What's History: Time Enough at Last

At every progressive academic stage, someone tells you to enjoy the one you're in while it lasts, because things are different in the next and you won't have as much time. This is both true and unhelpful while you're in it, because you can't quite see your way to the next stage and don't know how to implement the advice.

The research year of a PhD, which I am currently in the midst of, is one of those times. You get the blessed freedom to direct your efforts in whatever direction you like, which is lovable in theory and anxiety-producing in practice. This week I've been struck by how hard it can be to just sit and work on something, because you are unprepared to do the creative work of writing, and the unstructured work of research has not yet been completed. To find your best ideas, you have to spend at least some time looking at things without knowing quite what you're looking for. Sure, poking around can be a form of procrastination. But it's also frequently the only way you get to a topic that really needs to be explored, or a question that needs answering. 

As a result, I'm invested in coming up with ways to incorporate this kind of time into the courses I teach: time which students can spend unstructured time wandering around the edges of their projects. I think in the next course I teach, I will assign students to spend a half-hour each week poking around a topic discussed in class or a larger final project topic that they're considering, depending on the structure of the course. I'm also considering opening up a class period or optional weekly blocks of time in which students could gather and perform this research or get individual help with the resources available for this sort of exploration.

Why bother assigning unstructured research time? First, I want students to have a chance to realize the importance of this kind of time through practice. Even if you're aware of this, and sit down to write an entire blog post about it, it can be hard to convince yourself that this time is worthwhile. Years of primary and secondary education can have the effect of making both unstructured and creative thought difficult even as the brain is active and learning. This is partially because assignments in high school and college are so focused on deliverables: Create a poster. Write a five page essay. Introduction with thesis, body, conclusion. And these deliverables must be delivered on time: Due Thursday, by 5 pm, in my box, or by midnight on the 23rd, by email only. Add the pressures of taking four other classes, having a job that pays for your food and housing, and engagement in campus or local groups, and it begins to seem like any poking around without a specific goal is a luxury. Why would I take a stroll through the LibGuide for the class when that won't put words on the page? If I had time to wander around the internet, I'd do it recreationally!

I also want to give students as many opportunities as possible to figure out how to use the research resources available to them. It's often fairly late in the game that students get a handle on the kinds of tools available for academic research, even though in my experience they are told frequently about them. I remember a great number of library field trips in my undergraduate classes, but I didn't truly use and appreciate the resources explained to us until I wrote my master's thesis. I still learn of new resources that make me wonder how I did anything before I knew about them. Also, every institution is different, and their practices can make the problem of knowing how to look for things better or worse. For example, the Proquest newspaper database allows the user to search articles from a wide variety of papers from the past several hundred years. To find this from the homepage of the UIUC library website, there is a circuitous path of clicking through LibGuides and headings, and truthfully I think I find it a different way every time. Without the specific link, it's unlikely for someone to stumble upon it. This is where the optional gathering or consulting research periods I mentioned above are particularly helpful.

I also think the time gives students permission to invest in the course in ways that many of them would like to do, but feel that they shouldn't. In undergrad I was, like many students, locked in a battle between my interests and my obligations; I was glad when an assignment gave me an "excuse" to look further at texts that I wanted to understand better, not because I loved to write papers but because, if I had to write one, I wanted to make it service my interests and my development as a person. I wanted to know what I thought about things that I knew I should have thoughts about, and having an assignment which allowed me to explore that made that goal somehow more legitimate in a college culture focused on deliverables. 

This kind of unstructured exploration of a topic has broader applications than just historical research. A similar process can help with all sorts of writing-- my sporadic attempts at keeping diaries and writing fiction have also often faltered because I sat down to write without bothering to reflect on what I wanted to write about. I hope that students will be able to carry the skills they learn from weekly unstructured research to other parts of their lives. 

I wish I had more links to share on the topic, but unfortunately my attempts to search for people discussing this strategy haven't turned up much. If you have any recommendations of other discussions, or thoughts on your own experiences with unstructured research time, I'd love to hear about them.

Related Links: 

Title Talk-- Time Enough at Last.

What's History: Walking Into the Past in Coco

Poster for Coco, from the film's Twitter. 

I'm always looking for ways to translate the work (and play) of what history is when teaching, perhaps because it took me such a long time to figure it out for myself. The practice of history is deceptively simple-- read/look at/listen to things; write about them; repeat-- but the significance and the everyday reality of this process is difficult to explain. It is best experienced by example and, I think, only evident through piecemeal glimpses: 

• Reading diverse kinds of scholarship which use different sources to perform different functions, and trying to take apart their pieces to see how the evidence makes the journey to argument. 
• Trying to assemble your own narrative through looking at primary source documents, whether for a paper or just trying to find out who lived in your apartment years before you did. 
• Seeing hints of historical practice as reflected in fiction/media/everyday activities. 

