10 Wednesday Sep 2008
Posted in my historian hat
God, I miss the West Wing.
I’m doing an exercise with the undergraduates in History 100 this Thursday to help them think about using maps as historical sources. As an introduction to my little preliminary talk, I plan to show them one of my favorite clips from The West Wing (Season 2; Episode 16). Thanks YouTube for having just what my geeky little heart desired!
27 Wednesday Aug 2008
Posted in my historian hat
Yesterday was the 88th anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment (giving women in the United States the right to elective franchise). Aside from making my usual recommendation that everyone watch (and tear up over) Iron Jawed Angels, I offer a couple of blog posts that came across my RSS feed.
Jessica, at Feministing, opened a comment thread yesterday for readers to share the stories of the first time they voted. Lots of fun — and occasionally painful — reminiscences there!
Amanda Marcotte, over at Pandagon, covers the appearance of anti-choice protesters who turned up at a rally to celebrate women’s suffrage. “I mean,” she writes, “if you can buy that not getting pregnant in the first place is actually an abortion, then why not expand the definition even further to start chipping away at other feminist gains and ideas?”:
Check out the rest of the post, and then go curl up and watch Alice Paul & company stick it to the man. Or, if you’re in a literary frame of mind, read journalist Doris Stevens’ Jailed for Freedom, which is the first-person account of the latter years of the suffrage campaign on which the film drew heavily.
*and the photograph above is of my friend Edith, dressed as Alice Paul, at the 85th anniversary celebrations in Crawfordsville, Indiana (2005).
16 Monday Jun 2008
Posted in my historian hat
Hi all! I flew in to Boston’s Logan airport at 12:10 this morning, after long delays in the Chicago O’Hare airport on my way home from the 14th Annual Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. The conference was at the University of Minnesota (U of M to the locals although to this Michigander that abbreviation only means one thing). It was a beautiful weekend and the campus–which spans the Mississippi River in the twin cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul–was a stunning location, particularly coming as many of us did from the first sweltering heat wave of the East Coast summer. The building on the left is the Weisman Art Museum, designed by (who would have guessed?) architect Frank Gehry, and perched on the high Eastern bank of the river.
I attended a number of awesome roundtable discussions and seminars, including one on the history of childhood and youth (“Childhood as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis”), one on 1970s popular culture and gender, and one on the history of lesbian and gay families in the 20th century. I also got a chance to catch up with my undergraduate adviser, and enjoyed dinner in Dinkytown with my current program adviser. I even managed to wedge in a visit to the campus bookstore!
The conference gave me some good ideas about possible directions in which to take my thesis research–whichever body of primary sources I end up using, I will certainly be focusing on ideas of experimental education and educational theory (pedagogy) in the mid-twentieth century (1960s and 70s). I am interested in the relationship between new educational practices and political movements such as feminism, environmentalism, peace activism, and radicalism on both the left and the right. Home education is, of course, one form of this experimental education. There are some others–including early women’s studies programs and the Oregon Extension program I attended as an undergraduate–that might also provide fruitful material to explore.
As much as I am resistant to formal academic environments, I can’t deny that it is encouraging and exciting to be around such incredible group of (largely women) scholars who are all researching thought-provoking topics in women’s and gender history. I was honored to have the opportunity to absorb their conversations and look forward to a time when I might more actively participate in the same.
17 Saturday Nov 2007
Posted in my historian hat
I am working on a paper right now on the educational philosophy and practice in the utopian Oneida Community, which existed in New York state from 1848-1881 as a religious commune and continues to this day as a company manufacturing housewares. As part of this research, I visited Boston College’s O’Neill library, which has a microfiche collection of the community’s newspaper, the Oneida Circular. Microfiche is a pain to read–I have been known to get both migraine headaches and severely motion sickness–but the content it enables researchers access to is often excessively diverting.
The Circular functioned as both a venue for the community to evangelize to an external audience and as sort of community newsletter. They seem to have freely culled news items from other publications, usually unattributed, and also share miscellany from the life of the community, such as a note that “the wheat that was stored in the can-shop is nearly all saved, and but slightly injured” (1). Here are some oddments that I discovered while in the midst of “serious” research.
A large lithographic “View of the First American Railway Train” is on exhibition in the Library. It shows simply a line of old-fashioned stage-coach bodies connected together, and placed on car-wheels. Each vehicle contains six solid-looking gentlemen with stove-pipe hats; and their sharp noses and chins are all after the same pattern. The brakeman sits comfortably on the driver’s seat with an iron lever in his hands (2).
Seneca Lake is frozen over and people skate from one end to the other. This has never happened before within the memory of white men (3).
Answers to correspondence: “J. Y., Rochester, N.Y.–We should probably have to deny your request for admission as we are full. In any case, very much more acquaintance with you would be necessary. Our Community is not of the nature of a cooperative union, but of a church.” (4).
[The] cuttle-fish of the European coast are dwarfed by comparison with some from the coast of Newfoundland. In the American Journal of Science and Art for Feb., Prof. Verrill gives an account of a specimen which became entangled in herring-nets near St. John’s, Newfoundland, and was secured after a severe battle. The body was nearly seven feet long with eight arms covered with suckers each six feet in length . . . (5).
We feel warrented in advocating romping girls. They seldom fail to make healthy, happy, useful and not un-refined women. Do let us have more of them! (6)
Notes:
(1) 1 March 1875, p. 69
(2) 1 March 1875, p. 70
(3) 1 March 1875, p. 72
(4) Ibid.
(5) Ibid.
(6) 1 March 1875, p. 70
Image found at the Oneida Community Mansion House website.
05 Monday Nov 2007
Posted in my historian hat
I was first introduced to Guy Fawkes Day as a child by the immortal author E. Nesbit in The Phoenix and the Carpet:
It began with the day when it was almost the Fifth of November, and a doubt arose in some breast–Robert’s, I fancy–as to the quality of the fireworks laid in for the Guy Fawkes celebration . . .
Thus, Guy Fawkes will always, in my mind, be associated with magic carpets and imperious, mythical fowl. However, I thought I rather owed it to my profession to be a bit more informed about the actual history that gave rise to the holiday–a spot of unpleasantness, I gather, involving a failed attempt to overthrow the British government, as memorialized in this rhyme:
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot,
I know of no reason
Why Gunpowder Treason
Should ever be forgot.
So, tonight, my friend Jeremy and I are going from work to the Old State House downtown, where the Bostonian Society is hosting a scholarly lecture on “Bonfires, Effigies, and Brawls: Colonial Boston Celebrates Guy Fawkes Day.” You can check out their online exhibit right here on blogspot. Sadly, we doubt that any actual bonfires, effigies, or brawls will be in evidence. . . perhaps we will have to foment a rebellion ourselves?
the feminist librarian 