Heather Cox Richardson

Pundits have sunk their teeth into a fight recently over whether or not Santa was white. After Fox News commentator Megyn Kelly declared Santa’s whiteness was a given, some called up the history of the original St. Nicholas (the patron saint of scholars, as well as children, by the way) to point out that the historical figure was Greek and therefore probably not light-skinned. Others have responded by noting that “Santa” is a universal and timeless figure who should not be bound by any physical characteristics.

But there is a different story worth noting in this odd debate. In fact, America has its own, very specific version of “Santa” who arrived during a particular moment in American history. That moment was the 1880s, a time when the nation appeared to be reaching some kind of healing after the deep wounds of the Civil War.

By the 1880s, Americans North, South, and West, had reached a political equilibrium, and that calm appeared to be driving a healthy economy. Politicians had ceased to fight over reconstruction. Northerners had come to accept that white Democrats would control the South; northern leaders turned to new western territories to make up the electoral votes they needed to continue to hang onto national power.

After a terrible financial crash in 1873, the economy had begun to pick up again by 1878, and by 1880, Americans were feeling flush and optimistic again. They began to celebrate significant events with parties and gifts. Weddings were no longer small affairs in someone’s front parlor; now they were elegant occasions in a decorated church with a reception afterward. For the first time, parents held parties for their child’s birthday, and those invited brought gifts for the guest of honor. Thanksgiving became a major holiday, marked with feasts of turkeys, ducks, or geese.

Nothing showed this change more clearly than the arrival in 1881 of cartoonist Thomas Nast’s iconic Santa. Printed in Harper’s Weekly before Christmas that year, the image was one of American prosperity. Santa was fat, warmly dressed, and smiling. He carried an armful of children’s toys, including a belt with a buckle embossed with the letters “US.”

As Nast’s Santa showed, the new prosperity was uniquely American.

But the success Nast celebrated was uniquely American in a negative sense, too. It belonged only to the sort of people who read Harper’s Weekly: white, well-off, and well-represented in government. These were the nation’s new white-collar workers, middle men for the new corporations. They, and their wives and children, had more money and more time than Americans had ever had before. They had time to plan parties for their children, and to tell them stories of a well-fed man who would give them toys for Christmas—just because they were loved. These men were secure. Government economic policies guaranteed that the booming economy would continue to put money into their pockets, enabling them to continue to coddle their children (who would go on to be the first generation to go through high school and then college).

But most Americans did not share this prosperity. In the 1880s industrial factories were growing while workers fell behind. Wages dropped and working conditions deteriorated. Farmers, too, were ground into poverty as overproduction depressed the prices of farm commodities. The economic dislocation of the era was terrible for white workers and farmers, but adding racial and ethnic discrimination into the mix made the lives of most African Americans, immigrants, and Indians horrific. At the same time, Congress sternly refused to consider any policies that might help these Americans. Living in dirt poverty, working when they could, their only experience with the prosperity of the 1880s was being blamed for their inability to participate in it. There was no jolly Santa Claus to bring toys to the children of southern sharecroppers, Polish steelworkers, Chinese laundrymen, or reservation-bound Lakota and Cheyenne.

Thomas Nast’s American Santa was indeed white. But that’s not something we should celebrate.

President Grover Cleveland humiliated by the Wilson-Gorman Tariff Act.

operations, along with those of every other business, needed middle managers who could oversee production and sales and then report back to business owners. These new “white collar” workers had steady incomes and free time. They bought nice clothing and novels, and went to the theater; their wives played lawn tennis and their children had ice cream to eat and toys to play with at newfangled parties given just for them on their birthday.
People squeezed in the new economy resented the fact that tariffs kept prices artificially high. It didn’t seem fair that laws should prop up business while workers barely scraped by on pennies and industrialists like J. D. Rockefeller and Cornelius Vanderbilt lived in mansions in New York City and built 70-room “cottages” in Newport, Rhode Island.

[Here we repost a piece on the history of Thanksgiving that originally appeared on Thursday November 25, 2010]  
Heather Cox Richardson

Anyone who cares about the history of Thanksgiving generally knows that the Pilgrims and the Wampanoags shared a feast in fall 1621, and that early American leaders periodically declared days of thanksgiving when settlers were supposed to give their thanks for continued life and—with luck—prosperity.

