Flashback Roundup: The Birthday of Bourne

There's been a lot of talk about the Spanish Flu recently for obvious reasons. While many people have varying associations with that particular epidemic, it always makes me think of radical antiwar bohemian and disabled writer Randolph Bourne, who died of it at age 32 in 1918. In honor of Randolph Bourne's birthday (May 30), I'm revisiting two posts on Bourne's lesser-discussed life and work. In addition to the sources linked below, you can read some of his writings at the Internet Archive, or listen to some of his essays at LibriVox. 

Randolph Bourne, Student Radical (originally published November 6, 2017)

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).

The Embodiment of Bourne (originally published July 18, 2018)

Randolph Bourne at typewriter.

I brought two books on my trip to Princeton to work as a teaching assistant for the Center for Talented Youth. One of these was the script for Body of Bourne, a play that deals with the life of Randolph Bourne, an antiwar thinker and bohemian. One morning I found myself sitting at breakfast in a dining hall on Princeton's campus, reading the scene in which Bourne has been accepted to Princeton but is unable to go, lacking the financial support his uncle offered only to Bourne's abled sister. Bourne never made it to Princeton; instead, he worked six years in an low-paying job and eventually raised enough money to attend Columbia University.

As you might remember, Bourne is one of the bohemian roles in the Greenwich Village, 1913 Reacting to the Past game. His role in the game is to promote bohemian ideals, particularly those of multiculturalism and the influence of youth on social change. But how did he come to care about these things? I've previously written about his college days at Columbia and the commitment to women's rights and labor issues espoused by his editorial in the Spectator. In this post, I want to explore another of his pieces, one critical to understanding the formation of his ideals and the experience of embodiment in the early 20th century US: "The Handicapped-- By One of Them."

Initially much of the scholarly work on Bourne suffered from a misleading mind/body dualism. Bourne has long been regarded for his mind, and his ideas continue to hold weight among liberal and radical thinkers-- he was even the subject of an article on current politics in the New Yorker in August 2017. His antiwar stance and embrace of multiculturalism as a boon to American life have made his ideas feel fresh to multiple generations. His body, however, has often been portrayed as either a mere footnote to conversations about his intellect or a tragic obstacle he overcame-- in other words, he is a notable thinker in spite of disability. The back cover of Bruce Clayton's Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne, for example, suggests surprise that the "disfigured and hunchbacked" Bourne "reacted to his disability not with bitterness or self-pity, but rather with exuberant love for beauty and a compassion for humanity"-- in other words, it is a pleasant surprise that Bourne was able to resist bitterness and develop a compassionate view of the world. 

This viewpoint on Bourne is all too common; the great disability scholar Paul Longmore criticized these trends in scholars' work on Bourne in his review of Forgotten Prophet by saying "The problem with it, as with all Bourne biographies, is its fundamental misunderstanding of his experience and identity as a disabled man in a society that intensively stigmatized him." Longmore was so interested in this side of Bourne that he took up the topic twenty years later in an article with Paul Steven Miller, arguing that Bourne's experience of disability (or "philosophy of handicap," a phrase Bourne used to title "The Handicapped" when it was reprinted) was the foundation of his radicalism. (In many ways, Body of Bourne and the Longmore/Miller article are companion pieces, making harmonizing arguments through contrasting means about the role of body in Bourne's political thought.)

Bourne saw handicap as a critical part of his experience and his ideology. The category of handicap, as Longmore and Miller explain, is less about bodily function or impairment and more about social expectation. Bourne's "The Handicapped" opens by claiming that in many ways, it is easier to be "helpless" and happy with any little diversion you can get than it is to "move about freely," but with a "crooked back and unsightly face" and have to strive and work for opportunities frequently denied you. Employment, friendship, and day-to-day tasks are all hampered, as he goes on to describe, not by physical impairments but by the low expectations of others. Most successes must not only be clawed for through perseverance (akin to the can-do attitude promoted by rehabilitationists of the era) but also at some point permitted through the explicit cooperation of an abled person.

As this need for cooperation might suggest, the difficulties Bourne related were socially informed-- they did not hinge on the body's function but on others' perception and treatment of that body. Bourne could have stopped his essay and his ideology there-- i.e, "my experience has taught me that peoples' perceptions of my body affect me negatively"-- but instead, he explained that this had contributed to a broader understanding of the ways in which people's status and success were influenced by social factors outside their control.

It makes me wince to hear a man spoken of as a failure, or to have it said of one that he "doesn't amount to much." Instantly I want to know why he has not succeeded, and what have been the forces that have been working against him.

Bourne extended the idea that people had underestimated him to a consideration of the roles of others within his society-- i.e., "if I am being underestimated and blocked from success, others must be suffering the same treatment." He prized this aspect of himself, noting that the knowledge was worth anything he'd endured to gain it: "If it is solely to my physical misfortunes that I owe its existence, the price has not been a heavy one to pay." 

At first, "The Handicapped" was printed anonymously (hence "By One of Them"), which Ned Stuckey French posits may have been due to embarrassment of his disability; I suspect concerns about having his other published thoughts disregarded, and thus his livelihood and reputation affected, was the key motivator. The worry of being flippantly disregarded is key to this piece; he even cites it as one of the worst things he experiences socially: "What one does get sensitive to is rather the inevitable way that people, acquaintances and strangers alike, have of discounting in advance what one does or says." Publishing this piece represented risk for Bourne, who likely did not wish to jeopardize the success of his other political writing.

