Current Project: Time Travel and Crucible Critique

A shot of the original production of The Crucible, from playbill.com.

It's Week 2 of the semester, and History 365 is now in full swing. In this course, in addition to seminar style discussions, weekly response papers, and a final project, I'm using various creative projects to encourage students to make connections between the historical fictions we're reading and other primary and secondary sources of the eras under study. Today I debuted an activity which asks students to step into one of three perspectives and work together to argue about The Crucible's relevance to the experiences of their group. 

How do you solve a problem like Arthur Miller? 

I have to admit that I was stuck on what to do with The Crucible for a while. I knew that I wanted to include it as a starting point for our discussion of witchcraft and religion in colonial New England, as so many people's ideas about the topic and the period are already informed by the work. I wanted everyone to have the opportunity to read and discuss it in class, so that we would all have a basis for understanding this influential portrayal of the Salem trials. I knew also that it was long enough that it would be difficult to pair with the longer companion texts in the section for a comparative discussion-- I didn't want to have it due the same day as Escaping Salem or The Witch so that we could compare the two immediately. It would not only be more reading than was reasonable for one day but also rush the discussion of both, leaving us little time to get to some of the smaller details. It would have to be the subject of a few days of discussion before getting to these newer texts.

Knowing this was the case, I still couldn't figure out what to do with The Crucible. As performance of a theatrical work can be an important part of its interpretation, I toyed with the idea of having students produce scenes from the work, with one as a dramaturg, one as a director, some as actors, etcetera. Perhaps pairing it with a performance of a HUAC trial transcript. But although I could see the potential value of doing this, I couldn't see my way into or out of it-- I couldn't make it make sense for this class and the kind of intellectual engagement with the text I wanted to encourage. 

I was lying in bed trying to fall asleep in under half an hour for once when the solution finally came to me, as these things so often do. I had assigned the Christopher Bigsby introduction to the Penguin edition for the week before the actual play was due, and when I went back to consider it again I found a great deal which seemed delightfully questionable. No statement was so ripe for critique as that which came near the end of the piece, in which Bigsby claims that "the play's success now owes little to the political and social context in which it was written." Such a claim echoes the widespread interest in declaring this particular work as well as most other well-regarded literature as somehow good because they capture a universal humanity, a transcendence of context. How could I encourage students to avoid this mentality, which sounds very nice but is useless for an appreciation of history? 

The Project: Time-Travelers and The Crucible

The conceit of the project I ended up designing is this:

In a mysterious and poetic quirk of fate, two groups of 1690s Puritans from Salem, Massachusetts AND two groups of Hollywood writers targeted by HUAC in the 1940s and 50s have been transported forward in time to the modern day. As coincidence would have it, they have landed in the midst of a conference of historians of race and gender who are analyzing The Crucible. In this project, you and your group will analyze Miller’s play in light of your particular viewpoint and come up with a plan to present your experiences to one another and to the curious world in a press conference. 

In this project, students are in one of six groups. (For a smaller class, three could easily be used-- my class is too big to have only three groups).

• Groups 1 and 2: 1690s Puritans who lived through the trials. They are tasked with answering the question: Does this play reflect our experience and values?
• Groups 3 and 4: Targets of HUAC in 1940s and 1950s Hollywood. They investigate whether this play speaks to their experiences as suspected Hollywood Communists.
• Groups 5 and 6: Modern day historians of race and gender. They have a more removed task, contemplating whether Miller’s play is more reflective of 1690’s ideas on race and gender, 1950s ideas of race and gender, or some combination of the two. 

Each group confers with one another to consider Miller's work in relation to "their" experiences and interests. They create a 5-7 minute presentation, using evidence from the play and other sources provided, such as lecture, primary documents such as selections from Puritan sermons and HUAC trial transcripts, and secondary literature. They took the class period to work on this, and are free (but not required) to work on this outside of class as well. On Friday, they will present their conclusions to the group. 

Project sheets and rubric are here. 

Reflections

I am pleasantly surprised to see how well the class has taken to the activity so far. I was a bit worried it would be confusing and I would get a lot of questions about the details of the project. In reality, many of the questions I got were complex historical ones about relationships between ideologies and actions in the Puritan context. From observations I made walking around the room, most of the class seemed to come to the questions and ideas I wanted to encourage, considering issues of race, religion, gender, enslavement, historical interpretation, and the nature of experience in relation to the texts. The questions and arguments raised in this section will serve as a nice platform to build upon for the final week of inquiry into the mythological role that Salem and the concept of colonial witchcraft trials have played in US historical memory. 

