” history, but it’s total BS.

Chris: One of my favorite courses I took at Hamilton was a course on the Brothers Karamazov. It was all about contextualizing the book within Russian literature and reading it closely.

Erin: One of my favorites was philosophy through Dostoevsky, in which I read Karamazov, and also The Idiot and Notes from Underground. No need to worry, my dudes, despite all that “analysis” of it, I still almost missed a cue while running the light board in our concert hall because I was reading the end of The Idiot and weeping.

Chris: Now, did spending half a semester on the Brothers K help me land a job? Directly, no. Did it further my critical thinking skills, teach me to write better, and expose me to a new genre (to me) of literature? Yes. Was it worth it? Absolutely. I reread the Brothers K a few summers ago and loved it again.

Erin: And I bet it didn’t diminish your recognition of it as a great and powerful work, but rather enhanced it.

Chris: No, it enhanced it.

Looks like we had the same idea there.

Erin: I mean, my other major was music, and I thought seriously about doing an advanced degree in music theory. [History writing can be hard, but it’s nothing compared to writing about music, let me tell you.] All I did in that was analyze and pick apart great works. In Theory 3 or 4, we spent several weeks on the third movement of Brahms’ Third Symphony

We didn’t listen to it, we just analyzed it. We tore it apart. And then at the end, our professor said “Let’s listen to it again.” Every student in that class cried.

Chris: Those are valuable skills! Understanding how something came together is crucially important. And not just in academia, everywhere. If I’m fixing a toilet in my house, yeah, I’m going to learn how to take it apart and put it back together. I’m going to deconstruct it. Study it, examine it.

Erin: I think those are the skills that are often most dangerous

Chris: Figure out how it works.

Erin: If you’re invested in keeping the system largely as it is. Like, at the end of reading that IHE piece, I honestly couldn’t understand exactly what they want us to do with the humanities. Step 1: Make students read Shakespeare but don’t analyze it too much and force them to love it and recognize genius, Step 2: Profit?

Chris: There were so many confusing things about that piece. I can’t explain that ending either.

Erin: I think one of the problems is you can’t encourage the kind of humanistic thinking that can be monetized without encouraging the kind of humanistic thinking that can help people analyze, take apart, and imagine new systems, institutions, and ways of being. Like this sort of thing.

Chris: That’s a good way of putting it. Because what did every historian on Twitter do in response to the IHE piece? Put their skills to work

Erin: Yep.

The humanities help us remember we’re all human, even the “geniuses.” That’s why this passage in that story stuck out to me: “It is a relationship Malloy says is discomforting to some friends, the ones who compliment her interest in the abstractions of second chances, while flinching at the realities, the idea that the first lady of Connecticut is comfortable getting in a car with an ex-convict.”

Chris: I’d like to circle back to the opening question for a second, to make sure we’ve exhausted that discussion. Is there a teaching crisis in the history/the humanities?

I think there is a perception of one, due to the decline in humanities majors. But not that there is actually one.

Erin: I mean, I think whatever crisis there is is rooted not in the nature of the humanities but in the larger issues of higher ed at the moment. As I noted in my piece this week, I think most historians would prefer to teach in the ways that Wieman advocates. No one is disputing that.

Chris: Agreed

Erin: People outside academia should think hard about why tuition keeps going up while the pay of the people who do the teaching – the primary labor of the university – are paid less and less.

Chris: Right and I think Wieman, Morson, and Schapiro are looking at symptoms of the disease and saying that they’re the cause.

Erin: Yep.

I also do not want to read any more higher ed hot takes from elite institutions any more. I just don’t. But of course that’s all we see, because Morson/Schapiro’s view of what is “worthy” in literature is how American society thinks about knowledge

Chris: Yeah, I also wanted to reiterate that point.

Erin: Whatever’s coming out of elite institutions must be the best/freshest thinking

Chris: Higher education is not just the Ivys, little Ivys, and R1s.

Erin: If you want the best genius, read Shakespeare/look to elite institutions

Chris: Yet publicly that’s all that gets discussed. (I know we’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth restating).

Erin: Most of the really pioneering and effective research/experimentation being done in higher ed pedagogy is being done at places that these writers have never heard of.

Chris: I just spent an entire week surrounded by high school teachers, giving up a week of their summer or school year to try and get better at teaching their students critical thinking skills. There are people practicing and teaching these skills, you just have to look down rather than across your Ivory Tower to see them.

Erin: I heard an amazing presentation at AHA years ago, in one of the Tuning Committee meetings early in its history, by a professor at a Catholic women’s college in Minnesota or Wisconsin, that served primarily first generation students, largely women of color. And it was about how the school’s liberal arts mission statement pervaded teaching. Each department had to take it and rewrite it for their department, and then professors had to do it for each course. It showed a level of understanding of and commitment to the liberal arts that took my breath away, and was so much more powerful than anything I’d ever heard from an elite institution.

Chris: The lesson is, good pedagogy is out there. You just have to be willing to look for it.

Erin: And acknowledge that people less prestigious than you are doing it.

Chris: I’m about out of stuff to rant about.

Hey NPR!

Tags

Erin Bartram, higher ed, historical thinking, pedagogy

Most of the time we give you context for the news, but sometimes we are the news. NPR had a recent feature with Nobel-winning physicist Carl Wieman in which he talks about his efforts to encourage “active learning” in the sciences. Wieman talks about all of the hallmarks of active learning: small groups, engagement with the material, working through problems, not sitting and listening to long lectures. Wieman is not alone in advocating this, nor is this call new, despite the headline “Hey Higher Ed, Why Not Focus On Teaching?”

As a result, one question and answer stood out

Are the active learning teaching techniques applicable as well to the humanities, among those teaching Shakespeare or art history, or for that matter, a K-12 classroom?