Reactions to Bourne's "The Handicapped-- By One of Them" suggest that themes Bourne raised resonated with disabled readers of the Atlantic Monthly. Some readers wrote to thank him for his words. Bourne's correspondence, held by his alma mater, Columbia University, include two letters from different women who signed their communications "Another of Them," in reference to the title of his piece. Both thank Bourne for his writing, saying that it had encouraged them. They offer brief details of their own about their lives in support of his points: one notes that she is writing both for herself, an "old woman who is learning to bless her handicaps for the insight they are bringing into the possibilities of life," and for her brother, still struggling in the "darkness, the weight of his handicaps heavy upon him." His greatest problem? The "lack of intimate friends," which Bourne highlighted in his piece; which several sources suggest was critical to both the greatest joys and sorrows of his life; and which frequently, especially at a time when socializing was much more circumscribed by place and social circles, necessitated the need of cooperation by abled friends and family.


Related Links:
An early review of Body of Bourne in Variety. It's a great intro to the man and his life, so read or see it if you can: I got the script through Interlibrary Loan, and there's an upcoming production at Oberlin College next year. You can also see an interesting image of the original performance at Getty Images.
Bourne's "The Handicapped" appears in a variety of places across the internet, including the Disability History Museum, the disability rights publication Ragged Edge Online, and The Anarchist Library. The second form of the piece can be found in Youth and Life.
Randolph Bourne at the Disability Social History Project. 
More of Bourne's writing available at fairuse.org. 
Weird connections: the New Yorker article mentioned above was written by Jeremy McCarter, author of two books: Young Radicals, about many of the Greenwich Village bohemians including Bourne, Jack Reed, and Max Eastman; and Hamilton: The Revolution.

Archival Citations:
Another of Them to Randolph Bourne, September 1911; Randolph Bourne Papers; Box 1; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. 
Another of Them to Randolph Bourne, September 14, 1911; Randolph Bourne Papers; Box 1; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library.  

Flashback Post: Because You're Mine, I Walk the Line

In honor of the anniversary of the 2018 strike of the Graduate Employees' Organization at UIUC, I'm reposting my piece on it from last year. In the past year, we've seen incredible numbers and incredible results from teachers' strikes, and I continue to believe that one of the best things we can do for education-- no matter what our connection to it-- is to support the labor rights of those who deliver it. Even Miss Othmar agrees. 

Graduate workers marching during strike, surrounded by bubbles. Photo by Jeff Putney.

As you may know, the Graduate Employees' Organization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is currently on strike (at eight days and counting, the longest in UIUC history). There have been a lot of beautiful letters and posts floating around about the strike, making articulate and reasonable arguments in favor of protecting tuition waivers, raising graduate wages, and making clear to the administration their dissatisfaction with their unwillingness to bargain with graduate employees. I myself did the opposite last week, canceling my usual weekly post both in solidarity with the strike and to give myself more time to participate in pickets and rallies. This week, I want to jot down just a few messy reflections on the possibilities for learning that the strike has presented (while encouraging you to also read some of the cogent arguments in favor of the GEO presented in a variety of places like the Undergraduate-Graduate Alliance and the fine folks on Twitter.)

Most obviously, the GEO strike has presented a lot of opportunities to reevaluate the value of graduate labor for people at all levels, even surprising graduate workers themselves. I know the value of my own labor, but did I know about the ESL courses that every international student is required to take under the guidance of graduate workers? Not before last week. Undergraduate allies of the GEO are reflecting on the role that TAs and GAs have played in their own coursework and highlighting these experiences in letters to the provost.

For me, the strike has also sparked thoughts about labor history and the way we teach it. US history courses often cover the labor movement, and for good reason-- as we are wont to say, their efforts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries changed the landscape of work in this country (at least, I am wont to say so). An eight hour day, a weekend, restrictions on child labor, a living wage, workplace safety-- all things that the labor movement envisioned and made real. We do a lot of activities designed to highlight this contrast-- reading John Spargo's observations of child laborers and their dismal working conditions. We emphasize the differences in various union ideologies, bringing up a lot of unions with a lot of acronyms, like the IWW and the AFL and the WTUL and maybe even the ILGWU if we get really rowdy.

What most of us haven't explored so fruitfully-- what is hard to approximate in the classroom-- is the mixed emotional bag of labor activism. The strike has brought on for me an appreciation of how complex the decision to strike is-- both dreaded and celebrated. It has highlighted the spirit of joyfulness that the strike brings, and that as it goes on, you become closer to those around you. When teaching strikes and unions, I had been painting a picture of iron-jawed determination, but what I've seen in the past week has been more lighthearted-- a determination to win, yes, but also a celebration of community. I've heard this newfound appreciation of community from many people this week, and I've said it myself-- "This might sounds cheesy, but all that solidarity stuff-- I get it now."