Related Links:

Some of the sources I provided include the HUAC transcripts of Paul Robeson and John Howard Lawson; Gretchen Adams, "The Specter of Salem in American Culture," from the OAH Magazine of History, July 2003; and selections of John Winthrop's A Modell of Christian Charity; "Regulating Sexuality in the Anglo-American Colonies," from Major Problems in the History of American Sexuality; Elaine Breslaw's Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem; Steven J. Ross, Movies and American Society.

Enough About Me: Social Networks as Teaching Support

Table laden with laptops, phones, and stationery items. By Marvin Meyer on Unsplash.

There are a few really good gifts we can give ourselves in life, and one of them is learning how and when to seek out advice. Social media offers a lot of opportunities to do this with relatively low investment: we throw our question, minor or major, out into the world and see who might be willing to try answering it.

I was inspired to think on this when both I and a colleague of mine posted teaching related questions on Facebook within a few weeks of one another. I appreciated all the suggestions for video games that deal with American history that I had received in response to my query. When fellow Illinois PhD student in History Taryn Vaughn asked a question online about helping students build vocabulary, I noticed the variety and quality of answers she received and contacted her to chat about social media as a tool for teaching support. We decided to share our thoughts in a blog post (her words are italicized throughout). Along the way, I reached out (in a Facebook status, naturally) to see what others might be moved to say on the topic. So, join us in taking a break from scrolling to consider some benefits of the Internet Ask:

It gives you variety

Personal networks are extremely powerful, and it's likely that (despite constant fretting that we all live in monocultural echo chambers) you have connections to people with a broad variety of experiences. Asking for teaching help online has the potential to draw a wider variety of respondents than you would asking around your department/workplace/family mansion, especially if you're trying to find unexpected sources or ideas. I recently used Facebook to ask about video games that deal with historical subjects for the course I'm planning and was pleasantly surprised at the flood of useful responses I received-- some from other historians, some from people I hadn't talked to since high school. Taryn appreciated this aspect of the Internet Ask: "Any of my friends or followers or what have you can see my post so I can get advice from that friend who’s studying law, from that one high school teacher I haven’t thought of in years, from that poet friend I haven’t seen in a while, all without having to specifically search them out." This variety of respondents helped me feel as though I wouldn't miss anything that would seem too glaring to the students-- I'd hate to have my class say halfway through the semester "Why didn't you pick this game for our class, it would have been perfect!" and have to respond "Uh, because I live under a rock and have never heard of that one."

The variety of respondents to a query can result in a corresponding variety in the answers offered, which can be useful not only for getting a big pool of ideas in order to pull out a few, but also for situations in which you want to be able to show students a variety of options. Kateri Smith, a foster care specialist at the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, has used social media to accumulate a variety of responses to questions she later asked as part of trainings for teenagers in foster care: "A lot of what I do is about getting kids to think in an out of the box way about big, emotional subjects like family, success, & healing. When I first created the curriculum for one of the sessions, I asked people the same questions I would later ask the teens. This gave me a great variety of answers from different demographics so I could put some on a worksheet to demonstrate how not-black-and-white the topics could be. I think it was really important that the teens could see how people from across the country of different ages, races, and backgrounds had dealt with some of the things they were feeling." Students are wide-ranging, and can benefit from an instructor's attention to and appreciation of that truth.
 

…But not too much variety

Conversely, social media appeals for information can be limited in useful ways. I've occasionally participated in a Facebook group designed for instructors who use Reacting to the Past games in their classrooms to ask questions and to share tips, which not only keeps the secret twists and turns of each game from public eyes but also connects me to people guaranteed to have at least SOME idea of what I'm talking about. Using groups can also save you some time and effort by cutting down on extraneous advice. Sarah Morice Brubaker, Assistant Professor of Theology at Phillips Theological Seminary, uses a Facebook group to post her questions in order to maximize useful suggestions and minimize unhelpful comments. "Even though not all of the suggestions offered would work in my own classes -- because of theological perspective of the school, grad v. undergrad, and other norms specific to the institution -- I find it a lot more helpful putting an appeal there than putting out an appeal to Facebook or Twitter at large. Especially Facebook. There's a small but enthusiastic share of my Facebook friends who seem derive pleasure from giving advice the way a beagle dog derives pleasure from barking. And, er, it tends not to matter to them whether they have the requisite knowledge base or experience to offer useful advice." So, for specialized questions or if you just need a few good answers, groups can be a great way to limit responses. 

