Shared Experiences of Different Times: Academic Empathy and Recognition in Blogging

Academic bloggers write for all sorts of reasons. Many write to share their research with a wider diverse audience than is to be found in professional journals. Others do so to "test drive" ideas with familiar folks before they move into working with them in formal scholarship. Some write as an opportunity to respond to contemporary events and to interact with others. One feature that I have noticed though is writing as a mechanism for coping with and working through challenging problems we encounter when doing our research and analysis.

I recently wrote about my struggles with questions of morality in the subjects I work with in my research, and lo, it seems that particularly in these cold winter months, others are in a similar position.

Robert Greene II, in "When History Knocks You On Your Behind," describes how he stumbled across a historical figure who shares his name (sans an "e") and the questions, concerns, and opportunities this provided. Along the way, Robert shares his experience of interacting with, and finding, subjects of future scholarly or personal interest.

Over at S-USIH Blog (the blog for the Society for United States Intellectual History), Robin Marie shared her experiences with tackling her emotions while working on racial, gender, and other social iniquities in her post, "Writing Through Rage." Despite these issues, she continues to push through with both her research and writing. Also at S-USIH Blog, Ben Alpers discusses questions of pessimism and optimism in students today in his post, "The Ceremony of Innocence is Drowned." Both of these posts are fascinating, and make sure to take a look at the comments as well.

Kathryn Hamilton Warren recounts working with of her students who was morally opposed to the literature that was a part of one of her first classes in "The Reluctant Reader." This encounter, she suggests, reminded her that there is more than one perspective on the value of encountering new material.

The bloggers over at Lingua Franca often infuse their discussions of grammar, linguistics, and vocabulary with analysis of contemporary society, their everyday lives, and the issues of being in the academy.

The common thread between all of these bloggers is the attempt to use their writing as a mechanism for coming to grasps with what they've encountered in their professional lives. While surely we turn to those in our homes, workplaces, and places of faith for issues we confront, academic bloggers take the chance to try to negotiate these questions in a way that is both cathartic and hopefully useful to our peers that might be experiencing similar circumstance. 

Despite the image of the floofy professor in the coffee shop smoking and quoting obscura, those in the humanities are individuals who passionately want to understand, challenge, preserve, and render the arts, history, and values of the world around us into a fashion that improves society. Often, though particularly as of late, these attempts are marginalized and challenged. Some of this criticism is warranted, there are excesses in every endeavor. This does not mean that we as a nation should turn our backs on this challenge. Rather, we should take advantage of the thing that makes us humanists, our humanity, and turn toward each other with understanding and try to learn from, and lean on, each other as we confront the world in front, behind, and around us.

Reviewing American Philosophy: A Love Story by John Kaag

*Note-References are to the nearest section heading. As I was reading a Kindle Edition of the book, pagination was not available for consultation. It is well worth reading in this fashion, as you can highlight and search terms very easily as well as cycling between references and text.*

Other than documentary editors, librarians, archivists, and public historians, few ponder the relationship between historical materials, their physical construction, and their contemporary residences. I use the term residence, as opposed to holding institution or institutional repository deliberately. Books are, except in cases of gravity, transient receivers of action rather than active components interceding in human life. John Kaag’s American Philosophy: A Love Story (2016) is an important reminder of the transitory and often imperiling journeys the stuff of historiography takes on the way to the hands of researchers.

Part of my interest in the realm of intellectual history is in the concept of intellectual ancestry. While comprehending a chain of influence between generations of thinkers is incredibly difficult, historians can gather indications of this ancestry through materials such as correspondence, allusion, and referencing. As someone who has been privy to discussions of the quirks related to individual libraries being deposited, I felt a keen sense of connection to Kaag’s lamentation that “books are lost among the millions of others in the stacks, reorganized in a homogenized Library of Congress categorization. The books are put in rigid order, and the unique integrity of the original collection is lost.” (Part 1: Hell: Finding West Wind) One area, which unfortunately has been sanitized and cataloged away, that provides the cleanest assessment of this influence is the personal library. Personal libraries are just that, personal. They are highly individualized collections of resources, pleasures, values, and aspirations (As I write, an unopened copy of Being and Nothingness taunts my optimistic bibliophilic purchasing).