It also takes you outside of yourself a bit. I saw a pretty apt sign last week that said something to the effect of, "Things are so bad even the introverts are out here!" The person that you are on the picket line, shouting chants and encouraging strangers, is not the person that you are every other time of your life, when you fear talking to other people or just wish you could go to your office without seeing anyone. Most weeks, I avoid campus when I don't have to be there-- last week, I was there every day.

I have never been able to get this sort of worldview-altering enthusiasm into my discussions of labor history, because I didn't really know it myself. The discussion is about that iron-jawed determination I mentioned above-- the ideals of Marxism, the rational reasons why one would want to work a manageable number of hours or have their children attend school instead of picking coal. I've never focused on the community building of unions and strikes, the human motivations of union leaders or members. Even the Greenwich Village game, which approximates so many lived experiences and ideas well, also fails to get across this experience of the labor faction-- its focus is on ideals among bohemians, not engagement in actual labor activism. How much more sense do the various enthusiasms of Leah Schwartz, Big Bill Haywood, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn make when you've actually seen a strike in action?

So, one of the nice things about this strike, in addition to the solidarity it has fostered, is the insight it can offer not only into our present but into labor history for teachers and students alike. I like to think that the next time I walk into a classroom on this campus to talk about unions and labor, there will be a great deal more familiarity with these concepts among my students, and more appreciation of who exactly it is who organizes, strikes, pickets, and makes change throughout history-- people very much like us.


Related Links:

Title Talk-- I Walk the Line
A few links on the GEO strike: News-Gazette, Socialist Worker, Chicago Tribune, Daily Illini.
For the monetarily inclined, a link to the GEO Strike Fund.

Reacting to Reacting: The Embodiment of Bourne

Randolph Bourne at typewriter.

I brought two books on my trip to Princeton to work as a teaching assistant for the Center for Talented Youth. One of these was the script for Body of Bourne, a play that deals with the life of Randolph Bourne, an antiwar thinker and bohemian. One morning I found myself sitting at breakfast in a dining hall on Princeton's campus, reading the scene in which Bourne has been accepted to Princeton but is unable to go, lacking the financial support his uncle offered only to Bourne's abled sister. Bourne never made it to Princeton; instead, he worked six years in an low-paying job and eventually raised enough money to attend Columbia University.

As you might remember, Bourne is one of the bohemian roles in the Greenwich Village, 1913 Reacting to the Past game. His role in the game is to promote bohemian ideals, particularly those of multiculturalism and the influence of youth on social change. But how did he come to care about these things? I've previously written about his college days at Columbia and the commitment to women's rights and labor issues espoused by his editorial in the Spectator. In this post, I want to explore another of his pieces, one critical to understanding the formation of his ideals and the experience of embodiment in the early 20th century US: "The Handicapped-- By One of Them."

Initially much of the scholarly work on Bourne suffered from a misleading mind/body dualism. Bourne has long been regarded for his mind, and his ideas continue to hold weight among liberal and radical thinkers-- he was even the subject of an article on current politics in the New Yorker in August 2017. His antiwar stance and embrace of multiculturalism as a boon to American life have made his ideas feel fresh to multiple generations. His body, however, has often been portrayed as either a mere footnote to conversations about his intellect or a tragic obstacle he overcame-- in other words, he is a notable thinker in spite of disability. The back cover of Bruce Clayton's Forgotten Prophet: The Life of Randolph Bourne, for example, suggests surprise that the "disfigured and hunchbacked" Bourne "reacted to his disability not with bitterness or self-pity, but rather with exuberant love for beauty and a compassion for humanity"-- in other words, it is a pleasant surprise that Bourne was able to resist bitterness and develop a compassionate view of the world. 

This viewpoint on Bourne is all too common; the great disability scholar Paul Longmore criticized these trends in scholars' work on Bourne in his review of Forgotten Prophet by saying "The problem with it, as with all Bourne biographies, is its fundamental misunderstanding of his experience and identity as a disabled man in a society that intensively stigmatized him." Longmore was so interested in this side of Bourne that he took up the topic twenty years later in an article with Paul Steven Miller, arguing that Bourne's experience of disability (or "philosophy of handicap," a phrase Bourne used to title "The Handicapped" when it was reprinted) was the foundation of his radicalism. (In many ways, Body of Bourne and the Longmore/Miller article are companion pieces, making harmonizing arguments through contrasting means about the role of body in Bourne's political thought.)

Bourne saw handicap as a critical part of his experience and his ideology. The category of handicap, as Longmore and Miller explain, is less about bodily function or impairment and more about social expectation. Bourne's "The Handicapped" opens by claiming that in many ways, it is easier to be "helpless" and happy with any little diversion you can get than it is to "move about freely," but with a "crooked back and unsightly face" and have to strive and work for opportunities frequently denied you. Employment, friendship, and day-to-day tasks are all hampered, as he goes on to describe, not by physical impairments but by the low expectations of others. Most successes must not only be clawed for through perseverance (akin to the can-do attitude promoted by rehabilitationists of the era) but also at some point permitted through the explicit cooperation of an abled person.

As this need for cooperation might suggest, the difficulties Bourne related were socially informed-- they did not hinge on the body's function but on others' perception and treatment of that body. Bourne could have stopped his essay and his ideology there-- i.e, "my experience has taught me that peoples' perceptions of my body affect me negatively"-- but instead, he explained that this had contributed to a broader understanding of the ways in which people's status and success were influenced by social factors outside their control.

