Results for Randall's posts

Latest issue of Historically Speaking Now Online

March 21, 2014
Randall Stephens

The latest issue of HS is now up on the Project Muse site.  It is a longer issue than normal, featuring two forums, five essays, and four interviews.  Readers might be especially interested in our forum on Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (Yale University Press, 2013), one of the most important history books of the last year.  As Don Yerxa puts it in the intro to the forum: "It has been widely heralded as an extraordinary scholarly achievement. Parker makes the case for a link between climate change and the worldwide catastrophe that occurred 350 years ago. We asked Parker to begin our forum with an account on the book’s long gestation. Then three prominent scholars, Kenneth Pomeranz, J.R. McNeill, and Jack Goldstone, comment on Global Crisis, followed by Parker’s rejoinder."

This issue, as many of our readers know, also marks an important transition for HS.  We are suspending publication for the remainder of 2014 as we forge a more sustainable operational framework. We are hopeful that some very promising developments will enable us to resume publishing a new and improved Historically Speaking in 2015.

TOC, Historically Speaking (November 2013)

"Silver and Segregation"
Wyatt Wells

"Winston Churchill and the Literary History of Politics"
Jonathan Rose

"Winston Churchill and Almighty God"
David Reagles and Timothy Larsen

"Liberal Protestantism in 20th-Century America: An Interview with
David A. Hollinger"
Conducted by Randall J. Stephens

"Catastrophe 1914: An Interview with Max Hastings"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

Digital versus Printed Historical and Literary Editions: A Forum

"Television Is Not Radio with Pictures"
Holly Cowan Shulman

"Pouring Old Editorial Wine into New Digital Bottles"
Constance Schulz

"The Changing Production and Consumption of Historical and Literary Texts: The View from the Simms Initiatives"
David Moltke-Hansen

"The Invention of the American Meal: An Interview with Abigail Carroll"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

"Global Crisis: A Forum The Genesis of Global Crisis"
Geoffrey Parker

"Weather, War, and Welfare: Persistence and Change in
Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis"
Kenneth Pomeranz

"Maunder Minimum and Parker Maximum"
J.R. McNeill

"Climate Lessons from History"
Jack A. Goldstone

"Response"
Geoffrey Parker

"A Combat History of the Great War: An Interview with Peter Hart"
Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa

"Jewish History and Education: A Review Essay"
Philip T. Hoffman

"Töchter of Feminism: Germany and the Modern Woman Artist"
Diane Radycki
Latest issue of Historically Speaking Now Online Latest issue of Historically Speaking Now Online Reviewed by Joseph Landis on March 21, 2014 Rating: 5

Looking Back on Assassinations and Motivation

November 13, 2013
To mark 50 years since the assassination of president Kennedy, I repost here a piece that appeared on the blog in January 2011.

Randall Stephens

On November 23, 1963 the New York Times announced "Leftist Accused: Figure in a Pro-Castro Group is Charged--Policeman Slain." Will Fritz, head of the Homicide Bureau, Dallas Police Department, linked Lee Harvey Oswald to the left-wing "Fair Play for Cuba Committee." Such connections proved more complicated than originally imagined. Oswald lied and was, by any account, a shiftless loser. Journalists and commentators grasped for a motive in the chaotic hours and days after President Kennedy's assassination. Texas, and Dallas in particular, was a hotbed of anti-Kennedy feeling and theories of a right-wing plot circulated widely. (Replace Texas then with Arizona now and some striking similarities in public discussion are apparent. Tea Partiers and John Birchers . . . anti-immigration and anti-communism . . .)

There was, in fact, enough hard-right political terrorism in the South to make such views seem credible enough. The Klan harassed and threatened civil rights workers and dynamited churches and schools. Pundits called Birmingham "Bombingham." In rare cases, gunmen assassinated black leaders and activists. The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr., in April 1968 created a political firestorm and produced innumerable theories as Kennedy's murder had less than five years before. After King's death in Memphis riots erupted across the country's cities and conspiracy theories of Klan involvement and a government assassin gripped the imagination of Americans roiled by the events of a turbulent year. Writing in Life magazine in June 1968 Paul O'Neil observed, "No real criminal organization conspired with [James Earl] Ray," King's alleged killer. Ray was, in O'Neil's words, like Robert Kennedy's assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, prone to bizarre fantasies and unreal self conceptions.

Medical professionals, journalists, and the general public have often questioned an assassin's sanity. And the current debate over the political motivations of Gabrielle Giffords' mentally unstable shooter parallel related events in history.

Was Leon Czolgosz, who shot and killed President McKinley nearly 110 years ago, insane? The American establishment, observes Eric Rauchway in Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt's America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), could not "admit that a low criminal had accomplished so much, and so from the start they insisted he was insane, and his action an accident of a callous fate" (x).

What of America's most infamous assassin? "One is naturally tempted to ask whether John Wilkes Booth, son of the 'Mad Tragedian,' might have been found insane under existing laws," writes Michael W. Kauffman in American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies (New York: Random House, 2005), 353. Wilkes's brother thought madness ran through the male portion of the family. But, in this case, notions of melancholy and madness were closely linked. And diagnosing someone from the the remove of nearly 150 years would certainly be difficult.

Historians often ask why people do the things they do. Is it trickier to answer that question about current figures than about those from ages past? Figuring out the motivations of men and women from long ago, like judging why an unstable young Arizona man went on a shooting spree, can be a tough game. David Hackett Fischer explored motivation in his controversial, argumentative Historians' Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1970):


Historians have often used motivational explanations in their work. Almost always, they have used them badly. Problems of motive in academic historiography tend to be hopelessly mired in a sort of simple-minded moralizing which is equally objectionable from an ethical and an empirical point of view. Lord Rosebery once remarked that what the English people really wished to know about Napoleon was whether he was a good man. The same purpose often prevails among professional scholars who are unable to distinguish motivational psychology from moral philosophy, and even unwilling to admit that there can be a distinction at all. Moreover, many scholars tend to find flat, monistic answers to complex motivational problems, which further falsifies their interpretations (187).

