Results for History Profession

On the passing of Pauline Maier

August 16, 2013
Chris Beneke


Pauline Maier passed away Monday. Her academic title was William Kenan Jr. Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It’s a distinguished position, but hardly does justice to the person who filled it.

I didn’t know Professor Maier was ill. Frankly, it’s hard to imagine her in a non-effervescent condition. Every other observation I’ve encountered since Monday affirms the testimony of my own experience: Maier was irrepressibly charming, ceaselessly brilliant, and blessed with a thunderous, seminar-shaking laugh.

Professor Maier published important books at a stately pace. There were four major monographs, one per decade. The first two changed our understanding of pre-Revolutionary politics;  the third upended standard interpretations of the Declaration of Independence;  the fourth provided the first full account of how the U.S. Constitution was ratified. Each was definitive, the sort of book that every early American historian needs to read at some point. Each was also a marvel of original documentary research and nonfiction storytelling.

Pauline Maier, the world-renowned scholar and teacher, also happened to be kind. She didn’t dispense saccharine praise to the minor figures who clamored for her attention. Instead, she offered genuine respect for their ideas and lots of tough, useful criticism. As a graduate student with no prior acquaintance, I invited her to comment on a conference panel. She agreed and, when the time came, cheerily directed me to think about many rudimentary things about which I should have already been thinking. A few years later, when I asked her to read part of my book manuscript—a punishingly dry and tedious tome—she agreed again, and then administered the thorough, friendly thrashing it needed.

These were the kind of things she did for people and partly explains why she published four landmark books instead of eight. Maier treated her fellow historians with the same honest consideration that she tendered her historical subjects, remaining ever open to the possibility that the lowly might possess more insight than their better appointed counterparts (as well as the possibility that they might be out of their senses). Ratification’s acknowledgements leave no doubt how much she appreciated the assistance that others offered in turn. She thanked them not merely in lists of names, or even sentences, but whole paragraphs. Word count be damned.

Maier was more irreverent in her work than big-name professors typically are. She had little use for unsubstantiated assumptions or pious orthodoxies. She had a keen eye for the workings of power and a still keener appreciation for the anxieties of those who confronted it. But Maier never succumbed to the vain illusion that doing history is the same thing as doing politics.

Professor Maier loved good argument but always approached the past with the kind of wonder and excitement that those burdened by mountains of historiography often find difficult to muster. Of course she knew the relevant scholarship inside and out. Maier just didn’t have much use for the things that we habitually say about those who lived before us. She wanted to know what they said themselves.

Scholars as celebrated as Pauline Maier are vulnerable to severe cases of self-absorption. That was not a malady from which she suffered. In addition to the innumerable kindnesses she extended to other historians, she was perpetually delighted by her children, grandchildren, and Rhode Island garden. And she loved her husband Charlie.

If, as planned, I had been able to attend her spring seminar at the Massachusetts Historical Society, I would have seen Professor Maier one last time. But I had kids to watch at home. As much as I regret that absence, I suspect she would have told me that the time was better spent with my boys. That’s one of the reasons I’ll miss her.
On the passing of Pauline Maier On the passing of Pauline Maier Reviewed by Joseph Landis on August 16, 2013 Rating: 5

Mothers in the Academy: How to Do It All*

June 19, 2013
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.
____________

*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.
Mothers in the Academy: How to Do It All* Mothers in the Academy: How to Do It All* Reviewed by Joseph Landis on June 19, 2013 Rating: 5

Mothers in the Academy

June 09, 2013
Heather Cox Richardson

A recent studyshows that having children hurts women in academia at every stage of the profession. This will not be news to any woman who has had to sneak out of a meeting to pick up a child before the daycare fine system kicks in, who has had to explain to an older male colleague that his insistence on scheduling his pet seminar from 4 to 6 guarantees she can never attend no matter how angry it makes him, who has worked all night in the office because search files could not leave the premises and there was no time during the day to get enough time to read them all, and who has heard those chilling words: “You can have tenure or children, but not both.”