The following year, ahead of the many expected state proclamations, President Lincoln declared a national day of Thanksgiving. He issued his proclamation on July 15, and the relief in the document was almost palpable. After two years of disasters, the Union army was finally winning. Bloody, yes; battered, yes; but winning. At Gettysburg in early July, Union troops had sent Confederates reeling back southward. Then, on July 4, Vicksburg had finally fallen to U. S. Grant’s army. The military tide was turning.

The President invited Americans “in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands” to observe the last Thursday of November as a day of Thanksgiving.

Heather Cox Richardson

On November 19, 1863, President Lincoln spoke at the dedication of a national cemetery at Gettysburg. When the battered armies limped out of Pennsylvania after July’s brutal fight, they left behind them more than 7000 corpses in a town with fewer than 2500 inhabitants. With the heat of a summer sun beating down, getting the dead soldiers into the ground quickly was imperative. A local lawyer urged

Lincoln at Gettysburg, about three hours before he gave his address.

Washington to establish a national cemetery in the town, where the soldiers could be interred with dignity. Officials agreed, and the lawyer planned an elaborate dedication ceremony. The organizers invited state governors, members of Congress, and cabinet members to attend. They asked prominent orator Edward Everett to deliver the keynote address. And, almost as an afterthought, they asked President Lincoln to make a few remarks. While they probably thought he would not attend, or that if he came he would simply mouth a few platitudes and sit down, President Lincoln had something different in mind.

About 15,000 people gathered in Gettysburg for the ceremony. A program of music and prayers preceded Everett’s two-hour oration. Then, after another hymn, Lincoln got up to speak. Packed in the midst of a sea of frock coats, he began. In his high-pitched voice, he delivered a two-minute speech that redefined the nation.

President Lincoln reminded the American people what they were fighting for. He transformed into poetry the nation’s founding principles. While slave owners stood firm on the Constitution’s protection of property—including their slaves—Lincoln insisted that American stood for equality before the law. Dating the nation from the Declaration of Independence rather than the Constitution, he insisted that America was “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Lincoln’s argument was about far more than race. In his youth, Lincoln and his friends, poor men all, had seen fabulously wealthy slaveholders gain control over the government. They had shaped legislation that permitted them to make more and more money, and which took away opportunities for men just starting out. Increasingly, wealthy men insisted that their economic system, which had enabled them to amass fortunes previously unimaginable, was the right one, for most men were dull drudges who must be led by their betters. There was no point in letting them have the tools to rise, for giving them opportunities would only divert the resources rich men would use better. When slave owners overturned longstanding laws to enable them to move their economic system into the West, Lincoln believed the very fate of the nation was at stake. “[W]e are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether . . . any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”

In the late 1850s Lincoln quit his law practice and threw his lot with the Republicans, a new political party that promised to keep the American government from falling under the control of rich men. Regular people must control the government, he thought, for only they would guarantee that laws would continue to enable every man to rise. Nothing was more important, the president told his listeners at Gettysburg, than continuing to fight so that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Most northerners blessed Lincoln’s speech, but opponents howled at the idea that America stood for equality. Surely “the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, the people called Gipsies, as well as the entire race designated as blacks, people of color, negroes, mulattoes, and persons of African blood,” were not equal to white people, Lincoln’s own vice-president would later rant. Others echoed the slave owners who warned that, unless the rich controlled government, it would confiscate wealth. Poor men would want tax dollars used for schools and hospitals, and the bulk of tax money would come from wealthier members of society.

Nonetheless, Lincoln’s position was clear. “[W]e can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground,” he noted. “The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” For Lincoln, the lesson of Gettysburg was for those left behind. “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.”

Why does the Gettysburg Address still matter? With it, President Lincoln rededicated the nation to the principle of human equality, and to a government that reflected that equality by advancing the economic interests of all Americans. Now, as then, most Americans back Lincoln’s vision. And now, as then, there are those who oppose those principles for both racial and economic reasons.

Now, as then, we must grapple with the same questions Americans did in 1863: What does America stand for?

It is no fluke that Fun. used Civil War imagery in this brilliant video, or that it has had more than 86 million hits:



What do we stand for?

Heather Cox Richardson

Cartoon of Charles Guiteau by Miriam Leslie, 1881.

