UMass
Year One
05/03/2010 21:40
I’ll be reading some of the US History titles with a couple of other people in the program who are doing American fields. That’ll be fun. And I’m trying to do this reading in parallel with my research, because I think the two processes complement each other. But I’m not saying much about the dissertation/book until it’s pretty much done and sold...which I’ve gotta say, feels unnatural. But is probably the prudent way to go. Write, but don’t post. Weird.
My favorite popular history
02/10/2010 08:33
My nomination is Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. This was the first book I read that got me interested in doing history (the other one was an SF novel). I remember being surprised by the stridency, but really intrigued by all the doors he opened to events and people who I’d never heard of before. I thought, “okay, even if some of this is over the top, there’s a lot here! Why hasn’t anyone ever said anything about this stuff before?”
Looking back on it after reading more popular history, I think Zinn does a pretty good job with the facts, and a pretty good job with the narrative. And he doesn’t necessarily go for the simple “heroes and villians” characterization. For example:
“The complexity of Populist belief was shown in one of its important leaders in Texas, Charles Macune. He was a radical in economics (antitrust, anticapitalist), a conservative in politics (against a new party independent of the Democrats), and a racist.”
Zinn can easily be faulted for telling only one side of the story. I’ve been listening to two audiobooks this week on my drives (to AAS). One is Matt Damon narrating Zinn’s excerpt on the 20th century. As I’m listening to the civil rights story, what strikes me is how surprising it is, in the face of little girls getting blown up in churches, that blacks in the South didn’t grab the guns and gas cans. Zinn’s style in this section is understated but suggestive. And his foreword, where he says it’s not about projecting our anger into the past, but using it to change the present/future, is cool.
The other audiobook I’ve been listening to is Joseph Ellis‘ Founding Brothers. I’ve only listened to the (really long) introduction and the chapter on Burr and Hamilton, so maybe it changes. So far, I find myself thinking, “he’s deliberately making this into an academic exercise, to make it as irrelevant as possible to my life.” The language and the professorial narrative intrusion are a real turn-off to me. And, if anything, the stories seem less real than Zinn’s. Ellis’ embellishments (the heavy fog on the still water as Burr and Hamilton are being rowed across the Hudson) are novelistic -- but from the type of novel I’d never read. A Bulwer-Lytton “it was a dark and stormy night” type of thing, with lots of adverbs. Several times I found myself thinking, “you couldn’t possibly know that.” Maybe these things are documented in someone’s journal -- seems like the author would want to say so, unless he’s so convinced of his narrative authority he expects the reader to believe anything he says.
That’s the difference for me, I guess, between Zinn and Ellis. Even if the perspective is radical, Zinn at least talks about his sources. Note to self...
Week 1
01/23/2010 09:12
I read a couple of anthologies over the last several days. Didn’t need to read everything in them, but I found several really good articles. It’s helpful, the way articles make the author distill it down into the point s/he thinks most important. Pointed me to a couple of historians I hadn’t known before. And, it’s interesting how the need to move quickly forces authors to make theoretical assumptions that reveal their underlying philosophy, maybe more than they would in a book-length work. I really don’t like the articles that claim a lot without evidence -- even if the author has already been over that ground in a book. It just seems too arbitrary. I’ll have to keep that in mind when I write. Even for the general public -- I think they need to see (and maybe be reminded) that authorial claims need to be supported by data and interpretation.
I hesitate to double-post some of the “reviews” I’m writing of these books, even if they seem to fit in both the rural and radical slots. Maybe that goes back to my personal history, in the computer biz when entire systems contained less memory than some of the web-pages I have up there! But it’s good (for me) that a lot of these readings seem to have something to tell me about the development of radicalism in America and the history or mythology of the country. This week, the “Jeffersonian agrarian” myth is especially prominent. Christopher Hill provides what is for me almost an ancient history background, but which seems to lead directly to Benjamin Franklin (I also listened to an audio-book of Walter Isaacson’s biography). The Davis anthology had clues about people in the Revolution and early Republic I should look into. Barron’s classic study of those who stayed behind is a reminder to me about setting and characters. And the contrast between Kulikoff and Taylor in Young was instructive. I’m going to read them both.
One week in...
09/14/2009 05:57
I volunteered to read an extra book in my Environmental History seminar, because I’d already read the assigned book. This additional book is a challenge – in the sense that I have a lot of critical things I want to say about it, and it’s a challenge, finding constructive (or at least not flagrantly nasty) ways of saying them. The author is alive and teaching in a major Env. History program, so I’m not going to put the notes I’ve taken so far onto my “reading” blog unedited. But I’m not going to say nothing…
Having my first planning meeting with the Prof. on the class I’m TAing. Will be interesting to see how much he wants to direct the process, and how much rope he gives us to run the sections. I wonder what I’d want to do, if I was the Prof.?
This afternoon’s “boot camp” seminar is going to be discussing two texts I read (and blogged) weeks ago. I’ll revisit them in a couple of hours, and see if there’s anything I want to add. Or subtract. I’ve talked to a couple of people about these readings – I’m curious what type of range of responses we’ll get in this group. The class is made up of all the incoming grad students, so it’s going to be big and diverse, relative to most grad seminars.
So far, I haven’t felt like I’m not going to be able to stay ahead of the reading or do the level of surrounding work I like to do. But I’m not doing a research project this semester, either.
UMass then and now
06/09/2009 20:38
I’m sure there’ll be other differences, but here’s one for a start:
UMass Library
05/07/2009 17:44
When I put up the Darwins page (maybe tonight), I should make a list of the towns, in addition to the map. With population figures from around 1800. Seems like the Darwins are from small, newer towns, generally in the western part of the state. As I was looking in the Vital Records today (page by page, because I’ve already done the easy ones that are online and can be searched), it seemed to me that if there were lots of really old-fashioned sounding biblical names, I was pretty certain NOT to find a Darwin. There were also a few other people who had a lot of kids named for them. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Clay, Luther, Wilberforce, etc. It might be interesting to try to correlate the Darwins with politics, demographics, Shaysite (as in Daniel Shays) towns, etc.
Oh, that’s the view out the 14th floor window I was sitting next to, and the Fit got better than 40 mpg.