 This last is what I took a stab at in my post about the song Burn in Hamilton, and it's what I want to take up again in reference to the new and widely praised Pixar film Coco. I saw Coco last week and was struck by the way in which the protagonist's journey suggests the paths we take when researching the past. This isn't a review-- great short reviews of the film by Latino film critics can be found at Remezcla, which I highly recommend. There are also a few major spoilers, so go see Coco first (newly stripped of its saccharine Frozen short, by this point-- so enjoy the extra 22 minutes of free time!).

In brief-- 12-year-old Miguel, a boy born into a family of shoemakers, wishes to become a musician like his idol, Ernesto de la Cruz. Unfortunately, he must take up his passion in secret, as his family forbade music in all forms after his great-great grandfather left his wife, Imelda, to pursue a musical career generations ago. Miguel looks at a photograph from the family ofrenda and comes to believe that de la Cruz is his great-great grandfather. Determined to convince his family to accept his musical ambitions, the boy takes de la Cruz's guitar to compete in a local Dia de los Muertos talent show. However, he contracts a family curse which can only be broken by a blessing from a family member. Miguel finds his family quickly among the skeletal but friendly dead, but Imelda will only break the curse if she can bind him to a promise not to play music. Coco follows Miguel's journey through the Land of the Dead as he allies with Héctor, who claims to know de la Cruz; tries to avoid Imelda and her powerful alebrije; and finds the only family member who he believes will bless him with no restrictions-- de la Cruz himself. Along the way, Miguel not only makes connection with long-deceased family members-- he also uncovers truths which lead him to change the present in ways both personal and far-reaching.

In many ways, Miguel's journey echoes that of a historian. When he encounters his family in the cemetery and follows them to the Land of the Dead, the passage between the two is rendered as a bridge made of marigold petals. 

Miguel and faithful canine companion Dante on the bridge to the Land of the Dead.  

In addition to the literal role it serves as a temporary connection between life and death, the divide between the Land of the Dead and that of the living can function as a metaphor on a variety of different levels. Film critic Carlos Aguilar argues that the divide echoes immigrant experiences, caught on opposite sides of a border, and that the film itself serves as a place of connection:

Coco is a bridge between those who are gone and those who remain, whether that means they’ve departed forever or just find themselves apart. It’s a bridge made of bright cempasúchil, centuries of hardship, economic migration, reconnections, newfound appreciation for the past, and culture depicted through animation. It’s a bridge between Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, between relatives that never met because time or laws didn’t allow it, between English and Spanish, between rural Mexico and chilangos like me, and between Hollywood and Latinos.

I suggest that the bridge also works as a different metaphor, a powerful symbol of the divide, yet continual connection between the present and the past.

As a result of his journey, Miguel's relationship with the people of the past changes. At first, the ancestors on the family ofrenda represent only obligation to Miguel-- building blocks in the creation of a roadblock to his future as a musician. But when he journeys to the Land of the Dead, he meets them-- not fully as they were in life, but in skeletal forms which nonetheless retain a great deal of personality. Likewise, historical research frequently begins with a brush up against the past's seeming impenetrability. How can we possibly get a sense of the reality of the past when its citizens seem so inscrutable and irrelevant to us? When their choices make no sense? When the repercussions of their actions seem inevitable and set in stone? Yet analyzing the sources they left behind help to break that shell and engage with the past. By crossing into their realm, Miguel grows to understand these people and their motivations-- the pain Imelda experienced that led to her musical moratorium, Hector's regret at never making it back home to his family, and de la Cruz's ruthless, violent pragmatism absent from the existing popular knowledge about the man.  

Miguel's research also uncovers larger truths that were lost to both the living world and the dead.  His pursuit of de la Cruz ends in victory, when the glamorous musician is thrilled to have a great-great- grandson and lavishes him with attention. However, this quickly sours when Héctor arrives and realizes that his death was caused not by food poisoning, but by regular poisoning, courtesy of his former musical partner de la Cruz. The much-lauded songs were actually Hector's stolen work. De la Cruz, determined to protect his reputation, orders both Héctor and Miguel tossed into a pit. It is there that Miguel realizes that Héctor, not de la Cruz, is in fact his long-lost great-great-grandfather. Thus, his investigation leads to knowledge of who Imelda's husband was, unknown to any of the living (except Coco, Héctor's daughter), the murder, unknown to all but de la Cruz, and Héctor's intention to return home, unknown to Imelda and the Rivera family.  But how to prove all of this to the living world? Here, documentation becomes critical: when Miguel returns home, his rendition of "Remember Me" sparks Mamá Coco's memory of her father and leads her to reveal photos and documentation of his creative work on the songs attributed to de la Cruz.