Others can see it

When you put a question out into the big wide world (or the small limited group), others can also benefit from seeing the post. I think this is especially useful for making what we do as teachers reach wider audiences. It draws broader attention to the topic being discussed-- you never know who on your friends list might decide to pick up a book or check out a website because of someone's suggestion. It demystifies the teaching prep process: no, the curriculum doesn't all come out of a textbook-- we're working to make it here, together, right now! It also helps other teachers, as Taryn notes firsthand: "I’ve posted on Facebook asking for advice on a specific teaching issue in the hopes of getting a wide variety of different perspectives on the problem. Before actually posting myself, though, I also saw my other teaching friends post their own questions on Facebook. I found it really useful to read the responses that people gave them. Sometimes the questions and answers spoke to questions I already had, but had not yet asked, sometimes they spoke to issues I hadn’t even considered before, but either way, seeing what other teachers are asking and the solutions their Facebook friends provide is just as useful to me as posting a question myself."

It gives you confidence

Taryn noted something that I hadn't appreciated: perhaps paradoxically, asking others for advice in this way can help you to trust your own instincts. As she put it, "I think the most valuable thing that I’ve gotten from social media in this regard is the advice that actually confirmed ideas that I had already had. When someone recommends something that I had already considered doing, it helps me trust my own instincts as an instructor. I’ve only just started teaching and before I reached out on social media, I felt paralyzed by my own lack of experience. I had no idea what I was doing. I had ideas, sure, but how was I supposed to know if they were any good? I convinced myself that they probably weren’t. Then I asked my Facebook friends and while some pointed me to resources that I had never heard of or considered, many of my friends suggested the very ideas that had been floating around in my head. 
Furthermore, just the simple act of asking for advice helped me to start thinking of solutions to my own question. It was as if putting the question out there helped me to separate myself from the problem and view it more objectively, whereas before, my fear of personal failure had stopped me from even wanting to think about it."
 

You can ask about almost anything without figuring out who to ask

There are some times when you want specific answers to a question. What games relate to US history between 1600 and 1920? That's a pretty rigid boundary. But other times, you're thinking broadly, or you're not sure what kind of responses you want. Maybe you want to get a sense of what other people think about a topic or a genre of thing. Maybe you have a question for which you know there is no solid, single answer, or maybe it's on a topic that you know so little of that you don't even know who might know of good answers.

None of that matters in the Internet Ask! It's your rodeo. Ask away. Any of these kinds of questions have the potential to be answered. Taryn notes that she thinks she'll continue to use social media for teaching questions and may in the future expand from more specific queries to murkier, harder-to-approach questions: "The last time I was looking for resources (like apps or websites) and/or class activities to help students improve their vocabulary. What I didn’t ask in my last post, but what I think I’ll ask about in my next one if I can figure out how to word the question, is how to structure a class that I myself will be comfortable leading. Newbie that I am, I’m not really sure what my teaching style will or should be when I attempt for the first time to teach history. It’s not simply that I’m not sure how to help my future students understand the material (though that is certainly one of my concerns). My question is: how can a pretty introverted and shy person like me engage students without exhausting my limited social endurance? How do I structure a class that draws on my strengths instead of preying on my weaknesses? I want to teach in a way that’s sustainable for me, and in a way that allows both outgoing and shy students to learn and participate."
 

It can lead you in directions you didn't expect

I'll conclude with a brief recounting of both my and Taryn's experiences at seeking teaching advice from social media, which should illustrate the broad pathways for action that this can open and reinforce some of the other benefits mentioned above.