Today is a curious anniversary. On November 14, 1851, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick went into print. Thirty years later, November 14, 1881, was the first day of the trial of Charles Guiteau, the man who shot President James Garfield. Although at first these two events seem entirely unrelated, in fact they explored the same profound American theme: How can a society succeed when its people act according to the dictates of divine inspiration?

Melville’s Ahab cannot stop hunting the white whale, even as the quest takes the lives of his crew, his own sanity, and eventually the entire ship. Guiteau insisted that he was on a divine mission when he shot Garfield, because God wanted Garfield replaced.

The question of the relationship between God and society was central in American intellectual life in the early republic. America’s Puritan divines insisted that their followers must have a personal relationship with God, but then got around the problem of divinely inspired antisocial acts by insisting that anyone operating in unorthodox ways was conspiring not with God but with the Devil. By the antebellum years, the country’s writers—Hawthorne and Melville, especially—had picked up the theme of the tension between God and society and explored it in the emotionally charged pages of their books. In the 1850s this question exploded into politics, with leaders like William Henry Seward claiming that there was a “higher law” than the Constitution that required their allegiance.

Seward’s argument horrified Abraham Lincoln, who insisted that the nation was one of laws, and who fought the Civil War according to the Constitution. Both Lincoln’s adherence to the Constitution and the sheer carnage of the Civil War effectively ended the idea that American society could accommodate the actions of those who believed themselves divinely inspired. By the time Guiteau tried to justify his actions to a jury, he was a figure of derision and disgust.

Heather Cox Richardson

Last week the U.S. Navy began the process of salvaging the CSS Georgia. There were two Confederate ships that bore this name. One was a raider; this one was an ironclad battery moored before Savannah to protect the city. Confederates scuttled it in a channel of the Savannah River in

View from Fort Jackson of the buoy marking the wreck of the CSS Georgia.

December 1864 to keep it out of the hands of General Sherman’s advancing troops. Next year, 150 years after it went down, it will come back into daylight.

Although the CSS Georgia was placed on the National Historic Register in 1987, it had no great military significance. It might have slowed down the taking of Savannah; too slow to maneuver, it might not have. Indeed, in its twenty months of operations, the CSS Georgia never fired a shot. It shows up only rarely in records: there are no existing plans for its construction. We don’t even know how big it was; sources say anything from 150 to 250 feet long. It is barely mentioned in most histories of the Civil War. So why should anyone not deeply interested in the—admittedly very interesting—world of underwater archaeology care about this naval salvage operation?

The story of the CSS Georgia beautifully illustrates the relentless press of the modern world on even the most deeply held outmoded beliefs.

The CSS Georgia was nicknamed “The Ladies’ Ram” because Savannah women (organized as the Ladies Gunboat Association) raised much of the money to build the ship. They did so because they believed so fervently in their cause: the preservation of a slave system that had been outmoded by the modern world. They gave their all to that cause, and yet by the time the ship was launched in May 1862, the Confederacy was beginning to feel the pinch of shortages. Many of the women who had raised money for the CSS Georgia would lose their husbands and watch their children cry with hunger as the war dragged on.

Only twenty months after the women of Savannah watched the ship they had funded slide down the ways, they would hear it had been scuttled. Then, on December 22, 1864, General Sherman offered their city to President Lincoln as a Christmas gift. Within six months, the modern world would rush in. Sleepy Savannah would turn to heavy industry and the export of naval stores, joining the modern economy. In 1866 a passing ship struck the wreck of the CSS Georgia, prompting officials to mark it with a buoy. Two years later, the Treasury Department hired a contractor to dynamite the ship, gather about 80 tons of iron, and sell it in the building boom. Everyone forgot the CSS Georgia until another vessel dredging the channel for more economic expansion snagged the forgotten wreck in 1968 and tore it apart. More dredging in 1969 1970, 1974, 1982, and 1983 further damaged the site. Also in 1982, a ship dragged the USCGS buoy marking the site downstream, pulling a ten-ton anchor through it. In 1979 diving operations recovered two cannons and other ordnance from the wreck. Investigations in 2003 showed that the ship’s hull was gone. The needs of Savannah’s modern economy tore the CSS Georgia apart.

Now, finally, efforts to expand the port of Savannah for the requirements of the 21st century demand that the ship be moved once and for all.