Most significantly, Miguel uses his research on the past to change the present. A side note here: There are two popular responses people commonly have when they hear you study history. The first is, "What are you going to do with that? Teach?" and the other is "So what do you think about 'revisionist history'?" Despite the bad press this term gets, revision is a necessary part of historical scholarship; if it weren't, we'd have no reason to keep researching or writing anything. At the film's end, we see that one year after the Miguel's return to the land of the living, both personal and public life have changed. The monument to de la Cruz is amended with a critical sign, and Héctor honored by the community instead for his work; Héctor's photo is restored to the Rivera family ofrenda, and Miguel plays music for his family. Coco's ending suggests that a research journey to the "Land of the Dead" can and should end with not only revision but with a rectification: a public awareness of the truth newly discovered or articulated and a commitment to making public space reflect historical fact.

Related Links:

A Vanity Fair article on some of the cinematic and real-life inspirations for Miguel's passion. 

A Remezcla piece on watching the film in Spanish translation. 

A Spanish-language review particularly taken with the characterization of Mamá Coco herself. 

Enough About Me: Teaching History Through Advice Columns

I have a secret passion for advice columns. Dear Prudence is my mainstay, but I've also dallied with Ask a Manager, Ask a Clean Person, and the classic Dear Abby (whenever there's an analog newspaper around). My interest is perhaps because I am fascinated with the concept of "shoulds"-- the "what should I do?" explicit or implicit in every question and the expectation that there will be an answer. I spend much of my day wondering about the "should" of the moment. Should I eat breakfast at home, saving money but sacrificing productive time in my office, or should I grab a donut on campus, which will cost money but save time? Once I arrive, should I answer emails first, so that others don’t have to wait for my reply any longer, or should I work on personal projects first, to make sure I actually make some headway on them today? I imagine most people do this sort of back-and-forth. Advice columns have long affirmed this impulse to wonder about "shoulds" and provide the comfort of having the matter judged by an outside expert. This has obvious value to the question-asker, but also provides a litmus test for the reader-- are your instincts about the matter correct? Did you come to the same conclusions as the expert? Today, I want to briefly unpack a couple of ways in which the concept of the advice column presents an interesting avenue for exploring various facets of history in the classroom.

The most obvious way to use advice columns to study history is to have students read historical advice. By examining the questions asked and the expert responses, students can get a sense of the kind of questions people were interested in having answered at a particular time.  There's a broad range of possible time periods for this activity-- advice columns have about a three-hundred year history, most likely beginning with the Athenian Mercury, a British publication. The two-year-old Atlantic article The Questions People Asked Advice Columnists in the 1690s (which I recall being pretty widely shared when it was published) has a delightful set of journalist Adrienne LaFrance's favorite pieces from the Athenian Mercury-- edited, but still revealing. The questions deal with a variety of topics, from broad questions about science and the natural world ("If the light of the moon is borrowed from the sun, why are they so differing in complexion?") to the more familiar "shoulds" I mentioned ("Dancing, is it lawful?"). Some questions would be particularly interesting to those seeking evidence of women's roles in society ("Is it proper for women to be learned?"), while others speak to 17th century British attitudes about religion and the supernatural (such as the meandering statement-question about a dog's power to foretell death). Those of you who have played The Trial of Anne Hutchinson may find some questions among these that your characters would have been quite interested in.

 I've used early twentieth-century advice columns in my own work to suggest complex attitudes toward women, work, and disability. For example, the bulk of Dorothy Dix's advice in one December 1935 column was given to a letter about a disabled young woman whose mother would not let her father provide her with a vocational education. The mother received nothing less than a tongue-lashing from Dix for standing in the way of progress:

Looking at a source like this, I encourage students to think about the layers of meaning that this may (or may fail to) reveal. What does this piece tell us about the letter-writer? About Dix? About the Boston Globe, which printed the piece? About the readers of the piece? About the disabled woman at the center of the question? Notice also what the column is surrounded by-- more advice, on a variety of matters! (If you're squinting, take a gander at a fuller picture of the page.) 

Some secondary source context may prove helpful in interpreting the variety of roles that advice columns can serve. Scholar Elyse Vigiletti suggests in an interview with Ask a Manager's Alison Green that the advice column surged in popularity at the turn of the century, and developed the "blend of self-help, humor, and tastemaking" that advice columns of the modern day possess. Part of a broader boom in print culture and literacy, advice literature (including columns, etiquette manuals, cookbooks, parenting guides, and other self-improving texts) were tools channeling desires for upward mobility to cultivate particular tastes in consumers. Joel E. Black's article "A Theory of African-American Citizenship: Richard Westbrooks, The Great Migration, and the Chicago Defender's 'Legal Helps' Column" in the Journal of Social History uses a legal advice column from the Chicago Defender to "examine law away from courts" (897). Black points to the ways in which columnist and attorney Richard Westbrooks used his advice column to promote theories of African American equal citizenship based on everyday, local matters-- municipal codes about employment and housing that assumed equality of application among all city residents. So, advice columns could be coercive or prescriptive, but they could also be radical or transformational. 