But that won't keep Americans from wondering, speculating, and trying to make some sense out of seemingly senseless acts of violence, past or present.

Looking Back on Assassinations and Motivation Looking Back on Assassinations and Motivation Reviewed by Joseph Landis on November 13, 2013 Rating: 5

"What the devil are they doing"? English Authors Writing about America

September 24, 2013
Randall Stephens 

Oh, my autumn almanac
Yes, yes, yes, it's my autumn almanac.

I like my football on a Saturday,
Roast beef on Sundays, all right.
I go to Blackpool for my holidays,
Sit in the open sunlight.

- Ray Davies, The Kinks, "Autumn Almanac" (1967)

An American version, "Fall Almanac," just wouldn't have cut it.  Ray Davies has long been an observer of the differences--linguistic, cultural, and otherwise--of the American and English scenes.  Sure, The Kinks were as English as clotted cream, cricket, Yorkshire pudding, and bad weather.  But Ray and brother Dave spent quite a bit of time living or touring in both countries. 

I've spent my share of time in both countries, too. I live in Newcastle Upon Tyne. (Which, in itself, is almost like another country compared with the Kinks North London stomping ground.)  So I look forward to getting my hands on a copy of Ray Davies new book Americana: The Kinks, the Riff, the Road: The Story (October, 2013).  Here, so says the promo material, the famous mod rocker and 60s icon "tries to make sense of his long love-hate relationship with the country that both inspired and frustrated him." The book promises to take "us on a very personal road trip through his life and storied career as a rock star, and reveals what music, fame, and America really mean to him." 

These kinds of travelogues have long been bestsellers.  Authors of them have included helpings of criticism along with a dash of admiration.  Maybe the sheer number of these volumes has something to do with the cultural and political special relationship between the two nations, the shared language, or just a general curiosity.  Think of the Americans who write about Britain--humorist Bill Bryson or former ambassador Raymond Seitz.  Or the English who write about life in the U.S.--academic Terry Eagleton and, most obviously, Alistair Cooke.

This is a literary trail that winds all the way back to the 18th and 19th centuries, when many of those who lived in America were becoming more than just relocated English people. I'm most interested in the English who made their way to the colonies or the U.S., pen in hand,
The "British despot" beaten again, 1897.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
ready to comment on American bragging and tobacco chewing.  They asked: What accounted for the growing distance between the Mother Country and the New World? Was there such a thing as an American character?  Or, as G. K. Chesterton put it in his What I Saw in America (1922): "We say that the Americans are doing something heroic, or doing something insane, or doing it in an unworkable or unworthy fashion, instead of simply wondering what the devil they are doing" (7).  Many of us natives wonder the same thing. A great collection of these accounts--spanning the centuries--is Allan Nevins' America through British Eyes. (Published in 1948, it's now a difficult volume to come by).   

If you're endlessly fascinated by such romps through America's teeming cities, pig-choked streets, and highways and byways then check out these gems:

Douglas S. Robertson, ed., An Englishman in America in 1785 being the Diary of Joseph Hadfield (1933)

Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)

Harriet Martineau, Society in America (1837)

Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation (1842) 
 
John Benwell, An Englishman's Travels in America: His Observations of Life and Manners in the Free and Slave States (1853) 

Anthony Trollope, North America (1862)

William Archer, Through Afro-America: An English Reading of the Race Problem (1910)
"What the devil are they doing"? English Authors Writing about America "What the devil are they doing"? English Authors Writing about America Reviewed by Joseph Landis on September 24, 2013 Rating: 5

September Issue of Historically Speaking and the History of History Departments

September 17, 2013
Randall Stephens

In the coming weeks Historically Speaking subscribers will receive the latest issue.  In it we have essays on American political history and reform (John Frederick Martin and F. S.
Naiden), objectivity in the study of history (Judith Walzer Leavitt), Atlantic World history (Trevor Burnard), photography and the Great War (Von Hardesty), an obituary of Pauline Maier (Chris Beneke), and Evangelical Catholicism (Mark Edwards).  Alongside those are interviews with scholars concerning American religious history (Larry Eskridge), and the critical years of 1979 (Christian Caryl) and 1913 (Charles Emmerson).

The September issue also includes James M. Banner's fascinating essay "The Almost Nonexistent History of Academic Departments."  Writes Banner: "Department histories are almost nowhere to be found."  Why is that so?  Says Banner:

The history of education has never found a strong place in history departments. Those aspiring historians seeking entry to graduate programs, even those with a nascent interest in the history of education, have not been without good sense in defining their interests to graduate program admissions committees as being, say, in the social history of ideas if they are interested in academic culture or, say, in the history of the social composition of academic faculties or student cohorts if they have a general interest in academic institutions. Those of their mentors who might wish it were otherwise, who would like to see students pursue the history of academic departments—and there are a few, even if very few, of these—have found it a losing game to try to attract their students to such subjects. It is thus a distinctive and hardy student who proposes to undertake a dissertation on the history of a university department in any discipline.

Two other forces are at work against the pursuit of departmental histories. One is the simple fact that institutions do not have memories; only their members and employees do. If faculty members fail to take an interest in their histories, academic departments are not likely to be the subject of institutional histories. The histories of departments are carried within their members’ memories, not within the institutions themselves; once their members resign or retire, the history they embody leaves the department with them. Only concerted efforts to capture and preserve those memories can avail.

But a second reality working against department histories is the disposition of most faculty members toward their own departments and colleagues. Academics are practiced in, sometimes champions of, gossip. They nourish themselves on intramural disputes, on information about their colleagues, on battles over appointments. That is generally all to the good, for if kept within collegial bounds, gossip and inside information are constituent parts of the equilibrating mechanisms of all institutions. But in this case, private knowledge gained and imparted through gossip stands in for formal historical knowledge and is not recorded or caught on paper or tape as a resource for formal future histories unless it happens to be set down in personal correspondence or diaries that find themselves into library collections. If not, that knowledge is allowed to vanish into air and thus be of no use to future historians. . . .