Kaag’s work was described by an NPR reviewer as hitting the “spot between intellectual history and personal memoir…” While it is true that there aren’t many of the formal historical elements such as citation, this doesn’t detract from his narrative. One does get the sense that Kaag is aptly educated and experienced to write the narrative to which his name is affixed (think Whitfield’s The Culture of the Cold War). Kaag twists together elements of intellectual biography, intellectual history, and philosophy and does a good job of keeping these components separate from his personal narrative. For those interested in American philosophy, Kaag provides an impressively concise introduction to the world of late 19^th and early 20^th Century Harvard. Kaag presents Dewey, Kant, and Pierce as engaging human beings trying to grapple with reconciling personal and philosophical worlds. Each interacts with the others in academic and friendly settings, suggesting that at times they encountered conflicts in their home lives based on their work.

There is a nostalgic sense of intimacy which pervades American Philosophy: A Love Story, but it is perfectly appropriate given his genre. If one is seeking a detailed account of the scholastic interrelationships between modernist philosophers, go elsewhere. If what you seek instead is a personal account of one scholar’s struggles with their field and their lives, Kaag’s is a perfect example. Kaag’s work is indeed memoir and explores his personal and professional elements, but these elements add to his narrative rather than pull from it. Kaag presents an opportunity to look at the way a scholar confronts the problems of his time and the very nature of his discipline. Seldom do scholars tackle the stuff which makes scholarship possible along with the intimacies of scholastic life in the same work. American Philosophy: A Love Story is, as the title suggests, a romantic humanistic statement of one scholar’s intellectual pursuits while dealing with the problems that life sometimes brings.

Kaag’s work is not a source for intellectual historical research, though it certainly could serve as inspiration for much inquiry. It is well worth a read, particularly as breaks provide the opportunity for some more leisurely reading. For the interested, Kaag and others have started a Kickstarter project to digitize the Hocking Library which is now a part of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell Library system.  A link to that project can be found here. 

Finding That Spark: Slogging Through Writer's Block

This post will be a bit different from anything that has gone up recently, which you might have noticed has been nothing. With the past semester's writing projects (including, I'm happy to report, three pending publications), I set aside writing on the blog in favor of academic work. Additionally, I've been struggling with perhaps the most difficult elements of thesis work, burnout and writer's block. So to that point, I'm going to outline roughly what projects I've been working on and what still lays ahead. My hope is to (1) provide an update for anyone who might be interested, (2) offer up some possible directions for future work — and to seek out potential collaborators on that work — and projects, and (3) to break through the latest round of writer's block by changing gears.

Publication Pending

Three of my recent projects are working their way through the printing pipeline. Each is a little different, and each one provided unique opportunities.

Cooperative Extension

The first of these publications provided the chance to look at two categories I don't typically work in: organizational and labor history. For this project, I looked at records from the Cooperative Extension Service in White County, IN. I outlined what these records can tell researchers about government programs during the Great Depression and how genealogists and family historians can use them to gain insight into the lives of ancestors. Along the way, I was fortunate to work with some records generated by one of my own ancestors, Ralph Alvin Chitty, who was one of the first C.E.S. Agents in Indiana, and for that matter, in the U.S. That research will reach print later this summer in the Indiana Historical Society's The Hoosier Genealogist: Connections. 

Bible Records

Another publication analyzes the role of family bible records related to a mid-nineteenth century lawyer from Fountain County, Indiana. These records are discussed as a tool for genealogists as well as for other historians. These records are discussed in relation to using newspapers and campaign materials as sources for understanding political action in pre-twentieth century America. This article will be published sometime in early fall.

Historic Diaries

My third and final pending publication looks at using historic diaries as sources of finding names, as well as understanding social dynamics between individuals. The diary of interest relates to a teenage girl from Martin County, Indiana in the early 1930's. As a part of that work, I've indexed the names of individuals included within her diaries from the period. This article will be published sometime in early fall.

Completed, For Now: Paratext and Education

One of the most interesting projects I had the chance to work on this spring was a "big" history of paratextual development in European education. Spanning from ancient history to the mid-nineteenth centuries, this term project focused on how paratextual elements including typography, tables of contents, indicies, page numbers, and marginalia came to be incorporated to form what we now know as "academic" texts. Special emphasis was placed on how major educational figures over time would have experienced the texts that they studied and produced. I am hoping to post a more user-friendly version of that work at a later date.

Current Research

As to current projects, I have two major efforts, and a significant search for a permanent job, underway. Both still have significant hurdles ahead, but both hold the possibility of providing fascinating insights into twentieth-century America.

 Understanding Factory Work During the Depression

The first project is using the diary of a young woman who worked for a shirt factory in Loogootee, IN to understand issues related to the private and working lives of Hoosiers during the Great Depression. The company she worked for had factories throughout the Midwest, and her experience provides a personal window into understanding the daily struggles of a working woman during that time. 