In short, there are a variety of things that advice columns of the past can reveal about the kinds of questions people were asking, answering, or interested in reading about. But perhaps more interesting is the possibility of using the writing of an advice column as a historical exercise. Students could take on the role of a person affected by a particular historical event in their letter and use their submission to reflect on the ways that different actors might experience history. In a unit on the 1910s, for example, students could take major events of that period and imagine the questions that different parties might seek advice about: a working woman, unsure of whether to join the unionists organizing her workplace; an African American family in the South considering the benefits and costs of joining the Great Migration northward; a suffrage supporter questioning whether or not to halt suffrage organizing to support the war effort. Students might also be asked to reflect on what sort of periodical they would send their question to: a national newspaper? A radical journal? A women's magazine? A black press publication?

This is also obviously of interest as a complement to a Reacting to the Past game. Students would be asked to write a question to an advice column as their character, focusing on what their concerns are within the game. This could be used as an introductory exercise, to help everyone get into character. However, it could also take on a dramatic role in the middle of the game, as students could use their questions to achieve character goals. The advice columnist could be portrayed by the Gamemaster (instructor) or by one of the characters. Greenwich Village, 1913 would be a particularly good candidate for this idea-- the game is already immersed in print culture and characters are required to contribute to the creation of an issue of The Masses by game's end.

What other historical instances would make great advice column questions?

Related Links:
A Library of Congress topic page on Dorothy Dix, including some samples of her work. 
A blog post on 17th and 18th century advice columns. 
Folks with an U of I login should be able to access Black's article here. 


PS: Follow me on Twitter! 

Reacting to Reacting: John Winthrop and William Blackstone in Boston

A street sign reading "Winthrop Lane."

My recent trip to Boston for research brought some updates about your friend and mine, John Winthrop, multi-time governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and head honcho of The Trial of Anne Hutchinson. As you may recall from either your time in the game or my other posts, the game revolves around determining whether or not the controversial Anne Hutchinson should be banished from the colony. John Winthrop heads both the colony and the faction which wishes to expel Hutchinson from its borders. Post-trial, while Anne was expelled and died shortly after, Winthrop led a long and celebrated life: he served a total of nineteen terms as governor despite criticisms and died in 1649. He is rumored to have regretted Hutchinson's banishment on his deathbed (perhaps because problems of keeping the colony religiously homogeneous proved to be both evergreen and bloody-- or perhaps this remorse never happened at all! History can be fun that way).

In any case, there's a lot of Winthrop's footprints around Boston. The top photo shows a sign for Winthrop Lane,one of many places in the state named after Winthrop. Winthrop Lane leads into a very small grassy area called Winthrop Square. Winthrop Square has a statue, but not of Winthrop, and I neglected to take a picture of it because I was so confused by this. For that tale, I'll refer you to this article from the Boston Globe.

The second photo deals with an event which precedes what my students have called "the Anne matter": 

A sign commemorating the 1634 purchase of Boston Common. 

This impressive sign in Boston Common commemorates the purchase of the gathering place under Winthrop's governorship. Blackstone (also spelled Blaxton) was the first European settler in the area which would become Boston, moving there alone in 1625 after arriving with a group of settlers to the south. He had accumulated a mass of land which he called his own, and welcomed the Puritans who arrived five years later, but soon wished to move on-- so, he sold them his pasture and moved to Rhode Island. This will sound very familiar to some of you-- many of Anne Hutchinson's supporters, like William Aspinwall, John Clark, and William Dyer, made similar moves in the wake of her banishment (though none of their pastures became Boston Common). 

This sparked my curiosity about Blackstone and his departure, which sent me down quite the internet rabbit hole. In a quick look, I've found limited and conflicting discussion of just why Blackstone left. Thomas Coffin Amory in 1877 poetically suggested that "The details of what followed are wanting, but in the end Blackstone found it convenient to leave," (7) and that Winthrop's band of Puritans, "Without actually driving [Blackstone] out… made it uncomfortable for him to stay" because he would not join the church (12). Wikipedia cites Louise Lind in saying that he simply "soon tired of their intolerance." The linked text which this comment came is now inoperative, but I tracked it down at the Wayback Machine and found it's an excerpt of a biography of  Blackstone. 

Another educational resource claims that "When the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony arrived in 1630 and found him living on land for which they had a patent, they drove him out and ordered his house burned to the ground." This is a statement borne out by no other evidence, including the source about Blackstone cited within the same page. That source, a family history written by a descendant in the 1970s, suggests:

"It is very difficult to believe that BLACKSTONE sold all of his rights and interest in Shawmut to his full content and satisfaction, as is so stipulated in ODLIN's deposition. Rather, it is quite obvious that life was made very trying for him, and he simply took what he could get after considerable hassling with the powers in control. If the facts were known, he probably refused to sign any kind of release leaving GOVERNOR WINTHROP and his clan in a quandry and which prompted ODLIN's deposition nine years after WILLIAM's death."