It makes me wince to hear a man spoken of as a failure, or to have it said of one that he "doesn't amount to much." Instantly I want to know why he has not succeeded, and what have been the forces that have been working against him.

Bourne extended the idea that people had underestimated him to a consideration of the roles of others within his society-- i.e., "if I am being underestimated and blocked from success, others must be suffering the same treatment." He prized this aspect of himself, noting that the knowledge was worth anything he'd endured to gain it: "If it is solely to my physical misfortunes that I owe its existence, the price has not been a heavy one to pay." 

At first, "The Handicapped" was printed anonymously (hence "By One of Them"), which Ned Stuckey French posits may have been due to embarrassment of his disability; I suspect concerns about having his other published thoughts disregarded, and thus his livelihood and reputation affected, was the key motivator. The worry of being flippantly disregarded is key to this piece; he even cites it as one of the worst things he experiences socially: "What one does get sensitive to is rather the inevitable way that people, acquaintances and strangers alike, have of discounting in advance what one does or says." Publishing this piece represented risk for Bourne, who likely did not wish to jeopardize the success of his other political writing.

Reactions to Bourne's "The Handicapped-- By One of Them" suggest that themes Bourne raised resonated with disabled readers of the Atlantic Monthly. Some readers wrote to thank him for his words. Bourne's correspondence, held by his alma mater, Columbia University, include two letters from different women who signed their communications "Another of Them," in reference to the title of his piece. Both thank Bourne for his writing, saying that it had encouraged them. They offer brief details of their own about their lives in support of his points: one notes that she is writing both for herself, an "old woman who is learning to bless her handicaps for the insight they are bringing into the possibilities of life," and for her brother, still struggling in the "darkness, the weight of his handicaps heavy upon him." His greatest problem? The "lack of intimate friends," which Bourne highlighted in his piece; which several sources suggest was critical to both the greatest joys and sorrows of his life; and which frequently, especially at a time when socializing was much more circumscribed by place and social circles, necessitated the need of cooperation by abled friends and family.


Related Links:
An early review of Body of Bourne in Variety. It's a great intro to the man and his life, so read or see it if you can: I got the script through Interlibrary Loan, and there's an upcoming production at Oberlin College next year. You can also see an interesting image of the original performance at Getty Images.
Bourne's "The Handicapped" appears in a variety of places across the internet, including the Disability History Museum, the disability rights publication Ragged Edge Online, and The Anarchist Library. The second form of the piece can be found in Youth and Life.
Randolph Bourne at the Disability Social History Project. 
More of Bourne's writing available at fairuse.org. 
Weird connections: the New Yorker article mentioned above was written by Jeremy McCarter, author of two books: Young Radicals, about many of the Greenwich Village bohemians including Bourne, Jack Reed, and Max Eastman; and Hamilton: The Revolution.

Archival Citations:
Another of Them to Randolph Bourne, September 1911; Randolph Bourne Papers; Box 1; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. 
Another of Them to Randolph Bourne, September 14, 1911; Randolph Bourne Papers; Box 1; Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Library. 

Current Project: Making a Course You Love

I've talked before about being a proponent of giving students an excuse to spend time on something that interests them, having relished those opportunities during my own education. There are so many obligations which face students that they must prioritize, and wrapping some freedom of choice into assignments allows them to reflect on what sorts of things they might be intellectually passionate about. Today I want to talk about the flip side of this concept-- instructors and the freedom they have to steer the content of a course toward things that pique their interest.

An empty page for only me to fill! Should I hold the light bulb over my head, or...

I've been prepping on and off for the last few months for my fall course, Fiction and the Historical Imagination. It's a fun one to organize not only because I'm always interested in how history is portrayed in fiction-- for this iteration of the course, I'm examining popular mythologies and narratives about American history in a variety of fictional sources from theatre to video games-- but because it's enabled me to expand on some topics and questions I've already taught in a much more limited sphere. Only semi-intentionally, this course positions itself roughly within the same time periods as my Reacting to the Past course. It begins with Massachusetts Puritans-- albeit to talk about the Salem witch trials in 1692-1693 rather than the Anne Hutchinson trial in the 1630s. And it ends in 1920 with the passage of the 19th Amendment, arguably the paramount goal of the Suffrage faction in Greenwich Village, 1913. So in many ways, it's as if I'm coming at much of this material backwards in planning this course. First, I helped two groups of students live the history; now I and a new group will together delve into the background, the historiography, and the popular memory which surrounds and bridges these two events. 

It’s a great opportunity to incorporate the knowledge I have gained from the games into a (slightly) more conventional seminar-style course. Not only do the names and dates associated with these periods come more naturally to me than ever before, but also an appreciation of the humanity, subjectivity, and tendentiousness of historical moments that Reacting emphasizes. I feel I have a grasp on some critical theological ideas of Puritan life that I might not have appreciated without having led students to those realization in the Anne Hutchinson game. One of my former students commented that she had come into the course thinking the Puritans were nonsensical people, but that the game had given her an understanding of their priorities. It's also helping to me envision a future course that marries both approaches; for example, a deep dive into the Puritans which incorporates both the Salem material and the Anne Hutchinson trial. 