The story of the CSS Georgia’s salvage is interesting in its own right. But I can’t help thinking of those Georgia women who raised the money to build the ship to support an outmoded way of life. Their dedication to a system that the rest of the world had left behind required tremendous sacrifice. . .and for naught. The modern world ground on, no matter what obstacles they tried to anchor in its way.

Heather Cox Richardson

The guns in Europe fell silent on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1918.

George Lawrence Price

But that was three minutes too late for Canadian Private George Lawrence Price, serving in Belgium, who was shot by a German sniper at 10:57 and died a minute later.

Ten minutes before the armistice, Price and two other men in his company had begun to search homes
from which Germans had just been firing machine guns. They found only civilians in the first two homes they searched. As they stepped back into the street, a single shot hit Price in the chest. He fell into the arms of his comrade, who pulled him back into the house they had just left. As Price died, German soldiers cleared their guns in a last burst of machine gun fire that greeted the armistice.

Price’s commanding officer was furious that the men had taken it upon themselves to search the houses, commenting “Hell of a note, to think that that would happen right when the war’s over.”

He was not the only one to note the significance of Price’s death. It came to symbolize the seemingly pointless slaughter of World War I. When an irony of history put Price in the same cemetery as the first Allied soldier to die in the war, disgusted observers commented that the war had apparently been fought over a half-mile of land.

But what about the man who shot Private Price? We do not know who he was; although Price became well known, the shooter never acknowledged his part in that final drama. He lived in anonymity. What induced him to take one last life two minutes before the end of a world war? And how did he remember that final shot?

Heather Cox Richardson

In honor of the birthday of Margaret Mitchell (November 8, 1900), I’d like to offer the very best thing to come out of Gone With the Wind: Carol Burnett’s classic spoof, entitled “Went With the Wind.” I discovered yesterday that none of my students had heard of this, and Burnett as Scarlett O’Hara in her new dress (at the beginning of Part 2) is one of the all-time greatest moments in comedic history:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Heather Cox Richardson

Grover Cleveland, by Anders Zorn, 1899.

On November 4, 1884, voters elected Grover Cleveland, the reform-minded governor of New York, to the White House. Today, people remember Cleveland primarily because he is the only president who served two non-consecutive terms. In fact, there was much more to Cleveland. He was a remarkably progressive and principled president, who tried to stop late 19th-century America from falling under the control of big business. Indeed, his opposition to the growing power of money in politics is the reason his terms were non-consecutive.

While we tend to forget it, Grover Cleveland actually captured the majority of the popular vote in 1884, 1892, and in 1888, the year he lost the election. In that year, despite a majority of about 100,000 votes, he lost to Benjamin Harrison in the Electoral College. This loss was not a random quirk of the American electoral system. Harrison’s men had been gunning for Cleveland from the day the 1884 election had been decided. Well aware that they could not win the popular vote, they focused on the Electoral College.

Their problem with Cleveland was that he was the first Democrat elected to the White House since the Civil War. That boded ill for Republican economic policies. Cleveland was very popular, not just among Democrats, but also among Republicans disillusioned with the drift of their party toward the service of the big businessmen who would soon be known as “robber barons”: J. D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Jay Gould, and their ilk. The Republican Party promoted the interests of industrialists primarily by maintaining a high protective tariff. High tariff rates on imported goods—running close to 50% of a good’s value—meant that American manufacturers could collude to monopolize domestic markets. They did, in pools and, by the 1880s, in trusts, which carved up markets and set prices.

Republicans argued that the government must protect business because a strong industrial sector created jobs and drove the economy, but plenty of Americans disagreed. The government must not privilege any economic sector, they believed, especially when that protection enabled industrialists to drive wages to rock bottom while hiking consumer prices. As Americans watched the growing contrast between the mansions at Newport and the impoverished children in coal mines, they called for government to stop promoting the interests of the wealthy and instead to level the economic playing field. Democrats took up the standard of those opposed to the trusts, but so did a number of reform Republicans.

In 1884 this combination put Cleveland into the White House after he promised to make the government more responsive to regular Americans. The key piece of his platform was a tariff reduction that would protect industry but lower the walls around industrialists so they could no longer set the prices that enabled them to amass fortunes.