Quite the tangled web! I would love to incorporate Blackstone into future playthroughs or discussions of the Anne Hutchinson game in some way. It certainly suggests the stubbornness of Winthrop and the others in his charge-- even a fellow white male Protestant critical of the Anglican church could not escape their pressures.

Delightfully, Blackstone/Blaxton's Wikipedia page bears the following statement:

Amory's text goes further than this. In his discussion of Blackstone's marriage to a Bostonian in 1659 (at the sprightly age of sixty), Amory suggests that "a recently discovered broadside shows that at this period he was accustomed to make occasional visits to Boston, riding on a bull, and the object of his pilgrimages may therefore be surmised" (17). Any Wikipedia editors out there should feel free to update this and garner editorial glory-- the people should know the truth about William Blackstone and his bull! 

Related Links:

Amory's pamphlet on Blackstone is short and just sort of delightful to read-- and free on Google Play. 

A discussion of Boston Common as a longstanding gathering place through the lens of the Commons Movement. 

Current Project: Who Tells Your Story: Fictionalizing US History, 1630-1918

“’Hamilton’ and History: Are They In Sync?” asked a 2016 headline in the New York Times.  The answers given to this question, provided by a variety of historians from Eric Foner to Lyra Monteiro, focused on how well Hamilton conforms to various sets of facts. The show either chooses to stretch Alexander Hamilton’s anti-slavery ideology beyond reality, or it does well in capturing his role as a notable abolitionist of the period. It places actors of color in roles based on largely white people and elides the actual contributions of black Americans, but also serves as a realistic depiction of the tangled political complications of the era. Hamilton—as well as other fictionalized accounts of historical people and events across a variety of media—gives scholars of all levels the opportunity to interrogate what it means to be “in sync” with history.

Since this week I am continuing work on my Widenor application, I thought I'd give an update on my current vision for the course. My plans have changed since I wrote last week due to the release of an updated list of courses. My course, “Who Tells Your Story: Fictionalizing US History, 1630-1918,” sets out to explore US history through fictionalized accounts including film, literature, musical theatre, and video games. What does it mean to fictionalize history, and how do we determine whether such a fictional treatment is “good” or “bad”? What liberties can one take with a person or event, and what must one portray faithfully? What does a particular piece of fictionalized history tell us about the time it depicts, and what does it tell us about the time in which it was created? How does the medium of the work make it particularly well- or poorly-suited to convey aspects of historical thought? This course encourages students to ask and provide multiple answers for these questions.

Material for the course will be drawn from a diverse variety of media, and materials assigned will be chosen through consideration of both pedagogical value and accessibility.

One thing I want to highlight a bit further than I have so far is the "What's History?" angle of these fictional pieces. My goal is not just to examine what media can tell us about history, but also how it engages with ideas of making history. As mentioned last week, Hamilton engages with not only historical facts but with the practice of history itself. Many works raise similar questions about historical practice. I intend to use this course to suggest that the practice of history is just as significant to their lives-- perhaps more so-- than the cohesive facts or narratives which these practices uncover or create. 

Any favorite works of fiction that are historical in some way? Any works that you consider particularly good at conveying the realities of historical practice?

What's History: "Burn" and Historical Agency

I'm currently working on an application to teach a stand alone course for HIST 270, United States History to 1815. I am enthusiastic about the possibility of teaching this course because I see it as an opportunity to follow themes of race, gender, sexuality, and ability into a period which is not technically within my wheelhouse. The prelim readings I did on the colonial and early American periods last year were fascinating to me because I had much less knowledge about these periods than the later years, and I'm eager to have the chance to incorporate some of the insights of those books into a course.

However, I'm also interested in incorporating modern connections, and so (like approximately 800,000 other history instructors out there) I have been incorporating some materials from uber-popular Broadway hit Hamilton. I've previously used a song cut from the final version of the show, Cabinet Battle 3, to illustrate the ways in which US founding documents pushed the issue of slavery further down the road. When I saw the show in Chicago from seats that I'm pretty sure were in an adjacent zip code to the stage, I was struck by the show's interest in the historical method. This is sort of an obvious connection in the closing number-- "Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?" is clearly evoking questions about how we remember history and who gets to be a historical figure with a "legacy." However, I was most intrigued by the role of the historical process in Eliza Hamilton's song "Burn." The song occurs in the show's second act, following Alexander Hamilton's publication of the details of his extramarital affair.