When I asked for video games, I got suggestions from a wide variety of comers. I looked up several of these and decided to add one or two to my syllabus (it's still in flux, as it will be until the moment of truth on day 1, probably-- there's always something that could be BETTER, right?). However, another of the suggestions I hadn't yet played. Assassin's Creed III had been on my Steam wishlist for some time, but it had not been on sale. I had already been in touch with a librarian about the gaming initiative for the final game of the course, Valiant Hearts. So I was aware of the existence of the gaming center, but hadn't yet been down there. My curiosity led me to find the disc (on a separate floor of the library); bring it back to the gaming center; check out the key to the gaming center, the Xbox controller, and the headphones; put it all together-- and sit and wait for the Xbox to download some necessary piece of the game. I never did get to play Assassin's Creed III that day. But I did learn how to use the gaming center, and prepare students for any issues that might arise when they try to use it to play Valiant Hearts or any other games I might assign in future. (And Assassin's Creed III went on sale on Steam just a few weeks later-- kismet!) Even though I likely won't assign that particular game due to time constraints, the suggestion led me in a helpful direction that I couldn't have predicted.
 
Says Taryn: "The last time I asked for advice on social media, I was able to cobble together a workable teaching style from the varied advice I got. I had asked about vocabulary building and most of my friends stressed the importance of context. Students need to see words in context, they need to use words in context. One of my Facebook friends, who also stressed the need for context, is a Spanish teacher at my former high school. When he commented on my post it reminded me of the Spanish class I took in my junior year of high school. Every day our teacher would come to class with a list of vocabulary words or structures (phrases that highlighted different grammatical rules) and we would use them to make up stories. Each student would get a turn to speak and sentence by sentence, we would create a story, usually ridiculous, using the vocabulary for the day.
 
I decided to take that strategy and modify it for my own purposes. Instead of a spoken exercise, like it had been in my Spanish class, I turned it into a written one. I made note of the words that my students had difficulty with, and the next day I came with a list of words, announcing that we would write stories, no matter how ridiculous, using that day’s vocabulary. I wrote too, [which] allowed me to warm up each day to the prospect of speaking in front of a crowd because writing and reading my own silly stories for them was somehow less terrifying than just talking. It allowed me to show them my personality and allowed them to show me theirs. It gave the outgoing ones a chance to share and the shy ones a chance to participate without exposing themselves to scrutiny. And it was everyone’s favorite class activity.
 
I never would have thought to do it if my high school teacher hadn’t commented on my post, and I never would have thought to ask him for advice otherwise… the fact that social media allows you to address many different people from many different backgrounds all at once is its biggest strength. If I had limited myself to what I could pick up in the TA office, I wouldn’t have hit on a strategy that suited both me and my students."

Have you used social media to help your teaching, or have you learned anything from others' queries?

Current Project: Fictionalizing West of the Revolution

Book cover of Claudio Saunt, West of the Revolution.

For many, the most immediate contact one has with history is in fiction. I'm currently solidifying the syllabus for what will be my fall course, Fiction and the Historical Imagination: Fictionalizing US History, 1620-1920. The course will focus on some of the lingering mythologies of American history and the ways these are explored in fiction. I've mentioned before my intention to use Hamilton as material for this class, even as I've shifted the course theme a couple of times. Hamilton emphasizes the centrality of the American Revolution to myths of American history and identity while rearranging some of our ideas about what that big moment looked like and who the players were. But for every history that's been made into part of a founding myth, there are many that have rarely been considered at all, let alone given a fictional treatment. In this post, I'll explore the companion piece to the discussion of the American Revolution in my course: an assignment which will ask students to create contrasting historical fictions of 1776.

I didn't always realize this assignment would involve a creative element. As a teaching assistant at the Center for Talented Youth this summer, I watched my students take on a variety of creative projects related to the theme of the course, Politics and Film, all orchestrated by experienced instructor Jess Wilton. I was pleasantly surprised at what they were able to accomplish in a limited period of time, and on my return home I came to an epiphany--  In a course about the ways in which history is fictionalized, where we will gather to talk about the responsibilities and possibilities inherent in using fiction to make arguments about these larger-than-life mythological pasts, why would we not take a moment to create historical fictions of our own?

Our inquiry will use Claudio Saunt's text West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776. This great resource for expands the story of the American Revolution, providing an engaging, complicated view of the year 1776 in disparate parts of what would one day become the US. The book has many features of interest to discussions of history and memory-- I particularly enjoyed the brief reflections on historical memory at the beginning, in which the author notes that a giant cake he remembered as part of the national bicentennial celebration turned out to be, upon further research, actually related to a far more local event, the bicentennial of the city of San Francisco (12-13). I look forward to discussing with students this fall the ways our memories of history are so eager to fit themselves into the most dominant narrative touchstones.