Read more by subscribing to the print issue or by logging on to Project Muse.
September Issue of Historically Speaking and the History of History Departments September Issue of Historically Speaking and the History of History Departments Reviewed by Joseph Landis on September 17, 2013 Rating: 5

Henry Steele Commager on America during the Cold War

August 29, 2013
Randall Stephens

The November 24, 1954 episode of Longines Chronoscope featured Henry Steele Commager (video embedded here).  That was not unusual for
the news and views program, which regularly featured heads of state, intellectuals, novelists, and other notables.  But the subject of the discussion is particularly interesting all these years later.  Maybe that's especially poignant because Commager was one of America's foremost historians at that time. Here he weighs in on American identity, the pressures of conformity, the post-war economic boom, and freedom of expression.  

This was filmed in the wake of the Korean War, the hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll, and not long after the historic Brown vs. Topeka Supreme Court decision.  Red Scare paranoia remained strong. The coming month of December would see the US Senate reprimand Joseph McCarthy, by a vote of 67–22, for "conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute."

Here are some of the questions posed to Commager by hosts Larry LeSueur (CBS News correspondent) and August Heckscher (chief editorial writer for the New York Herald-Tribune):

LeSueur: So, professor Commager, we'd like to ask you: Do you think that this country when it was smaller and less powerful, but when we had less responsibilities, do you think we were happier then than we are now?

LeSueur: Professor Commager, do you feel that our freedoms such as speech are more circumscribed now than they have been in the past?

LeSueur: Surely professor Commager there's less conformity now than in the days of the Puritans?

Heckscher: Would you say that . . . we exaggerate our standard of living in comparison to the standard of living of foreign countries, for example?

LeSueur: Do you think our country is more or less unified in some areas, on foreign policy for example, now than it has been in the past during some of our crises?

How are historians reflecting on the pressing issues of our day?  What will the opinions of contemporary historians look like more than 50 years from now?
Henry Steele Commager on America during the Cold War Henry Steele Commager on America during the Cold War Reviewed by Joseph Landis on August 29, 2013 Rating: 5

Larry Eskridge on the Jesus People in Modern America: An Interview

August 13, 2013
Randall Stephens

[Cross-posted from Religion in American History]

Life magazine, June 30, 1972
Larry Eskridge is Associate Director of the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals and editor of the Evangelical Studies Bulletin at Wheaton College.  With Mark Noll, he was co-editor of More Money, More Ministry: Evangelicals and Money in Recent North American History (Eerdmans, 2000). 

Eskridge has also written the definitive account of one of the most significant mass religious movements of the last century.  His God’s Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America (Oxford University Press, 2013) examines the fusion of the hippie counterculture and evangelical Christianity that burst onto the scene in the late 1960s. I recently caught up with Larry to ask him about the project, his research, and more.

Randall Stephens: What first got you interested in the topic of the Jesus People?

Larry Eskridge: I found the Jesus People an interesting topic at several levels.  At the most basic was the fact that I came of age during that period and had been personally involved in the Jesus movement in my local area in northern Illinois.  So, if doing history often serves as something of an exercise in self-biography, I stand guilty as charged by dint of being curious about the overall movement and the reasons for its success and eventual disappearance.

At a larger level I’ve long been interested in the way that evangelical religion intertwines with mass media and popular culture and the Jesus People offered plenty to study at that level as they were the subject of a great deal of media coverage as well as replicating various aspects of the counterculture and youth culture in a comfort with pop culture and music that was, traditionally, very unusual within the overarching evangelical subculture.

Finally, my interest grew as the result of conversations I had in the late ‘80s with a few evangelical historians who discounted the impact of the movement and who viewed it as some sort of immature, irrelevant, generational religious fad.  As I remembered the movement’s pervasive presence during the ‘70s I thought that it had been a pretty important influence in the lives of a lot of evangelical Baby Boomers and shouldn’t be dismissed so easily.  Not only were the Jesus People a colorful, interesting bunch with their communes, street papers, and Jesus rock bands, but they also represented a chance to take the religious life and experience of young people seriously. I was frankly taken aback by the manner in which some scholars apparently were able to easily discount the religious experiences and attachments of young people in our more-or-less contemporary settings—they surely didn’t do that with the young audiences that were impacted by the preaching of Jonathan Edwards!

Stephens: How influential do you think these countercultural evangelicals have been in shaping American Christianity?

Hippie preacher Lonnie Frisbee with
Kathryn Kuhlman and Chuck Smith.
See more on Youtube.
Eskridge: Well the book argues that they were surprisingly important in shaping the nature of American evangelicalism and—by reason of the growth in evangelicalism’s organizational, cultural, and political influence in subsequent years—a larger force within the overall history of the ‘60s and ‘70s than has heretofore been thought. In many ways I believe you can’t have a real handle on that period—especially on the youth culture of that era—without acknowledging the Jesus People as one of the important aspects of what was going on.

In terms of the American church there were obvious institutional outgrowths—the growth of the Calvary Chapel network of churches and its offspring the Vineyard, for example. But the larger impact was felt at the grass roots level in the manner in which the movement modeled a different relationship with popular culture and youth culture.  Before the Jesus People evangelicalism had a very nervous, if not downright oppositional, relationship to “worldly entertainments” and all the allures of popular and youth culture.  The Jesus movement, however, was much more comfortable in baptizing popular/youth culture and making a Christianized version that could be put forward as a means to both evangelize unbelieving youth and build up the kids who came from evangelical homes and churches.  There was, and still is, opposition to this way of handling these boundaries between “the World” and “The Church,” but to a large degree, the Jesus People marked a revolution in handling these relationships.
Undated poster for Berkeley music fest

In terms of the particular historical moment, the Jesus movement’s biggest bottom line was in generational terms: it played a major role in keeping evangelicalism together by providing a much easier path for a lot of people—particularly evangelical kids raised in the church—to navigate the massive changes that buffeted American society and culture during that period.  The Jesus People had a degree of “with-it-ness” and a cultural cache that the larger movement certainly didn’t possess going into the late ‘60s.  I think it’s fair to say that if the Jesus People hadn’t come along when they did the evangelical church would have been nowhere near as formidable a force throughout American culture come the 1980s and beyond.