Eliza's comments get at the ways in which historical actors (sometimes in ways that frustrate us) control the telling of their stories even centuries after their deaths. "I'm erasing myself from the narrative," she asserts, and "Let future historians wonder how Eliza reacted when you broke her heart." It's easy to talk about the ways in which people unintentionally reveal aspects of themselves in the records and objects their lives leave behind. The problem of what they have led us to believe through the presence or absence of particular items is thorny. Acknowledging this fact reminds us that the practice of history is less a narrative than a conversation, not only between a historian and other historians, but also between historians and sources and historical actors themselves.

I hope to use the song to engage in a discussion about ways in which people can and have shaped their own images in the historical record and how this activity continues. Susan B. Anthony performed a similar action by burning a vast quantity of her own archive. Lisa Tetrault suggests that this meant accounts authored or approved by Anthony "would become the source" for information about her life and suffrage activities (The Myth of Seneca Falls, 182).  I'll also incorporate some questions for discussion which link this idea to broader questions about historical practice and students' day-to-day lives:

How much is the historical record shaped by people's choices about what to save or destroy?

Why might someone destroy their papers? How might we figure out information about that person anyway?

What items or records would document your life? What could you add or remove to change the story?

Related Links:

There are quite good analyses at genius.com's lyrics page of the song, including in-depth breakdowns of the lyrics and a gif or two.

A piece at Mic on the "secret meaning" of the song (is it really that secret, though?) 

Reacting to Reacting: Randolph Bourne, Student Radical

I love it when my research allows me to indulge some personal curiosity I have about something. This was the case on my trip to Northampton, where I peeked in at the Helen Gurley Brown papers. Primarily, I sought information on Brown's sister Mary, a polio survivor, but also enjoyed peeking at the papers I had so longed to look at three years before, when I was finishing up my master's thesis on Brown's revitalized version of Cosmopolitan.

Visiting the Randolph Bourne papers at Columbia provided a different sort of satisfaction: getting a closer look at a character from the first Reacting to the Past game I ever encountered, Greenwich Village, 1913 (habitually shortened to GV). I looked at Bourne's papers in the hopes of finding some personal reflections on or similar to his work in "The Handicapped-- By One of Them" to use in my dissertation research about children with disabilities in the early twentieth century. However, in addition to learning a bit more about this piece and its reception (which I'll discuss more in a future post), I also found resources from Bourne's college days which shed light on some of the conflicts within the Greenwich Village game and the historical moment with which it engages. 

In GV, two factions, suffrage and labor, vie for the affections of the bohemians living in the neighborhood. The bohemians can be an unruly bunch-- loftily principled, if you think kindly on them; unrealistically flighty, if you're less charitable. One of the most focused bohemian roles is Randolph Bourne. The game describes him primarily as a young intellectual with firm beliefs in the vital power of youth to bring about social and political change. His piece "Youth" informs his speeches and writings within the game and those of other characters who wish to emphasize the value of vitality, novelty, and energy. Those who play him often pick up his voice fairly well in this respect, continually advocating for youthful energy and voices to play strong roles in the plans of the suffrage and labor factions.

One of the great additions I came across in Bourne's papers for future GV sessions was a series of replies to an editorial Bourne wrote for Columbia's Spectator while a student at the university. In the editorial, Bourne criticized university administrators for their exploitation of the women and children who labored at cleaning, book-delivery, and other "drudgery and primitive methods" he thought inappropriate for a university setting. Though I have not been able to find the full text of his editorial, it is referenced in this New York Times blurb from Feburary 26, 1913: 

Bourne's piece itself is a fantastic argument for his alliance with labor, as it showcases his interest in equitable working conditions and willingness to challenge systems of institutional authority. It could also be used to persuade him toward suffrage, as he seems particularly appalled by the degradation of women and children promoted by the university's practices and claims he and other students "blush with shame when they pass a poor, gaunt scrubwoman on her knees…or have a book delivered to them by an undersized, starving child."

The replies offer the opportunity to bring the discussion to another level. Most of them are strongly negative, taking Bourne to task for his exaggeration of the laborer's working conditions and his distrust of the university administration to know what is best. The writers of these replies found Bourne's ideology extreme and distasteful. Much of the Greenwich Village game is tightly wrapped in the insular community of Greenwich Village. In the Village, social cachet comes with doing something--anything-- that is daring, new, intellectual, fun-loving, or expressive. Radical ideas are the order of the day and for the most part all are trying to out-radical one another. There are some insertions of more conservative perspectives in the course of the game, particularly in opposition to woman suffrage which comes from outside the Village. These letters offer an intriguing look at everyday "college men's" opposition to ideas about labor rights in a context which affects him daily.  

Although people given the role of Bourne in GV are informed of Bourne's disability, it rarely comes up in game sessions or papers. I'm still struggling to come up with ways to promote discussion of this attribute of Bourne's life within the Greenwich Village game. I'll discuss Bourne's contributions to disability history, theory, and identity in another post. 