There is a push to change the mechanics of university life to address this problem, offering maternity leave to graduate students, for example, and extending tenure clocks for mothers. (More first-floor bathrooms wouldn’t come amiss either, by the way; two flights to a bathroom when you’re eight months pregnant is no picnic.) These steps are important, to be sure. But for historians, even more important to remember is that, by cutting more than half the population from the study of humanity, we are skewing our scholarship so badly it threatens to lose all meaning.

This is not a theoretical argument; it has real-world meaning for the study of history. Having a family—and nurturing it—is crucial for historians. (And this does not seem to me to have to be birth or adopted children, by the way. Investing in community does not require youngsters who actually live in your home.)


Here’s why: history divorced from the real concerns of everyday people is so rarified it is often meaningless. And when it comes to distinguishing important issues from theoretical fancies, there is nothing like having to explain to a five-year-old what mommy is doing. “Mommy is trying to figure out why sometimes white people aren’t very nice to black people,” was my age-appropriate explanation when writing The Death of Reconstruction, and the constant reminder that my discoveries had real-world implications for today that mattered to my kids made it a much stronger book than it would have been had I emphasized instead the theoretical implications of my argument.

Similarly, constant interactions with kids—your own and others—helps you to recognize which of the many issues that grab you is actually of interest to anyone who isn’t bowled over by the beauty of history for its own sake. Kids actually love real stories (which is, after all, what we discover) and chewing over their meaning. But which story you’re telling matters. The general history of mass protests in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s that led to liberation for a number of groups that had previously borne much discrimination . . . not so much. The story that mid-20th-century New York City laws deliberately targeted drag queens by making it a crime to wear articles of clothing associated with the opposite gender; that this forced gays and lesbians to frequent bars owned by the Mafia, which could afford to pay off the police; and that a bunch of well-oiled gays and lesbians had finally had enough when police raided the Stonewall Inn in late June 1969 and took to the streets to demand equal rights . . . that story rings true to young adults. It’s personal. It taps into their own sensitivity about discriminatory rules, and offers not just a lesson about historical change but also the example of people who stood up for their principles.

Your colleagues will happily argue the theoretical implications of mass movements for months. Your students will pretend to listen when you expound on the importance of movement theory. Your non-academic friends will nod as if they’re interested in what you have to say about theory, the same way you pretend to care about the insurance market. But your kids and their friends will always remind you that there’s a reason they are called “theoretical underpinnings.”

The perspective of kids, who are not yet sophisticated enough to pretend interest in anything for appearances’ sake, also helps one’s writing. “How can I explain what I learned today in such a way that it would interest my fifteen-year-old?” is a much better guide to narrative structure than “This is so cool, in all its intricate detail!” I can see the second my kids begin to glaze over as I tell them about a recent discovery, and try to remember that moment of disconnect when my prose gets hijacked by the intricacies of historical events that are so deeply fascinating . . . to me and about three other people.

It’s great to see discussion of the problems of motherhood in academia, but the discussion is hardly new: it was in full swing when my first son was born, twenty-one years ago. While our discussion seems to use more sophisticated words now, the actual world of the academy seems pretty much the same, if not worse than it was in 1992. So how can we actually create change? Part of the problem might well be that the drive to include mothers in the academy tends to focus on how unfair discrimination is to those excluded. That angle is painfully obvious, but it offers nothing to those doing the excluding except the chance to be noble. Evidence suggests that nobility doesn’t interest authorities enough to make much of a difference. But the discipline of history—and, I daresay, all other fields—needs to find a way to keep mothers in academia not so we can pat ourselves on the back for our generosity, but because without them the field runs the risk of becoming so insular it makes itself entirely irrelevant to the real world. It is not a mother’s battle, or even a women’s battle. It is a battle for the relevance of history itself and, as such, should be waged by every historian who thinks our scholarship matters.

Encouraging mothers to stay in the academy might be good for mothers, but it is imperative for the academy.
Mothers in the Academy Mothers in the Academy Reviewed by Joseph Landis on June 09, 2013 Rating: 5
Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )
ads 728x90 B
Powered by Blogger.