Stephens: You spend some time focusing on Christian rock.  How did this genre emerge when and where it did?

Eskridge: Music was such an important element in what held youth culture together by the 1960s that it would have been truly surprising if any sort of popular movement could have had any grass roots traction without a musical component. The Jesus movement was certainly obsessed by music just like the larger youth culture—”Jesus Music” seemed to naturally pour forth in the form of halting, homemade folk songs and bluesy, rock tunes from the earliest manifestations of the movement all across the country. A whole network of musical groups and venues grew up within the space of a few short years along with the infrastructure to distribute the music to Jesus Music fans. Of course this was all surprising in that the music of the Jesus People was an obvious departure from the norms of the larger evangelical subculture. Certainly there was no shortage of resistance among older, more traditional church people to the new forms of music.  But the combination of cultural crisis, earnest Jesus People fervor, and the sheer size of the generational cohort eventually served to lessen most older evangelicals’ opposition. I think most adults in the churches saw that it would be a better alternative to cultivate their kids’ enthusiasm for Jesus by indulging their new worship choruses on Sundays and letting them listen to Jesus Rock in their spare time.

Stephens: Could you say something about the kinds of sources you worked with for the project?

Eskridge: When I started working on this I was kidded by one friend, “in the biz,” that I wasn’t doing “history” so much as “current events.”  That’s not altogether a wrong-headed notion I suppose, but as I went along I quickly found out that there were a lot of challenges in taking up this sort of project.  First of all, being smack-dab in the middle of the information age while attempting to study a movement that was this far-flung, disconnected, and disorganized mean that there were simply a lot of sources with which one had to contend—books, people, documents, records and tapes, magazines, newspapers, video, etc.—and that they were all over the place.  A lot of the most basic materials had no institutional homes and were the sorts of things that libraries and archives simply had not concerned themselves with collecting—as a result, a lot of stuff was squirreled away by former Jesus People in boxes and file cabinets in their homes.
1971

Second, I quickly realized that I was dealing with living historical subjects that could actively help and challenge you as you were in the process of research—not the sort of active relationship one might expect when writing about, say, Charlemagne. It also became pretty clear that I was stepping onto contested ground in the sense that there were evolving, competing narratives about the “Jesus Revolution’s” development, history, and importance as well as former Jesus People still trying to sort out its meaning and importance, strengths, and weaknesses. While this could sometimes get a bit uncomfortable, it was usually a help in the sense that it helped me to get a better handle on the complexity of the movement.

Overall, however, I think one of the biggest advantages that presented itself in the decade + that I was working on this topic was the opportunity presented by the development of the internet.  From the perspective of 2013 that sounds fairly pedestrian, but in terms of reaching out to prospective historical sources it was a major boon.  Not only did it allow us to find and contact former leaders who had seemingly disappeared into the woodwork, but it gave us an opportunity to connect with a lot of folks who had been part of the Jesus movement at the grass roots level.  With the help of the purveyor of a Jesus Music fan website I and another historian of the Jesus People—David Di Sabatino—were able to whip together a survey targeting those who had been involved with the movement.  Looking back, it was way too long and hardly a masterpiece of social science design, but through the grace and persistence of the more than 800 people who took the time to complete the survey it did provide an extraordinary entrée into the larger Jesus People memory banks.  When all was said and done I believe that the information folks supplied served as a really valuable corollary to the more “normal” sorts of historical digging.

Stephens: What are you currently working on?

Eskridge: At the moment I’m concentrating on duties related to my regular gig with the Institute for the Study of American Evangelicals (ISAE) at Wheaton College, particularly a conference on “The Worlds of Billy Graham” which is being held Sept 26-28.  I do have two large chunks of material, which I’m thinking about a bit for future purposes.  On the way to doing the Jesus People I piled together a fair amount of material on evangelical youth culture in the post-war period that preceded the Jesus freaks. I had intended some of that for this book but it had to be axed in the service of a shorter manuscript; so, that could be something that could be explored a bit more fully.  Another area I’ve always been interested in is the world of religious broadcasting, especially the early radio preachers.  I don’t think the fundamentalist radio folks have ever been researched very deeply—certainly not the way the televangelists were back in the 70s and 80s.  I have a lot of stuff on the Chicago evangelist and radio pioneer Paul Rader—who started broadcasting in early 1922—that could be of some service in helping to understand the mass media imperative that has been so strong a force within evangelicalism.
Larry Eskridge on the Jesus People in Modern America: An Interview Larry Eskridge on the Jesus People in Modern America: An Interview Reviewed by Joseph Landis on August 13, 2013 Rating: 5

Got Lactase?

August 06, 2013
Randall Stephens

In a recent issue of Nature, Andrew Curry offers up the latest theories on milk and civilization in the West.  How and why did ancient herders supplement their diets with cheese roughly 6,800 to 7,400 years ago?  Who were these early cheese makers? What were the results of the new cheese diet and the later reliance on milk?

Says Curry:

farming started to replace hunting and gathering in the Middle East around 11,000 years ago, cattle herders learned how to reduce lactose in dairy products to tolerable levels by fermenting milk to make cheese or yogurt. Several thousand years later, a genetic mutation spread through Europe that gave people the ability to produce lactase — and drink milk — throughout their lives. That adaptation opened up a rich new source of nutrition that could have sustained communities when harvests failed.