Related Links: 

Bourne is frequently lauded for his commentary on World War I, including his famous assertion that "War is the Health of the State."

The memory of Bourne's opposition to war has inspired continuing antiwar organizations, including the Randolph Bourne Institute.

John Dos Passos' piece about Bourne, written about a decade after his death, is often quoted (including in disability activist magazine The Ragged Edge's version of  "The Handicapped" linked above).

What's History?: Museums

As part of my recent research travels, I visited the National Museum of American History. I was fortunate enough to receive a Travel Research in Equity Collections (TREC) award, so I was able to meet with one of the historians of disability I most admire, curator in the museum's Division of Medicine and Science, Dr. Katherine Ott. I first became interested in disability history in a course which used Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics, the volume she edited along with David Serlin and Stephen Mihm. Her contribution to that volume fascinated me at the time; her recent theoretical work on the special role of material culture in disability history has informed my PhD scholarship.

In preparation for meeting up with her, however, I revisited Making Disability Public the interview she gave to David Serlin for the Radical History Review. 2005 Smithsonian exhibit she curated, Whatever Happened to Polio? as well as the 2000 exhibit for the anniversary of the ADA about the disability rights movement. In the interview, Ott and Serlin discuss what it means to do public history, and Ott's approach to both exhibits supplies one possibility: to center the public, not medical establishments or curatorial voice, in the creation of an exhibit. This is accomplished through talking to affected people (in the case of these exhibits, people with disabilities and polio survivors) through surveys, interviews, or conversations, and "serving as the medium for [these] stories" (200), as well as letting the objects available guide the direction of the exhibit (205).

The piece is delightful for a variety of reasons: it is conversational and easy to read, yet both participants' contributions are deeply thoughtful; there are discussions of academic versus public history which not only value both spaces but offer insightful insights into the workings of each space and the considerations necessary to inhabiting both spaces. There are obvious points of interest to professional historians of all types. There are also elements which are clearly valuable to a class on disability history or disability studies. But on this reading I began thinking for the first time of how much I'd like to share the insights of this piece with the students I most frequently teach, those taking a more general, lower level introductory course. 

Many students come into history classes thinking that they are there to learn facts and straightforward narratives about history, when most people who teach college-level history will tell you that a large part of their goal is to teach broad skills-- the practices of interpretation, research, writing, and critical thinking that are applicable to many arenas outside the discipline. Many courses end up being a combination of these two attributes. But there's also a third element which often is considered only relevant to those who intend to pursue the major. This is the idea of specifically historical practice, the way in which history is done and made. I have a real passion for incorporating these ideas into courses which are not for majors, which are relatively low level, and which are ostensibly about a variety of other topics.

To me, it's critical for students who never dreamed of studying history professionally to know how history is made-- to learn how its made is to have some conception of how to judge the quality of the history that someone may be trying to teach you. Though some of them wish to learn discrete facts which they can use to build a knowledge base, some of them are less excited to learn that the process of finding and building these facts into a transmittable narrative is both subjective and laborious. Public history, especially in the form of museum exhibits, is a critical way in which history is made and transmitted-- yet it is so rarely interrogated in general history classes.

Not all aspects of this interview will be of interest to most students I teach. A discussion of the many problematics of the concept of "public(s)" (199) may not play a leading role in a discussion I might have of this piece with my class. However, the detailed discussion of the way museum exhibits are built and the idea that there are multiple goals one can have with an exhibit is something that I think would play a valuable role in classroom discussion.

As an assignment to go along with this article, I would encourage students to head to a local museum and visit an exhibit. They should try to figure out how the artifacts available informed the creation of the narrative, and whether it is "object driven" or "narrative driven" (209).

Other potential questions include:

Audience interviews about the polio exhibit suggested that age informed people's interest in a polio exhibit (207). What do you think a breakdown by age of the exhibit you viewed might look like?

Take a survey of interest in the topic of the exhibit from at least five people from two of the following groups:

Under 25s

25-30

30-35

35-40

40-45

Over 50

What role does emotion play in the exhibit you viewed?

Did your exhibit have a comment station? What would your comments be?

How would you redesign the exhibit, and to what end?

Anything else you'd like a discussion about museums to focus on at this level? Questions about the piece? Let me know in comments or email! 

Related Links:

A digital version of the polio exhibit. 

For Illinois affiliated folks, logging in at this link should lead you to Serlin, David. 2006. "Making Disability Public: An Interview with Katherine Ott." Radical History Review no. 94: 197-211. Academic Search Ultimate, EBSCOhost (accessed October 29, 2017).

Reacting to Reacting: The First Church in Northampton, MA

Sign outside of church, Northampton, MA. A link to the sign's text can be found here. 