One of the key appeals of this text for this project is the way that Saunt uses stories of an individual or group as a framing device for each chapter in order to personalize his geographically far-flung story. The book links Russian projects in Alaska, Spanish missions in California, and expeditions across the Great Basin as inciters of and responses to one another; pieces in a variety of efforts to control as much of the vast territory as possible. These broad themes are made manageable by each chapter's focus on an individual or group affected-- a group of seven Aleuts journeying on a Russian ship from Alaska to Yakutsk; Diego, a in indigenous man imprisoned at a Spanish mission in southern California-- who appear in the historical records but many details about whom we-- and he-- can only guess.

This emphasis on small stories of individuals makes it particularly well suited to students' dabbling in making their own historically-informed fictions. Immediately, we've got a few characters to play with when we begin thinking about how to transform this history into a different kind of narrative. Perhaps more importantly, Saunt proves himself willing to guess at possibilities and draw information out of seemingly minor players in Eurocentric records and make them central to the analytical and emotional crux of the argument. His transparency in doing so gives students a blueprint for how they and other writers of historical fiction can do the same.

Here's my lesson plan for this project, based around our fifty minute class period three times per week:

Day 0:

Divide class into 4 groups. Each reads the introduction to Saunt's book and one chapter from the first half of the book.

Day 1:

First 10 minutes of class: Group discussion on the introduction. What is Saunt's mission in this book?

Last 40 min: Groups get together and discuss their chapter with one another.

1st half: What happened in this chapter? Why is it important?

2nd half: Begin brainstorming an outline or draft of a fictional take on the history you've read.

Questions to consider:

What form should it take (Novel? Musical? Video game?)

What is the genre? (Comedy? Drama? Horror?)

Who are the characters?

What is the plot?

Homework: Create a draft or an outline of this fiction in consultation with your group. 

Day 2:

1st 10 min: Groups meet and tie up loose ends in the first version of their piece (draft/outline).

2nd 20 min: Split groups and create new groups with mix of people from each group.

Compare notes:

What is your fiction about?

What choices have you made about what to put in and what to exclude? How did you determine this?

3rd 20 min: Regroup. What did you learn, and how can you use it in your fiction?

Homework: Revise the draft/outline based on what you've learned. Distribute pieces to class.

Day 3: Share with one another.

1st 10 min: Quick 2 minute introductions to works from each group.

2nd 20 min: Exploring the drafts. Students will read, play, or otherwise examine what other groups have created.

3rd 20 min: Sharing analysis of the works as a class.

Discussion questions:

What did you learn?

What is the historical narrative?

What is emphasized and what is downplayed from the chapter?

Some of the challenges I anticipate with this plan relate to the relatively limited amount of knowledge students will have about the chapters outside of the one they have read, potentially making it difficult for them to evaluate other groups' fictions. However, I also think that this serves as an opportunity to motivate students to consider the fact that this is frequently the case in historical fictions-- rarely are historians the intended audience for a historical film. When developing their fictions, then, each group should be thinking about the fact that they will be introducing a topic to an audience that doesn't have the benefit of the exact knowledge they possess about it. I look forward to trying out  this lesson plan in less than two months!

Do you have any favorite resources on 1776 or historical fiction? 

Related Links:

An episode of the podcast Ben Franklin's World, in which Saunt discusses the events depicted in his book. 

A Chicago Tribune review of West of the Revolution.

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?

What's History: Inappropriate Beach Reads and Finding New Perspectives

A woman reading near a pool. 

This New Yorker article has thoughtfully laid out the qualifications for a good summer read, but I must admit that I have frequently broken these reading rules at the beach and/or pool. I'll go for some classic beach fare, sure-- an issue of Cosmopolitan, a book with a beach on the cover or centered around a "crustacean-centric eating party." However, I have historically (haha) also heavied it up with some hefty reading for research, teaching, or--horrors-- exams. I once memorably spent a day at the beach in Santa Monica reading A Short History of Reconstruction.