Thesis: Public Intellectualism in the Early Cold War

This is the biggest project I've ever undertaken, I suppose as it should be. Though this project has morphed over time, the major theme has remained the same. My hope is to look at the milieu of public intellectuals in the early Cold War. While the topic does, as most of my family knows, involve fiction author Ray Bradbury, I will forgo explaining further at this point in time (namely so I don't invite a competing thesis or article). 

Future Directions/False Starts

Along the way, there have been several false starts on projects which might provide interesting avenues for future research. Interesting prospects and possibilities exist when time permits. I'm happy to potentially collaborate on these projects, or for resources that might be of use.

Scouting in American Society

Being an Eagle Scout, I have long held an interest in scouting related materials, and think that working with those that I've managed to cobble together (including several decades of manuals, magazines, and field guides) might provide a unique opportunity to look at changes in American values.

Rural Electrification

A tangential topic to the aforementioned article on the Cooperative Extension Service, rural electrification was aided by CES under the auspices of the Tennessee Valley Authority and other New Deal programs. My hope is to look at both the impact this had on rural families as well as the lives of early employees of the electric co-op system.

Indiana's Fighting "Basketbrawlers"

While working on another project, I came across numerous references to riots and fights breaking out as a part of basketball games in Indiana. I'd like to go back and see if these incidents were limited to the court or if they occurred during other sporting events. I would also like to see what life was like for these players after they moved on from sporting.

Big Picture History in Daily Lives

In exploring several diaries while working on another project, I noticed recordings of what many people might consider to be "big" events (presidential elections, assassinations, scientific discoveries). I would like to go back and explore whether individuals' recordings of these types of events in diaries and other unpublished sources hold up over generations. Does the speed with which we now receive news change our perception of its importance to our everyday lives? Have we fundamentally altered the way we commemorate these events as individuals? Are our heat of the moment responses to major events any more accurate today than they were in centuries past? So many questions exist, and there seems to be a treasure trove waiting to be examined.

Records Retention Policies in Public Universities

In the category of what my wife calls "boring historian stuff" is an interest in looking at the records retention policies of public universities. I would like to try to look at this issue from multiple perspectives including from those of records producers, facility managers, administrators, privacy advocates, information technologists, and historians. While the topic may seem dry today, the retention (and disposal) of records changes what stories will be and can be explored by the historians of tomorrow. My hope is that this would lead to some form of policy recommendations for universities and other public institutions that try to balance stakeholders concerns.

Audio Comparative Review: Nash and Jacoby

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Cover of ISI 30th Anniversary Edition	--------------------------------	Cover of Basic Books 1982 Edition

The Review

Review of Murolo and Chitty's From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend

Priscilla Murolo and A.B. Chitty. From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend: A Short, Illustrated History of Labor in the United States. New York: The New Press. 2001. xx + 364. Cloth.

“It was past time to compile these insights into a new general history” (Murolo and Chitty, 2001: xi). This simple line sums up one of the critical differences between From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend and other scholarly works addressing labor history in the United States. Murolo and Chitty’s work is primarily a “general history,” in that its intention is not to provide an analytic, philosophical, or theoretical monograph on the course of labor history in the American nation. Instead, Folks is a narrative history of the United States, with the working members of society and their efforts highlighted throughout. The authors are careful to state their objectives from the start with hopes to provide “a comprehensive survey of U.S. history for the general reader...;” address that “the labor movement itself had changed...” since the last major general history had appeared; and finally, to correct what they saw as a defect in the American educational enterprise, that “much of what we learn and teach in schools is just not true” (Murolo and Chitty, 2001: xi-xii). Why is this relevant to assessing the value of Folks with regard to contemporary historiography? Without doing so, one risks unfairly critiquing Murolo and Chitty for not creating something they never intended to write.

Such unfair criticism would include challenging the lack of citation throughout the book, parenthetical, footnoted, or otherwise. While this indeed hinders readers from easily accessing the direct sources of information from which the authors draw their examples, incorporating them into this form of book hinders general readers and often conflicts with the publishing standards many companies have with regard to constructing monographs. In trying to create a review narrative for non-scholars, at least for those interested in having their work read, authors must adapt to the genre. This form exists in contrast to works focused on providing analysis and theory; those works necessitate providing clear citation in order to allow for verification and assessment by other scholars. Nelson Lichtenstein’s State of the Union: A Century of American Labor (2002) and Alice Kessler-Harris’s Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States (1982), both impressive analytic monographs which are of great utility to future scholars, include substantive citational and discursive notes to clarify and reinforce their efforts. When writers of analyses, including Bruce Laurie’s Artisans Into Workers (1989), fail to incorporate these mechanisms, their work is left open to challenge, loses some credibility, and may be limited in its utility to researchers. Folks, meanwhile, is not intended for such a purpose. Murolo and Chitty’s effort is instead focused on whetting the appetites of readers to look more closely at labor history and how the discipline can provide different perspectives on old, familiar, topics. When discursive footnotes are included, they provide both a momentary outlet from the central narrative, and again, stimulate interest for other areas to look. What does lend credence to the author’s understanding of the topic is a generous Suggested Readings section and fluent narrative style.

