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. 


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