That gets to be a more complicated issue, and I would argue on the basis of the research on learning that they almost certainly apply to most of the humanities because you can identify a historian … How they think about things, how they evaluate sources, etc. They have very much clear, expert decision making processes, and we have that. We know how to teach those better, but we don’t have people in those fields who have tried them in the classroom.

While many other historians have or are currently writing eloquent responses to this story, let me just shorthand all of those for you.

If you’re not in academia, which hopefully many of the readers of this blog are not, it is not surprising that you might think all history classrooms look like lecture halls full of sleepy students pretending to take notes while an old dude in a patched tweed coat drones on and on at the front of the room. That’s what you see in movies and on TV, and it may have been what you experienced in college.

But it’s not an accurate representation of what goes on in most history classrooms in 2017, nor does it take into account all the reasons why that style of classroom might persist despite the desires of the professor.

And so, there are really just two basic takeaways here. First, Wieman says “We know how to teach [the thinking processes of history] better, but we don’t have people in those fields who have tried them in the classroom.”

Everything he is talking about is being done, day in and day out, by thousands of historians across the country, in community colleges and Ivies, in small classrooms and large.

Historians have been doing those things for ages because they are the methods of our discipline. Despite the persistent stereotype, I don’t know a single history professor whose ultimate goal for their students is passive memorization and then regurgitation of material. Reading historical texts, analyzing them, writing about them, and discussing them with others is our bread and butter.  Yes, people do still lecture, though many of us do it very sparingly, and lots of historians are working on how to do it more effectively.

Secondly, any serious discussion of the kind of classrooms Wieman loathes and loves that doesn’t acknowledge the financial and structural constraints facing universities and professors is worthless. It’s not just about “good management.”

To be very blunt, lectures can be done on the cheap and delivered to hundreds of students at a time. In particular, if you are a publicly-supported university and have seen your state appropriations decline and then plummet, this is appealing, even if there is abundant research to support other methods of learning. In the throes of the recent recession, there was plenty of discussion of the “efficiency” of purchasing lectures given by faculty at top universities, to spare the expense of paying flesh-and-blood faculty. Good pedagogy? No. Driven simply by a failure to understand good pedagogy? Not really.

When I was a graduate student at a flagship state university, one that managed to maintain state funding far better than others during the recession, I usually was a teaching assistant for 250-person lecture course. We and the students attended two lectures each week, given by full-time (though not necessarily permanent) faculty, and then each teaching assistant taught three 25-28 person discussion sections on Friday, in which we engaged with students in all the ways that Wieman wanted. When I advanced and taught my own courses as a graduate student, I taught “small” classes of 40 people in which I employed the techniques of active learning as best I could.

Were these large lectures and smaller discussion sections the “best” way to teach students historical thinking? Perhaps not. Would state governments like to fund universities so that faculty could use the sorts of teaching methods that are best for their discipline?

Moreover, most of the teaching of history in the US at this moment is done by highly-qualified, engaged scholars with the highest degrees in their field who are hired by the course, or by the semester, often with little notice, paid very little, and not compensated for any “extra” work, including the work of course preparation. While many of the methods of active learning are not inherently “more expensive,” they often require investments of time that non-permanent faculty simply don’t have or won’t be compensated for.

These are some of the basic realities of teaching history on the college level as I see them –  from my experience at a large public university and a small private university, from reading about pedagogy in higher ed, and from talking to colleagues across the country and abroad. If NPR has any interest in talking to me or anyone else in the trenches, we’d be happy to talk, as we’re already talking about this all the time. Just know that we won’t offer any pithy answers or easy solutions.

If you want to read more about how historians are thinking about pedagogy and trying new things, there are lots of great people writing online. Teaching US History is a great place to start. I write there, and on my own blog, as does the awesome Kevin Gannon. The good people at Digital Pedagogy Lab are thinking and doing about teaching and learning all the time. Or you could just check out the #twitterstorians feed on Twitter and see what we’re talking about.

 

 

#WomenAlsoWriteDadBooks

Tags

Chris Bouton, David Mislin, Erin Bartram

We offered up some suggestions for female-authored works of history in our “Books for Dad” post yesterday. Who knew you didn’t need to look like this to do history?

You responded in the comments, on Twitter, and on Facebook, with a pile of additional suggestions. Here they are in no particular order.

Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration

Ann Little, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright 

Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Never Caught: The Washingtons’ Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge

Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Get this for the Teddy Roosevelt fan in your life!) 

Kathleen Sprows Cumming, New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and American Catholicism in the Progressive Era

Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919-1939 and A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America

Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America

Patricia Cline Cohen, The Murder of Helen Jewett

Jane Kamensky, The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse

Jill Lepore, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin and The Secret History of Wonder Woman

Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells

Theresa Kaminski, Angels of the Underground: The American Women who Resisted the Japanese in the Philippines in World War II

Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision

Elizabeth Varon, Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859

Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic

Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

Joanne Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic

Holly Tucker, City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris

Carol Sheriff, The Artificial River: The Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862

Judith Giesberg, Sex and the Civil War: Soldiers, Pornography, and the Making of American Morality

Kathleen Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia

Tobie Meyer-Fong, What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China

Julie Greene, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal 

Glenda Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950

Amy Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City, and Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire

And two more from David, with descriptions:

Kathryn Gin Lum, Damned Nation: Hell in America From the Revolution to Reconstruction

This is a really engaging study of the idea of hell, and of the social, political, and religious implications of dividing people into categories of “saved” and “damned.” This framework provides the basis for new discussions of abolition and the Civil War.

Kathryn Cramer Brownell, Showbiz Politics: Hollywood in American Political Life

An engaging, informative read that examines the relationship of celebrity and politics in the modern U.S. It’s a very relevant book.