This fluency comes from a substantive background in issues of labor history. Murolo is a faculty member in the Department of History at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, where she is Director of the Women’s History Graduate Program. She has a PhD from Yale University (1993), where she studied under noted labor historian David Montgomery. Her other major monograph was The Common Ground of Womanhood: Class, Gender, and Working Girls’ Clubs 1884-1923 (1993) Arthur Ben (A.B.) Chitty is a Library Systems Officer and Higher Education Associate with Queens College, City University of New York. Chitty has produced eight short books analyzing topics as wide ranging as cities in the Southwest, university development in the Reconstruction South, and an autobiography of bi-racial, illegitimate child in Reconstruction Era Tennessee. They live in Yonkers, New York.

Murolo and Chitty use this scholarly background to their advantage in Folks. Their work is incredibly fluid and easily read, as they have the necessary practice to present the larger historical components with solid prose that feels well practiced (almost as if they are used to teaching the subject). The two are careful to include a wide variety of peoples, especially during their discussion of the colonial and Revolutionary periods, when general histories often are predominantly from the perspective of white, rich, male voices. Though this particular reader would have liked to see some referencing to the source material for these characters, that interest is primarily to assuage selfish curiosity, rather than scholarly expectation.

The inclusion of Joe Sacco’s fascinating illustrations provides a stimulating experience in its own right, and one could easily connect this history through cartoon to later historical works employing the graphic narrative form, especially Ari Kellman and Jonathan Fetter-Vorm’s recent Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War (2015).

Reviews of the book were generally favorable, and most, like Paul LeBlanc’s review in International Labor and Working Class History (Fall, 2004), recognize that while the book is “hardly the last word on the story of the US working class,” but it does give readers, “valuable knowledge, rich insights, and challenging interpretations,” useful, “not only for those just learning about US and labor history, but also for experienced hands who can benefit from, and be stimulated by, a fresh and sometimes audacious retelling of the story” (LeBlanc, 2004: 218). “Undoubtedly,” notes James Spady, reviewer for The Radical Teacher (Fall 2004), “specialist researchers will object to elements of the narrative, theory, and method implicit in the book” (Spady, 2004: 16). Indeed, objecting to these elements is, in large part, what provides jobs for scholars. This book is not for those readers though.

What general readers may struggle with is a problem inherent to many analyses in labor history, alphabet soup. A five-page section at the beginning of the book lays out a compendium of government, corporate, and organizational and programmatic name abbreviations. Even with this, readers may struggle to identify the difference between subjects, and they may get a headache trying to ascertain how these pieces fit together. This confusion, though, is not a problem created by Murolo and Chitty; it is a by-product of the complex system they discuss.

The final chapter of the book is one area in which this reviewer is uncertain. Murolo and Chitty bring their analysis chronologically as close as is possible when producing a book. While this would be unsurprising in a sociological, economic, or political science text, its incorporation in a substantive chapter (rather than in the Epilogue) is odd for a history text. One important considerations for historians attempting to support their claims is by ensuring “historical distance” from their subjects to preserve objectivity, that is, as Mark Phillips suggests in History Workshop Journal (Vol. 57, 2004), “in terms of emotional identification and detachment - and, by extension, of the political or social loyalties that engage both historians and readers with their stories” (Phillips, 2004, 127). The generally accepted exception to this concept is in appended sections (particularly Epilogues, Codas, and the like) where it is common for authors to highlight contemporary shifts and concerns as areas for future scholarly inquiry. This may however, be an attempt by the authors to represent their own advocacy for the study and importance of labor history. Such advocacy is also a commonplace occurrence, particularly for subfields seen as marginalized or shrinking, such as labor history.

This distance does not substantially alter the utility or tone of the book. It is, rather, a discursive difference in how one structures a history monograph (Itself obviously a far from settled formulation, something the thousands of “how-to” books available can attest to). Instead, this quirk provides an interesting opportunity for a new edition, one which incorporates all of the chaos caused by 9/11, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Great Recession, the Tea Party, and our current era of income/wealth disparity. Perhaps, though, this would simply reiterate the lack of distance inherent to “compiling” the insights of contemporary history. It will certainly be interesting to see what makes the cut for the next generation of “general labor history.”