Cleveland’s victory horrified big business Republicans, and they immediately began to push back against the new president’s plans by spreading pro-tariff pamphlets and editorials across the country. And yet anti-tariff sentiment grew. By 1888 Republicans were so desperate to protect the tariff that they bypassed for president the party’s leading senator, John Sherman—who was so certain of the nomination he had begun to campaign—because he had recently suggested that the tariff should be lowered in industries where it permitted the formation of monopolies. Instead of tapping Sherman, the 1888 Republican convention turned to Benjamin Harrison, who was an unremarkable politician, but was firm on the tariff.

To guarantee Harrison’s election, Republicans blanketed the nation with pro-tariff propaganda. Perhaps more to the point, they pioneered new campaign funding, which gave them the cash to swing New York, and therefore the Electoral College, to the Republican column. When Harrison piously told his campaign manager that Providence had given him the White House, the manager grumbled: “Providence hadn’t a damn thing to do with it. [A] number of men were compelled to approach the penitentiary to make him President.”

Despite winning the ballots of most Americans in 1888, President Cleveland had to pack up and move out of the White House. Before he went, he gave what he thought would be his final message to Congress on the state of the Union, warning that “corporations . . . are fast becoming the people’s masters.” Government was transferring wealth from the people to “a small but powerful minority.” Devotion to the nation and to its people had been replaced by the assumption that the government was not a device for assuring equality for all, but rather a tool to be used by the wealthy to garner economic advantage for themselves. This “arrogance” undermined the integrity of American democracy, he warned, and if it were not addressed, there would be hell to pay when regular Americans fought back.

Republicans dismissed Cleveland’s fury as sour grapes, but he was right. In 1890, voters swept Republicans out of power in the House of Representatives, and in 1892, they handed Congress and the White House to the Democrats for the first time since the Civil War.

And Cleveland moved back into the White House, the first president to serve two non-consecutive terms.

Heather Cox Richardson

For all their new applications, new technologies are also good for the old-fashioned craft of history. They are excellent for honing our writing skills.

First of all, blogging and tweeting require very low investments of professional energy. There is something daunting about starting A Book. I often panic when I face a new project, because I simply can’t remember how to begin. What do you write first? How do you set everything up? Do you write an introduction? And on and on and on. For days. Everything seems Very Important.

Andrew Sullivan, an early and influential blogger.

Blogging, though, requires none of that. It is an exercise in brevity, centered on a single idea. It is not intended to Sit On A Shelf Forever. It doesn’t have to be Brilliant. It has to get done, and done quickly. So stepping over the threshold is easy. It’s fun. It’s a good way to rev up your engines to carry into the day’s more daunting projects.

Blogging also forces your writing up several notches. It has to convey an idea clearly and, with luck, engagingly. Those are not necessarily skills professional historians practice very much. We tend to fight over arcane theories and dig so deeply into our research that we lose all but a few other specialists. Blogging forces you to distill complicated ideas into crucial points, and then to communicate those points in such a way that a nonspecialist can understand. (Twitter and texting have similar value. Never is the importance of strong verbs more clear than when tweeting. You MUST use short, powerful verbs to keep ideas within 140 characters. Don’t believe me? Follow @JoyceCarolOates.)

Blogging and tweeting also let a writer develop a personal style that is terribly hard to find in academic writing. The form is much more epistolary than academic argument, and that very informality means that much more of your own quirks come out, which can bring your online prose to life. Blogging lets you develop a sense of humor in your writing. Hell, it encourages you to.

And that is maybe the key to why blogging and tweeting are good for the historian's craft. They’re fun. They let us love what we do on a daily basis. We can play with words and new ideas without committing to them for months or years. We get to share our enthusiasms with a different audience, and learn new perspectives and get new ideas to keep our work fresh. There is a whole wide world of terrific historians out there, both in and outside of the academy, blogging about American menus, and things that show up in historical romances, and American cultural icons, and on art history, and so on across an incredible range of topics. Getting to spend time in their company is a gift.

Heather Cox Richardson

United States Department of Defense graphic in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston.

The Cuban Missile Crisis lasted for thirteen tense days in October 1962. During those days, the USSR faced off against the U.S. over the placement of Soviet missiles in Cuba. President Kennedy vowed not to permit missiles so close to America; Premier Krushchev vowed to put them in Cuba
anyway. The two week standoff was the closest the Cold War ever came to erupting into a hot war.

