Dec 2009
Why history?
12/30/2009 14:33
Because, let’s be real. The City of Dreadful Night is more interesting as an artifact than as a poem. James Thomson’s life interests me, as does his vision of a nightmarish, dystopian London in the 1870s. But that does not in any way make me want to read the poem.
Does this make me a lowbrow, literalist, anti-intellectual materialist? Maybe, from a certain point of view. There’s a silk smoking-jacketed, punting-on-the-Cam, NPR-in-the-background perspective that likes its historical explanations laced with allusions to canonical literature. But that sort of thing leaves me wondering, was this really in the minds of the people in the story? Or is it just a shorthand way to tell the story to a particular type of audience? And, if it’s shorthand, what is it missing? That’s one thing Williams seems to have been keenly aware of: the tendency to reduce complexity and smear out ongoing evolution in an idea like “city” or “country” until it’s a handy, but misleading, archetype.
As I was showering this morning, I was ticking off the books I might say influenced me to study history. It’s been in my head for a few years that Neal Stephenson’s “Baroque Cycle” really got me interested, but I think it was more of a reminder than a discovery. The cool thing about Quicksilver and its sequels is the richness of “alien” (in the Carlo Ginzburg sense) material available in the past. And I thought it was cool, how Stephenson studiously puts known people in known situations, but is completely free to speculate about what’s going on in their heads.
But he’s not completely free. He has to convince his post-modern, sci-fi audience that these people are plausible. That means they have to seem authentic and fit the time, but be recognizable to his readers as heroes and villains. So, in what world are they authentic? The thing that interests me now about Quicksilver is how historians deal with these issues.
Another book that sticks with me is Colin Tudge’s little Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers. Because it’s far-out, and yet plausible (and of course, because it has neanderthals in it). I like the way he reaches a little past what we know, to speculate about what might have been. There are so many possible perspectives and subjective “realities” in the past, that it seems like an enormous invitation to find the weird, the alien, the deviant. Maybe it’s this age of conformity that makes me look for dissenters and resistors in the past. I like Tudge’s idea (I had it too, but he puts it really well. I will probably use it for a story someday) that the neanderthals were superior individuals, who “lost out” to better organized, collectivized sapiens.
What does this have to do with history? Individual/collective, rural/urban, all these binaries we use to understand the world. Joan Scott says “meanings are constructed through exclusions.” Any definition, she says, “rest[s] always...on the negation or repression of something represented as antithetical to it.” Why repression? Because identity is all about reducing a universe of words describing a thing to the two or three “important” ones that define it. But important to whom? When? Why?
Scott says “oppositions repress the internal ambiguities of either category.” (all this is in Gender and the Politics of History, p. 7) I’d say this binary view is particularly interesting when you’re looking at something like male/female or rural/urban. But it’s a simplification of the actual processes of identity formation and grouping. Identity is about taking adjectives and making them nouns. Grouping is about drawing boundaries between items that include these reified qualities and other items that do not.
Unlike set theory in math class, it’s not as easy in life to pick the “defining” quality. And it’s not a value-free or a power-neutral process. Am I the only person in the world who’s annoyed when the cute moose on Nickelodeon or Steve on Blues Clues does the “one of these things is not like the other” puzzle with my kids? Fer crine out loud! Leave the little ladybug with the off-color spots alone! She just wants to be with the other bugs!
But that’s the way we’re wired, I guess. It’s all evolutionary. Until it’s not, and then it kills us.
U.S. History
12/29/2009 17:30
Last semester I TAed a class in U.S. History, 1876 to the present. I thought it went fairly well, but there were some things I thought I'd change, if I had it all to do myself. So, rather than forget what those things were, I went ahead today and wrote up a syllabus of how I would teach the class. Might not be the ultimate -- if I ended up teaching it several times, it would probably develop some more each time. I just wanted to use what I remembered of the students reactions to the material (and my own) to see what it would look like...
One thing I wasn't happy with was the emphasis on generational conflict. We covered it in the Victorian era, and then again in the 20s, the 50s and the 60s. There were some things we passed by -- there's not a lot of time to cover nearly a century and a half, after all. Another thing was (and maybe I'll get in trouble with some older faculty members for this, but here goes), I think the focus on Viet Nam was overdone. And I don't think you can really sustain the argument that the 60s hippie movement was as historically important as Civil Rights or the Women's movement. So I dumped it in favor of the environment, which I think is going to turn out to be historically big.