The difficult part, as always, is transmitting knowledge and appreciation in an effective way to a new group. I know I will want to refer to the events of the games (much as I always make popular culture references in class that only two people understand), and being that there are only a couple of repeat customers I will have to restrain myself! 

Tailoring a course to something you'd like to talk about in this way offers a lot of fun options, but it also threatens some pitfalls. Many of us, I'm sure, have taken or heard of courses that were clearly serving only the instructors' interests and not those of the proposed themes. How do we lean into the freedom to shape a course we're excited about without ignoring the needs of the course as a whole? 

I don't claim to have all the answers-- hey, this is my first time doing something quite like this!-- but here's the general rules I've tried to make for myself in this process:

• Lean into joy rather than expertise-- that is, try for a course that emphasizes the things you think are really interesting rather than the very specific thing you are personally studying. These can of course overlap, but enthusiasm draws in people who might not care about the topic, whereas no amount of encyclopedic knowledge on children's hospitals during the Depression era can convince folks to stay in your course past the drop date.
• Related: Try not to be completely self-serving-- if something helps you with your reading to-do list, your prep for a conference, or just saves you time because you already have a lecture for that, consider whether it also serves the course well. There are many things I've considered incorporating that I've just had to cut because they weren't quite pulling their weight for my overall goals (but, okay, I'm still working on it). 
• Don’t hesitate to embrace the new/fun-sounding-- if you have the time, try to break out of what you've done before and use new resources-- you might find things you never knew existed. For this course, I decided to use Valiant Hearts: The Great War as a fictional source to discuss US involvement in World War I. This decision led me to learn of the Gaming Initiative and try out the Gaming Center at the Undergraduate Library, as well as learning the game had iPhone and Android versions. Now that I know that those things exist, how they work, and who to talk to about them, I can not only use them with greater ease in the future but also refer students to those resources and describe how to use them. 
• Related: Don’t embrace the new/fun just because it's new/fun-sounding-- this is particularly true for online materials, which bill themselves as being the newest most fun millennial/Gen Z appealing way to learn but in reality are often poorly structured and frustrating to both the computer unsavvy and the technology buff. If you don't have time to test the new thing and see if it's actually helpful, the old books/primary sources/paper copies/presentation styles are just fine. 

You'll notice a pattern here-- there's a middle ground that I'm aiming for, a happy marriage of all the considerations of structure, effort, enthusiasm, knowledge. A balance between knowing and discovering which brings vibrancy to a group discussion of ideas-- which is, after all, what a seminar is at its base. 

Do you have any tips for using intellectual interests to power a course?

Current Project: Because You're Mine, I Walk the Line

Photo by Jeff Putney.

As you may know, the Graduate Employees' Organization at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is currently on strike (at eight days and counting, the longest in UIUC history). There have been a lot of beautiful letters and posts floating around about the strike, making articulate and reasonable arguments in favor of protecting tuition waivers, raising graduate wages, and making clear to the administration their dissatisfaction with their unwillingness to bargain with graduate employees. I myself did the opposite last week, canceling my usual weekly post both in solidarity with the strike and to give myself more time to participate in pickets and rallies. This week, I want to jot down just a few messy reflections on the possibilities for learning that the strike has presented (while encouraging you to also read some of the cogent arguments in favor of the GEO presented in a variety of places like the Undergraduate-Graduate Alliance and the fine folks on Twitter.)

Most obviously, the GEO strike has presented a lot of opportunities to reevaluate the value of graduate labor for people at all levels, even surprising graduate workers themselves. I know the value of my own labor, but did I know about the ESL courses that every international student is required to take under the guidance of graduate workers? Not before last week. Undergraduate allies of the GEO are reflecting on the role that TAs and GAs have played in their own coursework and highlighting these experiences in letters to the provost.

For me, the strike has also sparked thoughts about labor history and the way we teach it. US history courses often cover the labor movement, and for good reason-- as we are wont to say, their efforts in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries changed the landscape of work in this country (at least, I am wont to say so). An eight hour day, a weekend, restrictions on child labor, a living wage, workplace safety-- all things that the labor movement envisioned and made real. We do a lot of activities designed to highlight this contrast-- reading John Spargo's observations of child laborers and their dismal working conditions. We emphasize the differences in various union ideologies, bringing up a lot of unions with a lot of acronyms, like the IWW and the AFL and the WTUL and maybe even the ILGWU if we get really rowdy.

What most of us haven't explored so fruitfully-- what is hard to approximate in the classroom-- is the mixed emotional bag of labor activism. The strike has brought on for me an appreciation of how complex the decision to strike is-- both dreaded and celebrated. It has highlighted the spirit of joyfulness that the strike brings, and that as it goes on, you become closer to those around you. When teaching strikes and unions, I had been painting a picture of iron-jawed determination, but what I've seen in the past week has been more lighthearted-- a determination to win, yes, but also a celebration of community. I've heard this newfound appreciation of community from many people this week, and I've said it myself-- "This might sounds cheesy, but all that solidarity stuff-- I get it now."

It also takes you outside of yourself a bit. I saw a pretty apt sign last week that said something to the effect of, "Things are so bad even the introverts are out here!" The person that you are on the picket line, shouting chants and encouraging strangers, is not the person that you are every other time of your life, when you fear talking to other people or just wish you could go to your office without seeing anyone. Most weeks, I avoid campus when I don't have to be there-- last week, I was there every day.