And with nuclear weapons widespread, it would have been a hot war, indeed.

The J.F.K. Library has put together a website that enables a viewer to experience each day of that crisis.

Heather Cox Richardson

Untenured scholars are in a funny place: that gap between the old world and the new. Ten years ago, yes, blogging would convince many senior scholars that a junior person was not a serious academic because s/he was catering to a popular audience. Since then, the old world of the academy is crumbling, and while many departments have not yet caught up, others are aware they must move into the twenty-first century.

So will blog posts and tweets hurt your career? Maybe. But they can also help your career in very practical ways.

The first has to do with publishing. The gold standard for employment and for tenure remains a published book. When most senior scholars finished their doctorates, it was almost guaranteed that their dissertations would find academic publishers. In those days, university presses had standing contracts with university libraries that guaranteed automatic sales of a few thousand copies of each monograph that came out from a reputable press. Budget cuts over the last twenty years killed this system. No longer can an academic press be certain that libraries will buy their monographs. This means that they can’t accept everything that comes over the transom, making it harder than ever to get a book contract.

But you still need one to get tenure.

One of the ways to improve your chances of landing that contract is for you to make sure you have written a book that is of wider interest than to those in your immediately area of interest, one that a press thinks it will be able to sell. How can you do that? Engage with a wider audience on-line. Listen to questions. See which of your posts get a strong response. Are they written differently than your other work? Are they asking different questions? What does this tell you about your argument and your writing style? How can you speak more clearly to what is, after all, a self-selected audience of interested people?

Contracts also depend increasingly on your own networks. Do you have standing because you contribute to a popular blog? Are there lots of people who like to follow what you have to say? That will help convince a publisher that you’re worth a hearing.

An on-line presence might speak to an employer more directly. Blogging gives you an opportunity to present yourself on your own terms. Any diligent search committee will google you. A series of interesting blogs about teaching, for example, will never hurt your profile.

There are pitfalls to an on-line presence, of course. First of all, and above all, it’s important to remember that the very act of on-line work means your opponents can’t respond, and it’s unsporting, at best, to launch a tirade against someone who can’t answer. For the job market, this means it’s crazy to write intemperately about anyone or anything. This is a very small profession, and even if XYZ’s work infuriates you, there is no reason to call it out. XYZ will certainly have good friends at any institution at which you might interview, and they will not forget you have taken a pot shot (they googled you, remember?).

The exception to this rule, of course, is that if you feel strongly that you must take a stand either for or against something on principle, do it proudly and openly. And be prepared to defend your stand against opponents. Just don’t pick fights gratuitously.

On Twitter, the rules are like Facebook. Don’t be an idiot. Don’t post about how much you hate your students, or your colleagues, or any of the obvious rants that will ruin you with a committee. Don’t post endless self-absorbed pieces about what you’re eating or drinking or saying or thinking. But Twitter and Facebook are not just danger zones; they can also reflect you well. I follow a number of junior scholars on Twitter who are obviously tightly linked to their communities and to new scholarship, and who are struggling with really interesting intellectual issues. If one of them applied to my school, their Twitter presence would make them stand out.

The other major pitfall is that you cannot let your on-line presence keep you from producing more traditional scholarship. Blog and tweet, yes, but make sure those contributions to knowledge reflect and/or point back to your larger body of work. No search committee is going to consider a blog equivalent to a manuscript, but it very well might like to see a blog that augments the rest of what you do. Just don’t let on-line work suck all your time.

Here’s a newsflash: The internet is here to stay. The profession hasn’t yet caught up with its implications, but it must, and soon. Today’s junior scholars are in a vague zone between the past and the present, but that same vagueness offers them a great opportunity to shape the way historians use the world’s revolutionary new technologies.

Heather Cox Richardson

Yes.

But since I still have more than 136 characters left, here’s my take on the Twitter question:

I have had many conversations lately with historians based in America about whether or not they should use Twitter. There are three complaints about it. First of all, there is a general impression that Twitter users are narcissists who feel obliged to inform the world every time they eat a bagel. Second, there is a sense that it is a waste of valuable time.  Third, younger scholars are concerned that presence on social media might hurt them on the job market.