Curry also notes that:

This two-step milk revolution may have been a prime factor in allowing bands of farmers and herders from the south to sweep through Europe and displace the hunter-gatherer cultures that had lived there for millennia. “They spread really rapidly into northern Europe from an archaeological point of view,” says Mark Thomas, a
An advertisement from the 1920s
population geneticist at University College London. That wave of emigration left an enduring imprint on Europe, where, unlike in many regions of the world, most people can now tolerate milk. “It could be that a large proportion of Europeans are descended from the first lactase-persistent dairy farmers in Europe,” says Thomas.
 
Working on very modern topics, I find all of this endlessly fascinating. The hard science, sleuthing, and guesswork that go into tracing these developments over thousands of years is simply amazing. It also makes me curious to know more about how region and other food stuffs--and especially those that can be easily stored--shaped the arc of human history.

Read more of the article here: Andrew Curry, "Archaeology: The milk revolution," Nature, July 31, 2013.

For more on foodways and history, see Don Yerxa's 2009 interview with Ken Albala in Historically Speaking.
Got Lactase? Got Lactase? Reviewed by Joseph Landis on August 06, 2013 Rating: 5

Models for Writing

July 30, 2013
Randall Stephens

When I teach writing I use a short piece by William Zinsser from the American Scholar: "Writing English as a Second Language" (Winter 2010). Yes, my students are native speakers.  Regardless, this essay is spot on for college students. (I've blogged about it before here.)
A WPA poster from 1937. Courtesy
of the Library of Congress.

Zinsser offers up a host of great tips:

Cut horrible, long Latin-origin words: "communicated, conversion, reconciliation, enhancements, verification."  When these are used/overused they lead to stilted or stuffy prose.

Use good, short, simple nouns: "infinitely old Anglo-Saxon nouns that express the fundamentals of everyday life: house, home, child, chair, bread, milk, sea, sky, earth, field, grass, road."

"I have four principles of writing good English. They are Clarity, Simplicity, Brevity, and Humanity."

"So remember: Simple is good. Writing is not something you have to embroider with fancy stitches to make yourself look smart."

Undegrads and grad students need to hear that advice over and over again.

Zinsser also remarks "We all need models. Bach needed a model; Picasso needed a model. Make a point of reading writers who are doing the kind of writing you want to do."  I like to add that if a student is not interested in reading and makes no effort to read good prose, then he/she will most likely never become a good writer.

The point about reading and having a model is excellent.  I have had students in my history methods/historiography course bring in one or two books--fiction or non fiction--that they have enjoyed and that we can use to spark a discussion. We go around the table and ask, "What makes this a good book?  How does the author set the scene and use color?  What do I like about the writing, organization, etc?  How could I model my own writing, in some way, on this?"

Here are some of the authors and books that I enjoy reading.  (I've brought a few of these titles into class for the above exercise.)  I can only hope a little of the style of these authors will rub off on me.  

Jane Smiley, The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (1998)

Thomas McMahon, McKay's Bees (1979)

Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley (1995)

David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments (1998)

Richard Russon, Straight Man (1998)

Mary McCarthy, The Groves of Academe (1952)

Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (1952)

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (2006)

Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Haruki Murakami, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1998)

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

John Dos Passos, The 42nd Parallel (1930)

What about you?  What models do you have? 
Models for Writing Models for Writing Reviewed by Joseph Landis on July 30, 2013 Rating: 5

PhD Applicant Beware

July 19, 2013
Randall Stephens

The July 11-17 issue of Times Higher Education includes a must-read article for the grad school bound.  In "10 truths a PhD supervisor will never tell you" (11 July 2013) Tara
Brabazon writes: "As a prospective PhD student, you are precious. Institutions want you – they gain funding, credibility and profile through your presence. Do not let them treat you like an inconvenient, incompetent fool. Do your research. Ask questions." Some of her ten tips apply more to the UK setting, but most are right on target for students in the US as well.

Prospective PhD students in history should think long and hard about who they want to work with. Ask around.  Get to know something about the scholar you'd like to be your mentor.  Has this individual shepherded other PhDs?  Do his/her students land good jobs? What is your prospective mentor's publishing record like?  Is he/she a good fit for your project? What will it be like to work with him/her?  Will he/she lend a hand or remain aloof and passive reclusive? 

Brabazon offers some dos and don't and, most of all, warns, "don't let the supervisors grind you down."  Here's one of her particularly helpful pieces of advice:

The key predictor of a supervisor’s ability to guide a postgraduate to completion is a good record of having done so. Ensure that at least one member of your supervisory team is a very experienced supervisor. Anyone can be appointed to supervise. Very few have the ability, persistence, vision, respect and doggedness to move a diversity of students through the examination process. Ensure that the department and university you are considering assign supervisors on the basis of intellectual ability rather than available workload. Supervising students to completion is incredibly difficult.   
 
Read more here.
PhD Applicant Beware PhD Applicant Beware Reviewed by Joseph Landis on July 19, 2013 Rating: 5

Michal Jan Rozbicki on "The Rise of Learned Hagiography"

July 09, 2013
Randall Stephens

The following excerpt is from Michal Jan Rozbicki's review essay in the June 2013 issue of Historically Speaking.  Rozbicki uses Jon Meacham's Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power
(Random House, 2012) to delve into "the cult of great individuals," which even in the present, does not lack enthusiasts.  Rozbicki is professor of history and director of the Center for Intercultural Studies at Saint Louis University. He is the author of Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2011).