I have never been able to get this sort of worldview-altering enthusiasm into my discussions of labor history, because I didn't really know it myself. The discussion is about that iron-jawed determination I mentioned above-- the ideals of Marxism, the rational reasons why one would want to work a manageable number of hours or have their children attend school instead of picking coal. I've never focused on the community building of unions and strikes, the human motivations of union leaders or members. Even the Greenwich Village game, which approximates so many lived experiences and ideas well, also fails to get across this experience of the labor faction-- its focus is on ideals among bohemians, not engagement in actual labor activism. How much more sense do the various enthusiasms of Leah Schwartz, Big Bill Haywood, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn make when you've actually seen a strike in action?

So, one of the nice things about this strike, in addition to the solidarity it has fostered, is the insight it can offer not only into our present but into labor history for teachers and students alike. I like to think that the next time I walk into a classroom on this campus to talk about unions and labor, there will be a great deal more familiarity with these concepts among my students, and more appreciation of who exactly it is who organizes, strikes, pickets, and makes change throughout history-- people very much like us.


Related Links:

Title Talk-- I Walk the Line
A few links on the GEO strike: News-Gazette, Socialist Worker, Chicago Tribune, Daily Illini.
For the monetarily inclined, a link to the GEO Strike Fund.

What's History: Cultures of Kindness in the Classroom

I've gone down a bit of a rabbit hole in thinking about kindness this week: between individuals, within groups, and in the classroom. Although teaching kindness isn't exactly teaching history, fostering a considerate atmosphere can greatly improve the ways in which we learn it.

Quite a bit of informal reflection has been done on academic kindness and unkindness. In these pieces, much has been made of the meanness of the academic world, expressed through, as Kelly J. Baker writes, "hostile questions and comments in seminars and at conferences, microaggressions, petty rivalries, sabotage and backbiting, racism, misogyny, ableism, ad hominem attacks, general rudeness, cruel footnotes and endnotes, harsh criticism of graduate students as a method to malign their advisers, remarkably long emails listing years of complaints, insidious gossip in the hallways, hate and disdain directed toward students, harassment, and even assault." The unkindness seems widely troubling enough to call forth a desire to counteract it-- there exists a Tumblr dedicated to small acts of Academic Kindness.  Baker suggests that the scarcity of consideration can be traced to a lingering division between the intellectual and the emotional which persists in academic circles: "Thought is what's important. And emotion? Less so."

I think many of us expect more from those who have spent their careers lifting up histories of the marginalized, or forming intellectual communities in ways that have inspired us. It is because of this that unkindness can dismay us so much-- not just an unpleasant moment, but a moment that makes us rethink our place in the world. This is doubly true in cases of imbalance of power-- when the unkindness comes from someone in a higher position on the academic hierarchy than their target. We have hope in those who have higher positions than us that they will behave in ways that, if not completely aware of our situation, are reflective of a certain element of awareness and sympathy. Instead, sometimes it is as though they revel in their ability to make others unsure of themselves-- they use their power to spread unhappiness and deter people from learning.

It is an awareness of these imbalances that I strive to bring into my teaching, despite the complications that arise when one teaches while being in graduate school. Many of us who are teaching assistants or graduate instructors do not often reflect on the complex balance of power that  in the classroom between us and our students. We often feel powerless to control what, when, and how we teach; we feel that we are at the mercy of student evaluations; most critically in the current time, we wonder if our students will target us because of our identities, beliefs, or scholarship for far-right harassment. The potential for injury comes from both "above" and "below" in the academic hierarchy. 

However, our students have similar worries about us, particularly students who do not fully understand the distinctions between lecturers, graduate instructors, and full professors; particularly marginalized or first-generation college students. Very little of this is explained to you when you enter an undergraduate degree program, and as a result I remember feeling mingled fear and awe at anyone who stood in front of a classroom. I was afraid to talk to any of them, and I worried about their opinions of me for minor actions. In this tense atmosphere, a little sympathy goes a long way. 

Students are not just uncertain about their instructors, of course; they also walk into the first day of class with some trepidation about their classmates. In my (very fortunate) experience, undergraduate classrooms tend towards superficial politeness already. There may be days of tension here and there, or conflicts between viewpoints about race, gender, ability, or sexuality that negatively impact students or instructors. However, for most times in most classrooms, the majority of students tend to be overly polite with one another, based out of their disinterest in starting a pointless conflict (likely about a topic they don’t feel they have a personal stake in) and the fear of being wrong or appearing unintelligent. I'm not talking about the oft (too oft)-repeated fear of "offending someone" in a "PC culture"  but rather the crickets and vague nods we've all received in response to a question like, "So, does everyone agree with Oliver's statement that the author of this document was trying to foment a Marxist revolution?" 