These are valid concerns, but they are, to my mind, vastly outweighed by the advantages of Twitter both for individual historians and for the profession.

Let’s start with the profession. Yes, there are plenty of people who use Twitter to issue a play-by-play recap of their most mundane activities. But there is no law that says that’s the only way to use the medium. Twitter works best for historians when participants use it to direct followers to content. This works in two ways. Tweets can mention a new archive or recently discovered source or the significance of a date. They can also be used to call attention to a longer blog post or article—or even a book—on a historical topic. Imbedded links make the longer format instantly available.

It is striking how few established historians in America use Twitter this way. Historians in Canada and the UK are all over Twitter, claiming history for professionals either within or outside the academy, while established historians in America are simply not claiming any territory. There are exceptions, of course. William Cronon posts great links.  So do Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; David Armitage; Tera Hunter; Kevin Levin; and certainly many others I’ve missed. But their heroic ranks can’t compare to the sheer numbers of Twitter users based in Canada and the UK.

If American-based historians don’t take up more oxygen in public spaces, their expertise will continue to be ignored, and the importance of their work discounted. A good way to combat that denigration is simply to show up.

A second benefit to the profession is that Twitter offers a place where people on both sides of the tenure divide can exchange ideas. Another thing I have found shocking about Twitter is how many junior people are active there, and how few senior people are. Following as many junior scholars as I have found suggests to me that they have a completely different set of concerns and skills than people safely ensconced in the academy.  Early career historians are all over digital technologies and new archives. They are terribly worried about the rise of adjuncts and MOOCS. And they have no idea how they will find permanent employment in academia . . . or even if they want it. In my experience, these are not conversations that happen often among tenured folks. We worry much more about research, narrative techniques, and dealing with administrators. People on both sides of this divide have a great deal to offer each other; indeed, it seems to me fatal to the rapidly-changing historical profession NOT to be talking.

Finally, Twitter offers to historians outside perspectives. It’s an opportunity to stand in the same virtual world as a whole bunch of really smart people and hear what they think is important. Aside from the posts I saw yesterday about the problems of transnational history, teaching American history in a diverse classroom, Bruce Bartlett pointed me toward Bloomberg’s recap of the five years of America’s financial crisis, and NPR announced that Alan Lomax’s archive is now on-line. All of this information will inform my teaching and scholarship, and none of it would have come to my attention if it hadn’t flitted across my Twitter feed.

Heather Cox Richardson

Well, first you need a good household staff.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA….

OK, now that we’ve got the hilarity out of the way, how really can mothers take on teaching, research and writing, and children—three incredibly labor-intensive jobs—at the same time?

Let’s start with teaching. Here are a few things I picked up along the way, largely by the seat of my pants as I jumped into a job when my first child (of three) was just shy of three months old. Nothing I learned was intentional, but some of it has stood me in good stead.

The key concept for enabling mothers to survive in the academy is efficiency. And here are some things that helped me to achieve it:

Teach big courses with a wide scope. That sounds counterintuitive, I know. Most people think it takes less energy for junior scholars—and most people with small children will be junior scholars—to teach smaller classes in their specialty. The problem with such specific classes is that they tend to be under enrolled, which means you will constantly have to come up with new courses to keep your numbers up. Repeatedly writing courses from scratch is a huge time-sink.

The initial time investment for writing a survey course is undoubtedly large, but it’s a one-time thing. From there, if you need to, you can pivot that material into a number of other classes. (My History of the American West stands alone, but has also spawned Race, Riots, and Rodeos, as well as The Plains Indians.) But the chances are good you won’t need to. Surveys tend to fill every semester. So do other sweeping courses that cover large periods, major events, important themes, and so on. Yearly tweaking will be enough to keep the courses up-to-date and interesting until you have the time to invest in creating new ones.

Another way to teach efficiently is to use grading rubrics. Instead of writing line-by-line comments on essays and exams—which takes forever—develop your own set of categories that you will evaluate. I grade essays with six categories: thesis, argument, style, evidence, grammar, errors, and overall. Under those categories, I write anything from a line to a paragraph about what worked and what didn’t.

You could, of course, break down your rubrics even further.

