Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

I found my way to this topic via a peculiar trajectory that began along the Cam under the tutelage of Quentin Skinner, where the distinction between classical republican virtù and protestant Christian virtue first entered my consciousness.  The hybridized virtù(e) that filled the political treatises of the American Revolution/War for Independence fascinated me but were not the centerpiece of my doctoral research.  When I returned to Jane Austen as my entertainment while my second son nursed, I realized that the hybridization process took place on the pages of Miss Austen’s novels.

The historiography of the American Revolution nearly drowns in examinations of Republican motherhood and patricidal rage. Austen’s heroines need not kill their fathers. They are already dead (Sense & Sensibility) or emasculated by poverty (Pride & Prejudice, Northanger Abbey, Mansfield Park), frailty (Emma), and vanity (Persuasion).  It takes little imagination to envision Elinor Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, Catherine Moreland, Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot as the republican mothers of a future generation.  In attributes they share much with the ultimate Republican mother as proven in her dual role as the United States’ first wife and mother to (failed) Presidents, Abigail Adams.  They can hold their own in discussions of the lofty but are unafraid to engage in the lowly. Think of Abigail Adams mopping her floors with vinegar while her many children lay sick, and Anne Elliot caring for her injured nephew while his squeamish mother tends to her own nerves not his physical needs.  When the virtùous Captain and Mrs. Wentworth set sail, I suspect their destination is the new republic on the other side of the Atlantic.

Thomas Jefferson obsessed over virtù(e) and corruption in both the public and private spheres.  Jefferson is remembered for his assiduous adherence to the necessity of landholding independence as a prerequisite for political virtù. He never deigned to fight in the colonies-cum-new republic’s wars though famously wrote on the worth of blood spilled for a virtùous cause.   He is also remembered for his utter lapse in private virtue, bedding but never wedding a woman he considered his racial inferior.   Jefferson was a last gasp of  this double standard in the Americas.  The widow’s of New Jersey had already become the first in Atlantic world to cast their votes in a simultaneous demonstration of both their virtù(e)s. 

Finally, I beg leave to indulge in some Whiggish analysis and imagine that William Jefferson Clinton’s presidency would have been very different indeed  had Americans not come to accept Jane Austen’s definition of hybridized virtù(e) and applied it to men and women alike.

____________

Sources: Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic; Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters; and Jay Fleigelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims.

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

I am as giddy as a child at the prospect of a snow day. Others fret about climate change when they see -40 windchills on the weather and can’t push the door open into a snowdrift. I think about Laura Ingalls

Laura Ingalls Wilder

Wilder’s memoirs and relish the prospect of stoking the fires of memory and imagination.

Wilder’s books sparked my early interest in the past. Some of Wilder’s tales seemed similar to my own grandmother’s recollections of learning and teaching in a one room school house. My grandmother had a comparatively stable life on a comparatively prosperous farm in Illinois.  Laura followed Pa Ingalls from Wisconsin West in a series of tentative land claims. My mother read the stories aloud at bedtime. My father would pass through and groan every time Pa uprooted his family and chased further west in pursuit of a half-baked dream. I didn’t need the New Yorker to tell me Pa Ingalls was not the saint his daughter imagined him to be.  Even as a child, I couldn’t stomach the television version of Wilder's tales. Michael Landon’s Pa was so angelic that the actor needed no adaptation to his performance when he moved on to play an angel in Highway to Heaven. I craved the bits of terrifying realism that remained in the prose and faded from the screen.

My favorite moments in the memoirs involved the Ingalls family hunkered down for fearsome but intimate winters. Little House in the Big Woods featured maple syrup drizzled on snow cakes that still make my mouth water. Little House on the Prairie offered the enduring image of Mr. Edwards making in through a blizzard to deliver Santa’s gifts to the Ingalls girls. During the heavy snows of the last week in Chicago, I have thought often of how Pa strung a rope between the house and the barn so he could find his way between them in a white out. I don’t need a rope quite yet, but I am glad no animals need feeding in my garage.