Education can help us more if we gain practice in disagreement about issues of interpretation, and teaching Reacting to the Past convinced me that aspiring to create an atmosphere where this could happen was desirable. Mark Carnes argues in his book Minds on Fire that Reacting to the Past creates a space in which students can comfortably disagree. In Reacting, students have a need to engage in conflict and take a stance which will necessarily put them in conflict with others-- the kind of temporary conflict that is excellent practice for the more permanent real conflicts that await. The Greenwich Village game is ideal for this because its two conflicting sides actually agree on many core principles-- supporting the rights of women, critiquing the horrors that befall working women in the 1910s, and the need for positive change in a world which seems far afield of the vibrant place they wish to inhabit. Yet they disagree on a few very critical points, largely revolving around tactics-- how best to get to the world they want.

How does all of this relate to kindness? I think fostering a culture of kindness in the classrooms in which we teach helps to ensure that students feel safe enough to disagree even without the excuse of embodying a historical character.  

It is interesting how many of the materials you can easily find on emphasizing kindness in the classroom deal with young children, as if kindness must only be suitable for children and irrelevant to the "real world." Yet I'd wager that many people learned a great deal about empathy and respect in college-- practicing concrete ways to help other people, joining groups dedicated to improving their communities and their world, or learning in their classes about the context of other groups and people which they had previously not appreciated.

Ideas about kindness don't have to be blatantly stated-- I don't have any plans to walk into my next class reminding everyone about treating one another with "loving kindness" (a reminder I got a lot in first grade) or handing out gold stars for sharing. In fact, the most effective thing I have done to promote consideration in my classroom was completely by accident. 

Public speaking can seem like the most daunting task to many students about to begin a Reacting game, and Lily Lamboy has put together an excellent set of videos which have been widely used among instructors who use RTTP. I used one of these, the eye contact exercise, in the first week of one semester of my Reacting to the Past course. Students pair up and practice talking to one another with eye contact. In part, this was simply to get students used to talking in front of a classmate and practice one of the important aspects of effective public speaking, so that they would have the tools to feel confident in their performance when it came time to argue for or against Anne Hutchinson's banishment, or appeal to the Boston Church to let them become members. The timing was convenient because it broke up the tedium of "Syllabus Week" and gave us all something to do while we waited for everyone's books to arrive (thanks, bookstore!). 

However, my choice to begin with this exercise had an added benefit I had not realized. The intimacy fostered by this exercise had lasting effects on the way in which students saw one another.  Unlike an earlier course, in which students had seemed uncomfortable with the amount of conflict that arose so suddenly with a group of veritable strangers, the group who participated in the eye-contact exercise seemed to feel more security in their roles almost immediately. I can only base these observations on my own vantage point-- perhaps the difference in the air between the two classes was entirely because of their individual personalities, or in the way I'd explained the ground rules of the games, or perhaps my observations don't adequately reflect their opinions of their time in the course. Yet the change in atmosphere as well as student comments suggested it had an effect. One pair even told me at the end of the course that they had become good friends who socialized outside of class because of their pairing for the exercise. (This Modern Love column suggests that sustained eye contact can lead to love! No reports back from my class on that front.)

The icebreaker is obviously not a novel idea. There are a lot of activities that get students to do a sort of meet-and-greet to learn names, build rapport, etc. Yet I rarely remember these being wildly successful from my own undergraduate career. I think the eye contact exercise works for several reasons:

• It's straightforward. Nothing terribly complex about looking at someone else and talking to them, though it may be difficult in other ways.
• It gives a task to focus on other than memorizing a name. Similarly--
• There's not a lot to fail at. I hate the "name game" because I have a terrible memory and I don't care what anyone says-- it's embarrassing to begin your first day failing to remember "Prickly Pete" or whoever.
• It lets you focus on one person and one thing at a time, meaning that you're more likely to remember what you learned. I'm reminded of the polar opposite of this exercise-- those bingo cards asking you to find "someone wearing green" or "someone who plays a sport" or "someone whose name begins with m." Has there ever been an activity more reluctantly begun than any round of this game ever played? 
• It practices a skill that will be important to students' success later in the game. So, to pull off the eye contact exercise specifically, I think a class probably needs to have a public speaking component. 
• And, most importantly for my purposes in fostering kindness, it creates a personal connection, which leads to an appreciation for the opinions and feelings of others in the room. 

Got some good ideas for cultivating collegiate kindness? Let me know!

Related Links: 

Academic Kindness on Twitter. 

Mark Higbee's article on Reacting Pedagogy which highlights, among other benefits, the social connections wrought by the games. 

Reacting to Reacting: Taking the Greenwich Village Walking Tour

While in New York City last fall, I remembered that when I began teaching Mary Jane Treacy's Greenwich Village game, I had seen a self-guided walking tour somewhere among the extra materials. Rebecca Stanton created this great resource as an add-on to the game.  I saved the map onto my phone and set out to hit a few key stops in the world of the bohemians.

My itsy-bitsy phone map of the tour. Larger Word doc version here.

The descriptions of the places on the tour. I did a lot of reverse pinching/pinching out/stretching!

If you've played the game, you may remember that most game action took place as the characters hung out in Polly's restaurant (14). You may also remember well this image of Polly's, which I show at every opportunity! 

 Jessie Tarbox Beals' photo of Polly's.

When I visited, I couldn't quite see address numbers and get my bearings enough to figure out where the restaurant formerly was-- at the time, I thought it was this building:

Wilf Hall, formerly...not what I thought.