This takes about a third as long as my old style of line-by-line comments, and students love it. I started it not to save time, but because I read an education study showing that students were overwhelmed by unorganized comments and learned very little from them. So I gritted my teeth and tried a rubric. The first time I did it, grading took so much less time than usual I felt like I was cheating, but that year I got the best student reviews I’d ever gotten for my essay comments. In this case, it appears that less really is more.

I did both of these things for reasons that had nothing to do with mothering, but they ended up being very helpful ways to organize my teaching time most efficiently. They also were great for my own research, but that will be a different post.
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*I’m writing another post on the theoretical argument behind this series of posts. Until then, once again, I am defining “mothers” as a different mindset, not as a biological identification.

The following is a reposting of a May 6, 2011 piece.

Heather Cox Richardson

While I’m as happy as the next mom to get chocolate on Mother’s Day—or on any other day, frankly—I can’t help pointing out that “Mother’s Day,” did not originate as a way to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s empowerment and social reform in the late nineteenth century. Rather than starting in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother, it was an impassioned effort by women in the late nineteenth century to end war forever.

The Civil War years taught naïve Americans what carnage meant in a modern war. Soldiers who had marched jauntily off to war discovered that long-range weapons turned the inaccurate volleys of the past into murderous waves of death. Their romantic notions of brave battle and either a victorious return or a clean end died even before the men did. They saw their friends trampled into blood-soaked mud, piled like cordwood in ditches, turned into emaciated corpses after dysentery had drained their lives away.

The women who had sent their men off to war were also haunted by its results. They lost fathers, husbands, sons. If their menfolk did come home, they brought scars: wounds, missing limbs, and psychological trauma.

Modern war, it seemed, was not a game.

Out of the war came not only the horror of war, but also a new sense of empowerment for Union women. During the war, they had bought bonds, paid taxes, raised money for the war effort, managed farms, harvested fields, worked in war industries, reared children, nursed soldiers. When the war ended, they were eager to continue to participate in national affairs. Resenting that the Fourteenth Amendment did not establish that women, as well as African-American men, were citizens, women in 1869 organized the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association and the American Woman’s Suffrage Association to promote women’s right to have a say in the direction of the country.

Julia Ward Howe was a key figure in the American Woman’s Suffrage Association. She was a Boston lady drawn to women’s rights because current laws meant that if she broke free from her abusive husband, she would lose any right to see her children (a fact he threw at her whenever she threatened to leave him). She was not a radical in the mold of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Rather, she believed strongly that women, as mothers, had a special role to perform in the world.

For Howe, the Civil War had been traumatic, but that it led to emancipation might have justified its terrible bloodshed (a theme she developed in her “Battle Hymn of the Republic”). The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 was another story. As she remembered:


Howe had a new vision, she said, of “the august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities.” She sat down immediately and wrote an “Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World.” Men always had and always would decide questions by resorting to “mutual murder.” But women did not have to accept this state of affairs, she wrote. Mothers could command their sons to stop the madness.

Arise, women! Howe commanded. Say firmly:


Howe had her document translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Swedish, and distributed it as widely as her extensive contacts made possible. She believed that her Women’s Peace Movement would be the next great development in human history, ending war just as the anti-slavery movement had ended human bondage. She called for a “festival which should be observed as mothers’ day, and which should be devoted to the advocacy of peace doctrines” to be held around the world on June 2 of every year, a date that would permit open-air meetings.

Howe organized international peace conferences; American states developed their own Mothers’ Day festivals. But Howe quickly gave up on her project. She realized that there was much to be done before women could come together on such a momentous scale. She abandoned her grand vision of world peace and turned her attention to women’s clubs “to constitute a working and united womanhood.”

Perhaps Anna Jarvis remembered seeing her mother participate in an original American Mothers’ Day, and decided to honor her own mother’s idealism. In moving the apostrophe to turn Mothers’ Day into Mother’s Day, though, she changed the meaning of the holiday profoundly.

While we celebrate Mother’s Day, it’s worth also remembering Mothers’ Day, and Julia Ward Howe’s conviction that women must make their voices heard in politics.

Heather Cox Richardson

The New York City Municipal Archives has put on-line more than 800,000 images. This is simply an astonishing collection. A must for anyone who studies New York City and the U.S. in general.

Click here for more

An 1882 cartoon: "THE ONLY ONE BARRED OUT. Enlightened American Statesman.--"We must draw the line somewhere, you know." Courtesy of the Library of Congress.