One would be hard pressed to find a dull period in Thomas Jefferson’s life. Mindful of that, I began devouring Jon Meacham’s 800-page Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power anticipating a gourmet biographical feast. It started off as an enjoyable and well-paced story but it was not long before the taste of syrup began to take over. By the time I reached page eight I had already been informed that “Jefferson was the
most successful political figure of the first half century of the American Republic,” “had a remarkable capacity to marshal ideas and to move on, to balance the inspirational and the pragmatic,” and was “a transformative leader.” He was a “formidable man” and his “genius” was that he “dreamed big but understood that dreams become reality only when their champions are strong enough and wily enough to bend history to their purposes.” A case of “the rare leader who stood out from the crowd without intimidating it,” his “bearing gave him unusual opportunities to make the thoughts in his head the work of his hands, transforming the world around him.” Not only “a man of Enlightenment, always looking forward, consumed by the quest for knowledge” but also “an inveterate walker,” “fit and virile,” “never tired of invention and inquiry,” “delighted in archeology paleontology, astronomy, botany, and meteorology,” “drew sustenance from music and found joy in gardening,” “bought and built beautiful things,”“was an enthusiastic patron of pasta,” and “enjoyed the search for a perfect dressing for his salads.” Moreover, he “knew Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish,” was “a student of human nature, a keen observer of what drove other men,” “perfectly acquainted” with “subject after subject,” an “extraordinary man.” Politically, he was “the father of the ideal of individual liberty, of the Louisiana Purchase, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, of the American West,” “the author and designer of America, a figure who articulated a vision of what the country could be.” A “builder and a fighter,” he “gave the nation the idea of American progress.” He was able to operate “on two levels, cultivating the hope of a brighter future while preserving the political flexibility and skill to bring the ideal as close as possible to reality.” The world “found him charming, brilliant, and gracious,” friends thought “he was among the greatest men who had ever lived, a Renaissance figure who was formidable without seeming overbearing, sparkling without being showy, winning without appearing cloying,” and “women in particular loved him.” Oh, and “he had great teeth” (xvii-xxiv).

The first pages are a herald of what is to come. The book is a glitzy glorification of Jefferson. But it is much more than that. It represents a new and intriguing genre that is perhaps best described as learned hagiography, an eclectic mix of seemingly incompatible components like old-fashioned hero worship, elite-centered topic, seductive narrative aimed at popular readership, solid scholarly research with a heavy apparatus of citations, and a didactic political objective.

The cult of great individuals has never lacked enthusiasts. Some are drawn to the Nietzschean belief that strong personages, superior to ordinary people, are the driving force of history. Others long for a savior who will liberate us from all evil. Some are passive followers finding comfort in believing that this or that leader is wise, knows best, and will guide everyone through the turmoil of existence. Others are mesmerized by the pomp and majesty of office. All reflect the uncanny ability of people to create idealized fictions and then believe their own wishful thinking. Their heroes have one thing in common: they are not so much who they are as who they ought to be.

Greatness sells, which is why hero-worshiping literature has a long and venerable
tradition, rooted in both popular and elite culture. It stretches from Greek mythology, Gesta Romanorum, lives of saints, Arthurian legends, chivalric romances, troubadour songs, and chronicles of monarchs, through the political drama of Renaissance and the epic poetry of European romanticism, to didactic biographies of leaders (such as Parson Weems’s life of Washington) and historical novels. These writings—as opposed to modern, critical history aiming to explain why things happened—mostly describe prominent people and events in time, often embellishing them with invented episodes, folk legends, and even the personal views and experiences of the authors. The goals are usually fairly simple: exalt the qualities of the great and the saintly, lionize the powerful, and point to their role in changing the course of history. One of the distinctive features of this literature is that it was an instructional tool. Its aim was pragmatic and rooted in the present. Authors hoped that their works would supply the collective memory with worthy themes and symbols that bind societies and invite followers. The enduring attractiveness of such stories lies less in their adeptness in reconstructing facts than in their ability to conjure up ideal types, to celebrate the potential of the individual person, and to offer positive models of virtue—all qualities that defy the incoherence of the world.

By selecting Jefferson, Meacham taps directly into the pantheon of national icons. Reverence for the Founders is perhaps the most conspicuous form of hero worship in America. Politicians, journalists, and ordinary people look to them for usable history, and revel in “discovering” their own views in the Founders’ minds. A suitable quote can buy a badge of legitimacy for a broad variety of endeavors. For writers of historical biographies, this appeal has been a gold mine. Hardly a few months go by without a new volume, and the demand seems insatiable. All things considered, this is terrific for history, and helps thwart a broader weakening of public interest in the country’s past (exemplified, for instance, by the decline of U.S. survey courses as core requirements in colleges). . . . 
 
Read more from Historically Speaking at Project Muse. 
Michal Jan Rozbicki on "The Rise of Learned Hagiography" Michal Jan Rozbicki on "The Rise of Learned Hagiography" Reviewed by Joseph Landis on July 09, 2013 Rating: 5

A Preview of Historically Speaking, June 2013

July 07, 2013
Randall Stephens

In not too long Project Muse will post the June issue of Historically Speaking.  In the meantime, copies are being shipped across the country and overseas to subscribers. 

The latest issue contains a lively range of essays.  This month we have the last of Joe Amato's three essays on revitalizing local history. Here he sketches a sensory history of 20th-century rural America. He then explores some causes and effects of the countryside’s marginalization in modern American society. On a related note, Don Yerxa interviews Canadian cultural historian Constance Classen about sense history.  Classen has written extensively on the senses, exploring the lived experiences of embodiment from the Middle Ages to modernity and helping us appreciate the tactile foundations of Western culture.  

Also in this issue are pieces on history and political thought, Mormon historical studies, Stalin and Nazi Germany, Civil War naval history, Britain and the Treaties of 1713 and 1763, family life in colonial New England, and a critique of hagiographical popular history. To round it out, Sean McMeekin speaks with Don Yerxa about the significance of July 1914 and the coming of World War I.

In "It’s Complicated: Rethinking Family Life in Early New England" Allegra di Bonaventura writes of the private lives of colonial Americans, teasing out a fascinating tale from the existing evidence.  "[W]riting about the early African-American family in New England," she notes, "depends unavoidably on the histories of the literate English who often owned and worked their African neighbors and bedfellows. Less evident, however, is that any mainstream history of the New England family faces a similar reckoning with the ethnic, logistical, and emotional complexities of real households."