Anyway, I now have something I can show people, if I go looking for adjunct or continuing ed. jobs while I'm studying. Should probably put together an undergrad Environmental history syllabus too...
One thing I wasn't happy with was the emphasis on generational conflict. We covered it in the Victorian era, and then again in the 20s, the 50s and the 60s. There were some things we passed by -- there's not a lot of time to cover nearly a century and a half, after all. Another thing was (and maybe I'll get in trouble with some older faculty members for this, but here goes), I think the focus on Viet Nam was overdone. And I don't think you can really sustain the argument that the 60s hippie movement was as historically important as Civil Rights or the Women's movement. So I dumped it in favor of the environment, which I think is going to turn out to be historically big.
Anyway, I now have something I can show people, if I go looking for adjunct or continuing ed. jobs while I'm studying. Should probably put together an undergrad Environmental history syllabus too...
Field Reading Lists
12/22/2009 12:34
I've added a new page to Rural History, called "Field Reading List," on which I'll list and say something about the books I'm reading for a "Field" in Rural History. This means that I'll be answering a question on Rural History during my comprehensive exam next fall.
Seems to me, we PhD students (not only at UMass, but everywhere) spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. Figuring out what to read for fields is one of those areas. I'm doing three fields in the next year, the other two reading lists will go up in the next few days on radicalhistory.net, which I've just acquired. I'd love to see what other people are reading, and what they think about what they're reading. So, I'm putting my titles and thoughts out there...
Seems to me, we PhD students (not only at UMass, but everywhere) spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel. Figuring out what to read for fields is one of those areas. I'm doing three fields in the next year, the other two reading lists will go up in the next few days on radicalhistory.net, which I've just acquired. I'd love to see what other people are reading, and what they think about what they're reading. So, I'm putting my titles and thoughts out there...
Fruits of Philosophy, 1836
12/16/2009 20:44
Maps!
12/04/2009 23:04
Maps, maps, maps. I love ‘em! Always have, since I was a kid -- A.E. Van Vogt notwithstanding (couldn't help the geeky reference to “Null-A” novels that stress the general semantics notion that “the map is not the territory”).
The various measuring authorities in the government (USDA’s ERS, the Census Bureau, the Statistical Abstract, etc.) have been working the last few years to redefine urban and rural. More on that later, but for the time being, the point is that they’ve introduced these things called “core-based” units. All the good measurements are done on a county-by-county basis, so the units are counties where there’s a “metropolitan” core population of at least 50,000. Or a “micropolitan” core of 10,000. From that, they create “combined statistical areas” that consist of a “core” and its feeder areas, tied to it by easy commuting routes to work, markets, etc. The result is a map that looks like this:
The purples are the combined statistical areas (CSAs). These are the cities and large towns it’s easy to call urban, and the surrounding counties that may look rural, but are economically tied to these centers. There are also cities and towns outside the CSAs. In Minnesota, for example, Duluth and Mankato (pop.s around 85,000 and 45,000, respectively) are not parts of CSAs. So it’s going to take some thinking to sort this all out.
But in the meantime, there are more colorful maps to look at! The fact that some of them contradict each other only adds to the fun!
This one, produced by the University of Illinois Regional Economics and Public Policy Group (REAP), suggests that over 300 rural counties are “more prosperous” than the national average. That’s interesting, and warrants a close look at the article backing up the map.
This next one, from the Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank, claims “Rural areas across the country generally have seen more growth in employment than have cities.” But the map tells a different story. The “Growth” they’re talking about is actually a slightly smaller DECLINE in rural employment relative to urban employment in some areas. Hardly the happy news advertised in the headline. Especially since there are FEWER JOBS in rural areas, so you’d expect less decline. Or am I missing something?
And here’s one last map for today, to dispel any lingering doubts about how peachy the economy looks in the country. The New York Times built this map showing the increase in people receiving Food Stamps in each U.S. county. 14.6% of rural residents use Food Stamps (vs. 10.8% of urban folks). From 2007 to 2009, the number of people using Food Stamps rose by about 30%, although in many places, only half of those who qualify are actually getting Food Stamps. The cool thing about the NYT map is that you can drag your cursor over it, and the statistics for each county will pop up. It’s SCARY. Good job, NYT.