As my family gathers round the fire to wait out a negative forty-four degree windchill, I imagine the Ingall’s envy at our well-insulated walls and well-stocked pantry. We don’t need Almazo to save us from starvation during The Long Winter. I’m fortunate not only compared to Laura but compared to most of humanity past and present. I know that. A snow day drives that home.

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

Thanks to a series of Teagle Teaching Workshops at Northwestern, the executive director of the American Historical Association, Jim Grossman, gave a lecture on “Historical Thinking and Public Culture.” Much of what he said hearkened to conversations I had at the Historical Society’s 2012 conference "Popularizing Historical Knowledge: Practice, Prospects, and Perils." As Jim said, we know people like history. The History Channel, thousands of reenactors, and millions of genealogists indicate a thirst for knowledge of the past. Derision of such historical fancy keeps doctoral candidates clothed in a veil of superiority while their bank balances dwindle. Grossman suggested a revolutionary shift in academic historical thought: dispense with the patronizing judgment and listen to what people want to learn.

The lesson holds for the undergraduate classroom. Faculty ask one another, “what are you teaching?” Grossman suggests we end the obsession with our own performances at the front of class and focus upon what the students at the back learned. While teaching and learning have a symbiotic relationship, the shift of emphasis from professor to listener signals a broader embrace of history’s public value. The nuances of Foucauldian analysis may help the professor frame his or her argument, but if every iPhone in the lecture hall sends out a frantic  “wtf?” we have lost the pedagogical point.

Few undergraduates seek to join the professoriate. All but a few desire paid employment. Grossman would not suggest that we shut our doors and send our students across campus to become computer programmers. However, we owe our history majors the language with which to market themselves upon graduation. Messiah College’s John Fea makes a noble effort in his blog series, “So What CAN You Do With a History Major?” Until every historian commits to explain the value of historical thinking, parents and politicians will direct students away from the classes possessed of the power to make them empathic progeny and conscientious citizens.

So then, what does Jim Grossman think history has to offer John and Jane Q. Public? The contingency and complexity of the human experience. Every medical professional takes a patient history, but how many understand the art of the open-ended question or the capacity for a written document to contain multiple truths? Academic historians sneer at biographers, but nothing sells better than a book with a president (or his wife) on the cover. The myths that undermine popular conceptions of the past emerge from these tomes. What if history classes taught students to compose biographies based upon a messy past in which the subject is but one actor with limited agency and tackled the linear hagiographies lining airport shelves within ivy-covered halls?

History doctoral programs posit law schools as their perpetual rivals. Grossman confronted a paneled room filled with professors and would-be-professors with a painful truth. Historians slander law schools as “vocational,” but law graduates take their skills and apply them in myriad occupations outside the law. Doctoral programs in history train their students to become one thing, professors. Who looks vocational now? 

Historians also like to slander lawyers as unethical, but Grossman argues that Ph.D. programs have become intellectual ponzi schemes. Universities constantly expand the number of graduate student TAs who “sell” history to undergraduates although they will never reap the rewards of tenure, because the removal of a retirement age depleted the lines available. Ethics demand early, repeated, reality checks. Tell graduate students that tenured jobs at R1 universities are as rare as positions in the NBA. We know that every child with a great playground jump shot cannot become Michael Jordan; neither can every brilliant young scholar become Natalie Zemon Davis. 

Furthermore, that brilliant young scholar might prefer to avoid the life of multiple moves and long-distance relationships nigh-on inherent to a lofty academic career. Grossman shared a study that concluded that historians outside the academy are happier than those within it. Commitment to a life of the mind ought not be mutually exclusive with commitment to a physical community. Early introduction to the options that may resolve the tensions between such commitments would remove the secrecy and shame associated with the pursuit of positions off the tenure track. Because I work outside a given department, my office often serves as the “safe space” in which to discuss the desire to stay with another person or in a particular geographic region rather than to travel wherever a tenure line might take an end-stage dissertator. The anxiety associated with such decisions undermines students’ job searches in all arenas. 