She begins her piece with a harrowing story:

When his pregnant wife Joan and son Jack were taken from him by law and forced into slavery, a penniless former slave named John Jackson refused to submit to the prevailing powers or to society’s conception of him. Instead, he bided his time and planned a most audacious rescue of his family. After many months of preparation, he pulled it off—traveling across land and rough waters in the middle of the night to break into the house where they were held and “steal” them home. The year in which John Jackson staged this daring rescue was 1711, and the place he ran back home to was New London, Connecticut.


John and Joan Jackson belonged to New England’s first generations of enslaved people, men and women dispersed across English households and found especially along the region’s long coastline and in its port cities. John had arrived in Connecticut in 1686 as a young man of eighteen, emerging as freight and human property from the hold of a West Indian trade ship. At first, he probably worked the wharves at New London Harbor, then went on to receive training in husbandry, the stock and trade of the vast majority of New England men. His wife Joan was a different sort of New Englander. Hers was already an “old” New England family by colonial standards, one that could trace itself at least to the 1650s and the early years of settlement in New London. Joan herself was a native Connecticut girl. Arriving enslaved in a new land, John Jackson would nevertheless make a place for himself in its cold, unwelcoming clime. In time, he would unabashedly assert a life and family of his own—in freedom. 

Around 1700 John Jackson became free and married Joan. Still, whatever happiness the couple felt at uniting in marriage was dimmed by the reality that they had to live apart. Joan was an enslaved woman living in another man’s house entirely under another man’s control. Their first two children, a boy and girl, were born into this grim and uncertain reality—mother and father separated against their will and by miles. Within just a few years, however, Joan Jackson received a highly unusual grant of freedom from her master and mistress, acknowledging in part her dutiful service. Once free, Joan was able to join her husband, but even that reunion was cruelly shortchanged. Because their children, toddler Adam and baby Miriam, had been born while Joan was in bondage, they inherited their bonded status from her as well. By law, Adam and Miriam would be perpetual slaves, the property of their mother’s former owner. When she left to join her husband, Joan was forced to leave the children behind. She and John could visit them, but they would never live together as a family. Yet the Jacksons added a succession of additional children to their family, spending nearly a decade together in relatively peaceful domesticity. John was a farmer who owned no land but who could nevertheless hire himself out in support of his family. Joan was skilled at housewifery, an occupation that she, too, performed for others, as necessary. Any tranquility was abruptly halted in 1710, however, when a powerful local landowner claimed ownership of Joan in court, calling her freedom into question and eventually winning her as his property at trial. The sheriff came and seized a then pregnant Joan, along with their youngest child, two-year-old Jack. Joan and little Jack were taken to live in slavery across the Sound on Long Island, and it was from there that their husband and father would rescue them.

When John Jackson did act, he was not alone. With him that night in 1711 when he retrieved Joan and two of his children (a baby, Rachel, was born in slavery on Long Island) was an aging merchant by the name of John Rogers. The merchant, too, was an ardent family man, and one who had also found it necessary to fight for his family when the law took his wife and children away. For Rogers, it had not been slavery but religious difference that led him to suffer that deeply personal loss repeatedly. A religious radical, Rogers founded his own Baptist Sabbatarian sect, diverging from the prevailing Congregational way. Rogers was rich; Jackson, poor. Rogers was English; Jackson, African. Rogers had bought and owned Jackson after he arrived in Connecticut, and freed him more than a decade later.

The bond between Jackson and Rogers had unusual characteristics, formed first in the injustice of slavery, but also steeped in the new ideas and common purpose of a shared insurgent faith. . . .
Read more by subscribing to Historically Speaking.  Or, access the June issue on Project Muse through your library's account.
A Preview of Historically Speaking, June 2013 A Preview of Historically Speaking, June 2013 Reviewed by Joseph Landis on July 07, 2013 Rating: 5

Memorial Day Posts

May 22, 2013
Randall Stephens

While I'm at an American Studies conference in Sweden, the blog will be taking a short break.  In the meantime, have a look at this two past posts that deal with Memorial Day:

Heather Cox Richardson, "A Thank You to Our Troops—All of Them—on this Memorial Day," May 30, 2011

Memorial Day came out of the Decoration Days held after the Civil War. This seems like a logical thing for me, a scholar of nineteenth century America, to write about today.

Instead, though, I’d like to talk about a group of soldiers that often gets forgotten when we remember our troops. I mean the WACs, the more than 150,000 women who served in the U.S. Army during World War II.>>>

Randall Stephens, "The History of Memorial Day and the National World War One Museum, Kansas City," May 23, 2009

As Americans cram their faces with hot dogs and swill cheap beer, many will also reflect on the heroic efforts of countless men and women who have served their country over the years. Parades, concerts, and ceremonies across Boston will turn our attention to those who fought and died for their country. The National memorial Day Concert in Washington, D.C., will draw a massive crowd of observers in the capitol and TV viewers.>>>
Memorial Day Posts Memorial Day Posts Reviewed by Joseph Landis on May 22, 2013 Rating: 5

Study of Past Sparks Debate about the Future in the UK

May 14, 2013
Randall Stephens

Readers might find interesting this recent article in the Guardian about history battles.   On the heels of the Niall Ferguson scandal, Labour Education spokesman and historian Tristram Hunt writes: "From curriculum rows to Niall Ferguson's remarks on Keynes, our past is the fuel for debate about th
Read the above at the BBC
e future." ("History is where the great battles of public life are now being fought," Guardian, May 12, 2013).

Here's a brief excerpt:

For as [Niall] Ferguson has discovered to his cost, history enjoys a uniquely controversial place within British public life. "There is no part of the national curriculum so likely to prove an ideological battleground for contending armies as history," complained an embattled Michael Gove in a speech last week. "There may, for all I know, be rival Whig and Marxist schools fighting a war of interpretation in chemistry or food technology but their partisans don't tend to command much column space in the broadsheets."