However, when I sat down to write this post, I discovered that Polly's was actually more likely to be down the street where this building now sits. From Polly's to pizzeria? Perhaps the smallest shift in function that I found from 1913 to today overall. A blog post on Polly Holladay from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation suggests that the majority of the block was demolished to make way for NYU law buildings, Wilf Hall being one. Wilf Hall, incidentally, turned out to be more relevant than I thought it would be when it turned out not to be Polly's. As this 2010 NYU Law Magazine piece about the then-new building assures us, the Provincetown Playhouse is the lone survivor of the block, still utilized as a "working theatre." As players of the game may remember, a number of figures from the game were pioneers in the Provincetown Players, including John Reed, Hutchins Hapgood, Neith Boyce, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell. A History of the Provincetown Playhouse gives not only background details on the formation of the Players but also some fun insight into the Players' messy personal entanglements (sound familiar to any former bohemians?)

Besides Polly's, the bohemians had other neighborhood haunts, one being the Golden Swan Cafe (1). The dive bar was affectionately dubbed "The Hell Hole" and drew many of the Greenwich Village bohemians of the 1910s through its doors. Artist John Sloan, who plays a significant role in Greenwich Village, 1913, even did an etching of its raucous interior.

John Sloan's Hell Hole, 1917. Playwright Eugene O'Neill at upper right.

At present, the area is much more peaceful. As Stanton notes, since 2000 the site has been occupied by a small garden.

Sign for Golden Swan Garden, with outline of leaf.

Trees in the Golden Swan Garden.

Another angle on the Golden Swan Garden, showing some trees, a light post, and an empty pedestal planter.

I also visited the sites of two of John Reed's former apartments. The one he inhabited during the events of the Greenwich Village game once sat at 42 Washington Square (4), and inspired him to author a poem so delightful that I will reproduce it here even though Stanton has already included it in the tour:

In winter the water is frigid,                                                   
In summer the water is hot;                                                    
And we're forming a club for controlling the tub                   
For there's only one bath to the lot.
You shave in unlathering Croton,
If there's water at all, which is rare,--
But the life isn't bad for a talented lad
At Forty-Two Washington Square!

The dust it flies in at the window,
The smells they come in at the door,
Our trousers lie meek where we threw 'em last week
Bestrewing the maculate floor.
The gas isn't all that it should be,
It flickers,-- and yet I declare
There's pleasure or near it for young men of spirit
At Forty-Two Washington Square!

But nobody questions your morals,
And nobody asks for the rent,--
There's no one to pry if we're tight, you and I,
Or demand how our evenings are spent.
The furniture's ancient but plenty,
The linen is spotless and fair,
O life is a joy to a broth of a boy
At Forty-Two Washington Square!

As far as I could tell, the site of this joyous address now sits somewhere in the midst of this NYU building.

Forty-Two Washington Square!(?)

The second apartment Reed occupied in 1918, as he worked on his famous Ten Days that Shook the World (2).

147 W. 4th St. 

As Stanton notes, Polly's occupied this building as well, from 1915-17. How convenient for Reed! No need to leave the building to socialize or get the latest scuttlebutt from his fellow bohemians.

Visiting the former site of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory is perhaps the oddest part of this excursion (7). The infamous fire, which killed over 140 workers on the upper floors of the Asch building (most of them young immigrant women), occurred in 1911. It launched investigations into workplace safety and inspired interest in labor movements among many locals. Yet it also followed memorable wins for women's labor movements, such as the 1909 Uprising of the 20,000, suggesting that existing efforts had not made as much change as they had hoped. The tragedy is momentous for a variety of historical and emotional reasons, and most students I've discussed it with have responded strongly to the personal narratives, the newspaper articles, and the images related to it found at Cornell's excellent online resource about the fire. The semi-recent centennial of the tragedy (has it been seven years since 2011 already?) inspired many commemorative actions and ceremonies. 

I had known that the building was in use by NYU and had been for some time, but I had expected that the site would be obvious, perhaps something of a tourist attraction with a statue or the like.  But the building (which suffered very little damage in the fire) appears in fact unremarkable. A bit of hunting reveals two plaques, one from the Department of the Interior in the 1990s and another one from 2003 by the New York Landmarks Preservation Foundation.

The National Park Service plaque.

The New York Landmarks Preservation Foundation plaque.

These plaques are easy to miss, and people flow around them without cease. I seemed to be the only one there that day specifically to see the building which survived a fire that dozens of workers inside it did not. 

There is a current effort to place a memorial at the site. The Remember the Triangle Fire coalition has a plan for the design which will cleverly incorporate steel panels into the exterior of the building, stretching up to the eighth floor and around the base, with names and details of the fire etched upon them.  Until then, the view is a simple one. I found it a half-troubling reminder of the ways in which physical places can seem to move on from events that societies never quite do (as Stanton notes, sweated labor and unsafe working conditions are still alive and well in the modern US).

View of the Asch/Brown building from the sidewalk.

Related Links:

The Tenement Museum gives an idea of the living conditions of immigrant workers who worked in factories like Triangle, organized within labor unions like the IWW and ILGWU.

For teaching or just browsing around, Cornell's expansive resource on the Triangle Factory Fire is a must-visit, featuring primary sources, secondary descriptions, timelines, legacies, and more.