I suspect if we could borrow Rawls’s veil of ignorance and place it over the tenured and chaired advisers who direct dissertations, they would offer greater empathy toward their advisees’ plight. Those who won the academic lottery sometimes forget that their success came from luck in addition to ability. Grossman reminded skeptics from his audience of a friend who got an offer from an illustrious Ivy on the same day he received a rejection from a regional university. Now, what if that friend had no desire to live in New Haven, because a spouse, ailing parents, or children loved their environs elsewhere? 

Proper pedagogy prepares people to make difficult personal and professional decisions. Historical thinking helps in that task. To my mind, we cannot take Grossman's advice and move our ideas and ourselves beyond the cloister known as tenure too soon.

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe


In my job as a fellowships advisor I stress to applicants that a strong application demonstrates three things: depth of expertise in a given field; breadth of interests and experiences; and the applicant’s change over time, i.e. history. The third pillar of the triad constitutes the all-important biographical element. Americans' hunger for personal history makes Ancestry.com’s stockholders rich and guarantees the flood of genealogists to the shores of Salt Lake.

The Ball family of Lompoc, California, ca. 1894.

My sons started high school and middle school at the end of August. As I delivered my nearly­ men to the doors of their new institutions, my desire to make history from memory overwhelmed me. The hundreds of digital images stored on the family computer cried out for a chronology with which to capture the evolution of my chubby-­cheeked chappies into the skinny tweens who seek escape from their mother’s needy embrace.

My compulsion has since produced three photo­books, and I am at work on two more. My mother used to assemble such tomes from the fragile prints of an earlier age. My photo­books exist in a cyber “cloud” as well as on my coffee table. My ability to shape the past into the form I like resembles the easier editing now accessible to authors of all history books. While David Hume wrote by hand and Oscar Handlin clattered at a keyboard, post­modern respondents to Clio’s call can, in a matter of seconds, place images on pages and produce flourishes that only the most able medieval monks could make over many days.

I love it.

The same woman who sat resentfully in archives and waited for genealogists to get off the microfilm machine so she could do her “real” research now neglects 18th-century documents for 21st-century snapshots. This history is my most real. I lived it. I interpret it for my own progeny. My intimate ties to my family finally managed to outstrip my intellectual engagement with the past.

Change over time dominates a narrative in which few words appear. Twenty pages of pictures are equivalent to a tome like Albion’s Seed. The calculus premised on one picture bearing the same value as one thousand words integrates images into narratives with frightening speed. The Halloween and Christmas albums bring back my sons’ obsessions with Thomas the Tank Engine and Star Wars that seemed interminable in the moment but flashed by faster than Lightning McQueen in retrospect. The backdrops document home improvements and gardening experiments since forgotten. Relationships morph from page to page as erstwhile trick­-or-­treaters move away, children grow, and grown­ups go gray.

I relish the lifeways of past peoples when a fine historian like David Hackett Fischer resurrects them for his readers. I revel in remembering the lifeways of my own little family in myriad private moments and wonder if any historian not yet born could relay them to strangers on our behalf. All the elements exist: the depth of our affection, the breadth of our interests, and their evolution over time. One day my sons might make lovely fellowship applications from the raw materials of their shared past. Could anyone else? Would I want them to try?

The final question frightens this historian, who puts the personal tragedies of the long dead into public view. When I assemble an album, have I issued an invitation or proven the impossibility of my profession?

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

"Length of the average dissertation," from FlowData.

This chart initiated a round of chest thumping by academic historians. Apparently we historians write the longest dissertations. Now, according to this chart, philosophers and classicists do not write dissertations, when in fact they do. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume the chart is correct. What does it tell us about historians? Either we do more research than scholars in any other field (unlikely from my interdisciplinary vantage point), or we are less able to articulate our findings in a pithy manner than our colleagues in other departments on campus.

When I made a snide remark about length on Facebook, my historian friends jumped to the defense of 325 page dissertations as the necessary length for a monograph. Other fields publish articles rather than books. Thus, the argument went, they can get away with less. This perplexed me. A doctoral dissertation no matter the field should demonstrate an original contribution to knowledge, right?