Even if academic historians might not like it, politicians are right to involve themselves in the curriculum debate. The importance of history in the shaping of citizenship, developing national identity and exploring the ties that bind in our increasingly disparate, multicultural society demands a democratic input. The problem is that too many of the progressive partisans we need in this struggle are missing from the field.

How different it all was 50 years ago this summer when EP Thompson published The Making of the English Working Class , his seminal account of British social history during the Industrial Revolution. "I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the 'obsolete' hand loom weaver, the 'utopian' artist ... from the condescension of posterity," he wrote.>>>
Study of Past Sparks Debate about the Future in the UK Study of Past Sparks Debate about the Future in the UK Reviewed by Joseph Landis on May 14, 2013 Rating: 5

Science, Religion, and the Modern West: The April Issue of Historically Speaking

April 28, 2013
Randall Stephens

In the coming week the April 2013 issue of Historically Speaking will be posted to the Project Muse site.  Subscribers can expect it soon in mailboxes.  The issue includes essays on environmental history, ancient religion, teaching, and Harry Truman.It also features interviews with Matthew Bowman on Mormonism in American history, John R. Gillis on seacoasts in history, and turning points of World War I with Ian F.W. Beckett. 

In addition the April issue includes a lively forum on "Scientific Culture in the Modern Era" with intellectual historian Stephen Gaukroger (University of Sydney).  "One of the most distinctive features of Western culture since the 17th century is the gradual assimilation of all cognitive values to scientific ones," writes Gaukroger in his lead essay. "A particular image of the role and aims of scientific understanding is tied up in a very fundamental way with the self-image of Western modernity. One striking illustration of this is the way that the West’s sense of what its superiority consisted of shifted seamlessly in the early decades of the 19th century from religion to science. From that time on, but particularly in the second half of the 20th century, this self-understanding has been exported as an essential ingredient in the process of modernization."

With this major shift in Western thought, soon enough religion came under new scrutiny. Using the perspectives of historical-critical thinking and later developments in science, researchers from the late-19th century forward began to reinterpret the sacred texts of the West. In an essay on "The Dead Sea Scrolls," also in the April issue, John J. Collins  (Yale Divinity School) examines changing perspectives and decades of wrangling about the meaning and context of the scrolls.  ""No archaeological discovery of the 20th century has aroused more interest than the Dead Sea Scrolls," Collins observes.

Below are two sections from Collins' fascinating piece on the arguments and counterarguments about the scrolls:

[American biblical scholar and historian] Robert Eisenman argued that the Scrolls, rather than the Gospels, were the primary documents of early Christianity, which was a hate-filled, xenophobic movement. Australian scholar Barbara Thiering claimed that Jesus was the figure called “the Wicked Priest” in the Scrolls. Two British writers, Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, published a book called The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception in 1991, in which they argued that Allegro and Eisenman were right, but that the truth was suppressed by the priests on the editorial team at the behest of the Vatican. Most scholars dismiss all of this as nonsense, but it always finds a ready market in the press. Even now, after most of the debates have subsided, laypeople ask earnestly whether Jesus or John the Baptist were Essenes. There is no reason to think that they were.
Text from The Great Isaiah Scroll,
The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

 
In fact, the relevance of the Scrolls to early Christianity is complex. They fill out many details about the world in which Christianity was born. The followers of Jesus, like the Essenes, believed that history would soon come to an end, that a savior figure would come from heaven, and that messiahs would restore the right order on Earth. Their idea of what constituted the right order, however, was very different from that of the Essenes. Jesus and his followers did not place great emphasis on purity, and were more concerned about what came out of a person’s mouth than with what went in. The sect known from the Scrolls, in contrast, was obsessed with purity, and separated themselves from their fellow Jews to avoid defilement.

The Arab-Israeli war of 1967 was a turning point in the history of scholarship on the Scrolls. Both the site of Qumran and the Rockefeller Museum where most of the Scrolls were kept came under Israeli
An aerial view of the ruins of Qumran. From the
BBC documentary Traders of the Dead Sea Scrolls (1998).
control. The Israelis did not immediately interfere in the publication process. The old editorial team remained in place for more than twenty years. But Yigael Yadin, who was both a general in the army and a distinguished scholar, took some soldiers and paid a visit to Kando, the cobbler in Bethlehem who was the middleman to whom the Bedouin brought the Scrolls. After some “unpleasant” negotiations, Yadin took possession of a long document called the Temple Scroll, which Kando had hidden in a shoe box under the floor boards. Kando later received a payment from the Israelis by way of settlement. . . .

The debates about the Scrolls have often been acrimonious. Norman Golb, long-time professor at the University of Chicago, has persistently disputed the Essene attribution, and has complained vociferously whenever his position is not acknowledged. His son Rafael, a real-estate lawyer in New York, was convicted in the State Supreme Court in November 2009 of impersonating a prominent Scrolls scholar, Lawrence Schiffman, who disagrees with his father, and pretending to confess to plagiarism in Schiffman’s name, apparently in the hope of incriminating him. Elisha Qimron, the scholar who helped publish 4QMMT, sued a magazine publisher, Herschel Shanks, for unauthorized publication of the reconstructed text and translation. Shanks was convicted by an Israeli court and had to pay damages. Exchanges about the Scrolls have often been more heated than is usual in the normally peaceful world of biblical scholarship.

It is somewhat difficult to say why this is so. For scholars like Golb, the Jewish character of the Scrolls seems to be at stake. The implication is that if they are attributed to a marginal sect, the Essenes, they are not “really Jewish” and are more akin to Christianity. For a long time Christian scholars had seemed to appropriate the Scrolls and set them against rabbinic Judaism. Certainly, some of the claims about the relevance of the Scrolls for early Christianity have been wildly exaggerated. . . .

The full essay will soon be posted at Project Muse. Subscribe to Historically Speaking here.
Science, Religion, and the Modern West: The April Issue of Historically Speaking Science, Religion, and the Modern West: The April Issue of Historically Speaking Reviewed by Joseph Landis on April 28, 2013 Rating: 5
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