Review of Bruce Laurie's Artisans Into Workers (1989)

Bruce Laurie, Artisans Into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989. pp. 257. Includes Bibliographic Essay and Index.

*Note: Page numbers refer to Illini Books Edition, 1997.

In 1989, when writing Artisans Into Workers, Bruce Laurie had established himself as a historian interested in labor issues. Laurie graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in 1971, having written his dissertation, “The Working People of Philadelphia, 1827-1853” which studied modernist laborers in America. By 1989, when Artisans Into Workers came out, Laurie had edited one major work on the subject and had successfully expanded his dissertation into a full-length monograph. Though Laurie’s research interests later on in his career would grow into studying conservativism’s development as well as abolitionism, at the time, he was primarily interested in the connections between labor and society in nineteenth-century America. These connections placed Laurie in the unique roll of being able to synthesize earlier institutionally focused labor history and the “new social history” of labor that was becoming popular at the time (indeed many of his reviewers noted this attempt as novel) as well as the intellectual roots of American radicalism.

Reading as an Escape

"'A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies'...'The man who never reads lives only one.'"
-George R.R. Martin, A Dance With Dragons

March is National Reading Month:

Yesterday I was reading an article online about famous quotes showing reading as an escape, which is true. Reading provides us the opportunity to slip outside of ourselves and into the mind of someone else. This can give us a chance to relax, the opportunity to experience an adventure, to explore new worlds, learn new things, or even the chance to simply have a good laugh. I thoroughly enjoy reading and while some would say it is a waste of time (most notoriously my gym instructor), this fails to keep in mind one thing, what food and exercise do for the body, reading does for the mind and soul. I generally try to keep a mixture of things in my reading list at any given time and today is no different. My current reading list is (with relevant details and the current Amazon description).

1. Crisis on Infinite Earths- Graphic Novel, Marv Wolfmann, 1985.
   "This is the story that changed the DC Universe forever. A mysterious being known as the Anti-Monitor has begun a crusade across time to bring about the end of all existence. As alternate earths are systematically destroyed, the Monitor quickly assembles a team of super-heroes from across time and space to battle his counterpart and stop the destruction. DC's greatest heroes including Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, and Aquaman, assemble to stop the menace, but as they watch both the Flash and Supergirl die in battle, they begin to wonder if even all of the heroes in the world can stop this destructive force."
2. The Public History Reader-  Paperback, Kean and Martin, 2013.
   "Drawing on theory and practice from five continents, The Public History Reader offers clearly written accessible introductions to debates in public history as it places people, such as practitioners, bloggers, archivists, local historians, curators or those working in education, at the heart of history-making. Hilda Kean and Paul Martin explore public history as an everyday practice rather than simply as an academic discipline - the idea that historical knowledge is discovered and accrued from everyday encounters people have with their environments and the continuing dialogue that the present has with the past."
3. The Last Policeman- Paperback, Ben Winters, 2012.
   "What’s the point in solving murders if we’re all going to die soon, anyway?
   Detective Hank Palace has faced this question ever since asteroid 2011GV1 hovered into view. There’s no chance left. No hope. Just six precious months until impact.  
   The Last Policeman presents a fascinating portrait of a pre-apocalyptic United States. The economy spirals downward while crops rot in the fields. Churches and synagogues are packed. People all over the world are walking off the job—but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week—except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares."
4. Master of War- Hardback, Suzanne Simons, 2009.
   *Note:This particular book states that it is the "true" story of something, aka it is an expose type book, so please use your own discretion in what you take away from it.*
   "Master of War is the riveting true story of Eric Prince, the ex-Navy SEAL who founded Blackwater and built the world’s largest military contractor, privatizing war for client nations around the world. A CNN producer and anchor, Suzanne Simons is the first journalist to get deep inside Blackwater—and, as a result of her unprecedented access, Master of War provides the most complete and revelatory account of the rise of this powerful corporate army and the remarkable entrepreneur who brought it into being, while offering an eye-opening, behind-the-scenes look at the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."

I like having a large variety of books to read at any given moment for two reasons. First, so that whatever I'm feeling like I have a go to book, and secondly, I learned that if I keep different subjects I learn to organize information differently, which helped when I had many classes and work to keep straight.

If you have any good books to suggest please do. I read most anything other than paparazzi magazines. 

Best Wishes!