Last time I checked, one can’t measure originality with a ruler or a word count. The Encyclopedia Britannica used to fill rows of shelves, but it contained less innovation than the napkin upon which
Watson and Crick drew the double helix. I am a fan of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws. It makes a mighty doorstop as well as an excellent overview of 18th-century political theory, but Madison’s concise constitution brought bigger results in fewer words.

Historians have never been certain whether we rank among humanists or social scientists. Do we weave tales or devise algorithms from the infinite human variables hidden in the past? Is our fundamental task to describe the human experience or analyze it? If the former, no wonder we run on so long. The infinite permutations of personal experience stand at odds with the virtues of pithy prose. We forgive Dickens and Dostoevsky their length for this reason, but should they serve as historians’ role models? According to the chart, anthropologists, whose ethnographic methodologies hinge upon description, nip at historians’ lengthy heels. Einstein captured rather a lot with E=MC2, that’s why mathematicians and physicists come in comfortably under 200 words.

I think most historians have had the experience of reading a brilliant, incisive essay in a journal or collected volume then trudged through the book that expanded the same analysis from 30 to 300 plus pages. The extra examples and paths through the past make us fall in love with our own research, but how many of our readers—even other historians—care?

A few days before the dissertation chart made the internet rounds, Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellow George Saunders spoke about his artistic practice as a short story writer on my campus. Years ago, I read Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies followed by The Namesake. Each of her short stories in the former Pulitzer-Prize-winning collection established a cast of characters, or—if you will—derived an equation constituted of characters as complex as that in the later novel. The novel (begun as a novella) attempted to propel the characters through a narrative/solve the equation with less critical acclaim. My equation analogy for Lahiri’s work came to mind as Saunders described his education as an engineer and his thrill when he takes ten pages and pares them down to one page of perfect prose. I tell my students to think of one page essays as a reduction sauce. Simmer off the excess and leave me with pure flavor. Like a good engineer who seeks to solve a problem, simplify the equation.

Saunders noted that novelists make more money than writers of short stories. Historical essayists such as John Murrin and Bob Scribner never earn the royalties garnered by Gordon Wood or Stephen Ozment, let alone journalists cum historians David McCollough or Barbara Tuchman. Do historians seek an added intellectual value in books or a shot at big bucks and the ultimate money-earner, a movie? These books and films definitely reach a wider audience outside the classroom, but do they convey as much useful information as a tightly argued article assigned in an undergraduate seminar? Size clearly matters, but why and how?

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe

On my first day as a brand new assistant professor a student came up to me, introduced himself, and announced, “I am a visual learner.” The class was a reading and writing intensive freshman seminar with a predetermined syllabus. I knew we had a problem, but I had limited agency to remedy the situation. 

This year I decided to see if I could match my long-since graduated student’s need for visual stimulus with my own desire to make students delve deep into the documents that reveal the mental landscape of the past. I integrated video presentations into the middle portion of each three-hour seminar.

The visual interlude fixed one pedagogical problem and revealed another. Although academic historians of colonial America know that all the world was not New England, word has yet to reach the filmmakers. Three Sovereigns for Sarah captures Salem’s witchcraft crisis and Mary Silliman’s War strips the romantic Revolutionary myths away from a tense civil war in Connecticut. When I wished to illuminate my own area of expertise, the colonial mid-Atlantic, I came up short. No film of which I am aware follows Conrad Weiser through Penn’s Woods or brings to life the ascetic world of the Ephrata Cloister. In the realm of video pedagogy,  the years between witches and independence and the geography between Puritans and plantations cease to exist. 

New England’s comparative simplicity garners it a disproportionate amount of attention. The Pilgrims and Paul Revere bookend schoolchildren’s understanding of colonial history, with a brief pause for the horrors of Salem and slavery. Thus our politicians and the voters who elect them imagine a past of Protestant purity marred by slavery and superstition. Historians seek to disabuse students of this dangerous misperception. However, in a visual age, we need the assistance of historical films.

No doubt, my plea to move beyond New England in a blog from Boston seems strange.  I suspect that it requires the Puritans’ descendants to call for an expansion of the past beyond the Hudson. A clarion call from Harvard Square to the monied classes with expensive cameras might just do the trick.