Being in Northampton is wonderful because one is surrounded by women of all ages who seem both smarter and more fashionable than you, and yet somehow it is motivating and not discouraging. Hence it was a little jarring to come upon this sign reminding me of the Trial of Anne Hutchinson, a Reacting to the Past Game I taught in my classes last year which, despite the title, features no women as playable characters --as a General Court of the period would not have contained any women.  (See a post from the OAH blog at http://www.processhistory.org/youre-gonna-make-us-do-weird-role-playing-games/ for a description of both Reacting and The Trial of Anne Hutchinson by Mark Carnes, co-author of the Hutchinson game and Reacting Consortium Executive Director.)

In this game, it's 1637, and a variety of men of the Massachusetts Bay Colony have gathered to determine whether or not Anne Hutchinson, local religious thinker and midwife, should be banished from the colony. Her crime? Well, that's sort of complicated. Were I to tell you much more, I would spoil the fun, but suffice it to say that those who have played the game come to a variety of conclusions about the charges and her guilt or innocence of them (but no, she's not a witch-- though some of these same Puritans' relatives will also be involved in the Salem Witch trials toward the end of the century. Puritan life was rife with religio-legal drama).

John Cotton plays a critical role in this game-- a noncommittal teacher whom all look up to, both pro and anti-Anne members of the General Court want to win his favor. Cotton is also in a precarious position within the conflict, not wishing to abandon any of his admirers or to upset the power players on the General Court. Historically, Anne is banished; Cotton escapes unscathed, becoming more conservative over the rest of his life. I give these historical details and more in the postmortem to the game (facts about the fate of their character which any student could look up were they inclined, so I'm not giving away any trade secrets here). During this postmortem, a clear theme emerges-- these people, and their descendants, have their mitts all over American history, especially on the East Coast. John Winthrop, Governor and main authority in the General Court, is perhaps the most famous example-- still quoted by a wide variety of politicians, he originated the "cittie on a hill" phraseology which has inspired many American-exceptionalist ideas. His son founded Connecticut and John Kerry is one of his notable descendents.

John Cotton has similarly notable descendents, particularly Cotton Mather, John Cotton's grandson who is known for his New England ministry and his historical writing (and, those darn Salem Witch Trials again!) This sign brings in another connection--  Eleazar Mather, cousin of Cotton Mather, was Northampton's first minister.

This tidbit suggests the reach of some of these families, a stark contrast to the way you meet them in the game. Despite some of their achievements and connections, or their apparent control over the colony, the colonists of Massachusetts Bay in 1637 are a small group in a tenuous position-- they're afraid of England; of attack by local Pequots, with whom they've recently warred; of sin, which lives within themselves; of one another, whose indiscretions threaten to bring down the wrath of God or England upon all of them.

Another connection to the problems and aftermath of the Hutchinson trial is the "Halfway Covenant" promoted by this church's second minister, Solomon Stoddard.

 Previously, to join Puritan churches, parishioners had to stand before the assembly and tell them how they came to know that they were part of the elect few who were saved. During the Anne Hutchinson game, a third of the students play the roles of newcomers to the colony, who have to be admitted to the church before they can vote on the Anne matter in the General Court or pursue their own individual goals effectively. They do so through their comportment, the hope that no one can discredit them, and, most importantly, writing and presenting a conversion narrative. As illustrated by Hutchinson's case, the churches' main concern was restricting membership to "visible saints" who were definitely elect.

For example, here's John Winthrop's conversion narrative. Note the detailed chronological retelling of one's life experiences; the confession of one's sins; changing behavior as evidence of becoming sanctified  ("the great change which God had wrought in me", pp 6) and yet the lasting struggle with sin ("continual conflicts between the flesh and the spirit", pp 12); yet, ultimately, assurance that he is elect ("when I have been put to it by any sudden danger or fearful temptation, the good spirit of the Lord hath not failed to bear witness to me, giving me comfort, and courage in the very pinch", pp12).

Fast forwarding thirty years or so, the exclusivity of the church resulted in reduced membership and thus a reduced power over public life. The Halfway Covenant allowed children of church members to be baptized into it (though as only "half," not full, members) without having had a conversion experience. This would increase church membership and address the issues that arose with second and third generations of Puritans, who wanted their children baptized within the church but often lacked a dramatic conversion to share. John Wilson, Pastor of the Boston Church at the time of the Hutchinson trial, supported the Halfway Covenant when it was proposed-- meaning that the arduous process that immigrants to the colony were forced to go through was downgraded in importance for the children of baptized members.

Why is this interesting? The church and sign showcases the reach of ideas and families across space and time (and suggests the familial ties between different New England cities), and illustrates the way a single place can echo to a variety of disparate, nationally relevant ideas. 

Questions? Comments? Send them my way! 

Related links:

Description of the Anne Hutchinson game on the Reacting site.

Winthrop's narrative at the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Winthrop's journal at archive.org.