The various measuring authorities in the government (USDA’s ERS, the Census Bureau, the Statistical Abstract, etc.) have been working the last few years to redefine urban and rural. More on that later, but for the time being, the point is that they’ve introduced these things called “core-based” units. All the good measurements are done on a county-by-county basis, so the units are counties where there’s a “metropolitan” core population of at least 50,000. Or a “micropolitan” core of 10,000. From that, they create “combined statistical areas” that consist of a “core” and its feeder areas, tied to it by easy commuting routes to work, markets, etc. The result is a map that looks like this:
But in the meantime, there are more colorful maps to look at! The fact that some of them contradict each other only adds to the fun!
Rural People's Thoughts?
12/03/2009 14:48
So I’m looking at the first couple of pages of Wendell Berry’s The Unsettling of America. Yeah, I know I should really be reading student papers or writing one of my two final papers for this semester. But I was curious. This is one of the books everyone in Environmental History mentions, like Raymond Williams The Country and the City (which I also bought this semester, and haven’t read yet).
In any case, Berry starts strong, claiming “as a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be.” Berry compares the conquistadors’ conquest of America with America’s conquest of the moon; both filled with fantasy and avarice he says. But clearly there’s a difference.
An imperial technocratic bureaucracy sent two men to the surface of the moon in 1969. Although I remember the excitement and sheer adventure of this event, and myself sitting in front of a black-and-white TV explaining the technical details to my grandmother, that’s what it was. But not so much, the missions to the New World in the seventeenth century.
It took a lot of people to sail ships and establish colonies in the Americas. Doesn’t seem as easy, to say they all shared the motivations of the leaders. And even the leaders – what were their actual motivations? Even Cortes and Pizarro settled down, and became mayors of the towns they established. Cortes burned his ships; a pretty definite statement for a twenty-something young man to make about the old world and home.
In the north, where people came to start commercial agricultural colonies (Virginia) or religious communities (Massachusetts, Maryland), I have to wonder about the goals of the majority. Even for the Puritans, were they perhaps motivated just a little by the fact that there were limited opportunities back home? Even if we believe they were completely open about their own motives, are we to take the professed goals of colonist leaders as the reason everybody came to America?
If not, how do we get at the motivations and thoughts of the majority? The folks who in large numbers became the same rural people whose wishes and needs go largely ignored in the agri-business dominated countryside Berry is going to talk about throughout the book? Yesterday I was reading the beginning chapters of David Danbom’s Resisted Revolution. He was talking about the same thing: an “urban agrarian” agenda that motivated the Progressives’ Country Life Movement. So, it looks like this question of “what do rural people really think?” is going to be a recurring one.
Also this week, we talked about Rachel Carson in Environmental History. And again, on the drive home, I found myself wondering, how did actual farmers and country people react to this? Was it just a suburban-ecologists vs. urban-agrocorporate chemists type of thing?
(cross-posted on my rural history blog)
In any case, Berry starts strong, claiming “as a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be.” Berry compares the conquistadors’ conquest of America with America’s conquest of the moon; both filled with fantasy and avarice he says. But clearly there’s a difference.
An imperial technocratic bureaucracy sent two men to the surface of the moon in 1969. Although I remember the excitement and sheer adventure of this event, and myself sitting in front of a black-and-white TV explaining the technical details to my grandmother, that’s what it was. But not so much, the missions to the New World in the seventeenth century.
It took a lot of people to sail ships and establish colonies in the Americas. Doesn’t seem as easy, to say they all shared the motivations of the leaders. And even the leaders – what were their actual motivations? Even Cortes and Pizarro settled down, and became mayors of the towns they established. Cortes burned his ships; a pretty definite statement for a twenty-something young man to make about the old world and home.
In the north, where people came to start commercial agricultural colonies (Virginia) or religious communities (Massachusetts, Maryland), I have to wonder about the goals of the majority. Even for the Puritans, were they perhaps motivated just a little by the fact that there were limited opportunities back home? Even if we believe they were completely open about their own motives, are we to take the professed goals of colonist leaders as the reason everybody came to America?
If not, how do we get at the motivations and thoughts of the majority? The folks who in large numbers became the same rural people whose wishes and needs go largely ignored in the agri-business dominated countryside Berry is going to talk about throughout the book? Yesterday I was reading the beginning chapters of David Danbom’s Resisted Revolution. He was talking about the same thing: an “urban agrarian” agenda that motivated the Progressives’ Country Life Movement. So, it looks like this question of “what do rural people really think?” is going to be a recurring one.
Also this week, we talked about Rachel Carson in Environmental History. And again, on the drive home, I found myself wondering, how did actual farmers and country people react to this? Was it just a suburban-ecologists vs. urban-agrocorporate chemists type of thing?
(cross-posted on my rural history blog)