This is not because I am so darn studious but rather because the pleasant setting makes work more palatable. If I'm going to read, why not do it outside? The change of scenery works wonders for my mood and often my concentration, and the weird timelessness of lounging beside pool or ocean often stirs my brain to come at ideas in a more patient fashion than it might otherwise. Don't worry, there's always a backup magazine nearby in case of emergency.

So recently I took this approach to new heights. I printed out pages of the Michigan Hospital School Journal that I've been using for dissertation research and read them in the pool while on one of those floaty things (yes, they got a little damp). I was pleased with the success of my method-- I took a few notes on the pages and got through the day's reading rather quickly.

The next day I came across an interesting letter in an issue of this Journal. The Journal was published by a convalescent home in Farmington during the 1910s-1930s which reported on the goings-on of the institution, but it also had wider appeal as a passionate call for the education and rehabilitation of children with physical disabilities. Among other material, the editor frequently included letters from all sorts of readers-- state officials, children at the hospital-school, members of other progressive organizations, and disabled adults expressing support and encouragement for the Journal and its mission. 

The letter that so caught my attention was from Percy Angove, State Supervisor of Industrial Rehabilitation, published in the Nov-Dec 1922 issue. He began his note by saying:

I am on my vacation and my greatest enjoyment at the present time is looking through and reading articles in my treasured bound volume of The Hospital School Journal. This is the greatest compilation of its kind or anything similar that I know of…

"My greatest enjoyment at the present time"-- strong words! What a glowing review of a periodical called The Hospital School Journal, and which frequently featured items I find dry, hard to plow through, or repetitive. Surely the Journal has brought me joy as well-- some of the calls to action that editor Joe F. Sullivan delivers are still stirring almost a century on-- but sheesh! I had a sudden image of Angove sitting on a porch overlooking a Great Lake, sipping iced tea and thumbing through his hardbound volume with delight.

I realized this was not such a dissimilar image from what I had been doing the previous day. The combination of the letter and the laid-back setting helped me see the Journal from a perspective other than the straightforwardly critical lens that serves as default. I tried to put myself in the shoes of this Progressive-minded man on vacation, enjoying his recreational reading, taking a week away from supervising industrial rehabilitation to sit and read a magazine which is, at it's heart, about children's orthopedic treatment.

When I came back to the Journal, I thought about what might make the magazine so joyful in Angove's mind. Certainly a shared pro-rehabilitation leaning between reader and material was at play, but with my new frame of reference I could also appreciate how light the material could be-- notes on picnics and parties, photos of happy children, short poems and tidbits, and reader letters on a variety of subjects, which are interesting in the way that reading someone else's correspondence can be. The language of most of the articles is pleasantly straightforward. And of course, as the publication hoped to drum up support for what they called "crippled children's work" as well as reconstructive surgery and training more generally, the Journal printed plenty of stories of satisfied customers-- happy children who had grown into employed, articulate adults. This was probably also part of Angove's enthusiasm, akin to the human interest stories and videos which still capture public attention and make us feel hopeful about people.

As teachers of history, we focus a lot of attention on teaching students how to read "like historians"-- from a scholarly, analytical mindset. However, reading like historians also involves reading like historical actors, pulling out not just what we can see in a text but also what might have stood out to the people who read it when it was first produced. Perhaps our teaching could incorporate this more explicitly-- not just asking "what would X group say about this document?" after all have read it but also encouraging students to read documents with a particular mindset. I aim to explore, in future, how to incorporate multiple methods of reading sources into classwork, looking not only for what the text itself is saying but what might have provoked interest, pain, or--yes-- greatest enjoyment of its early readers. 

Related Links:

For more on Sullivan and the Michigan Hospital-School, see Brad Byrom's work in Disability Discourse, Children with Disabilities in America: A Historical Handbook and Guide, and The New Disability History: American Perspectives.

Enough About Me: Embracing Options

A row of white doors. They'll all get you where you're going!

Whenever I am struggling to gather my thoughts about a project, I like to attend a workshop or a lecture. Though one often goes to a talk to hear about the presenter's thoughts on the subject presented and learn something new (a good reason to go, as a rule), I find that they are also useful for reminding me of things I've forgotten or have neglected, and for giving me the space to think over a problem. By taking in new arguments and information, I have the chance to look at new things in a new way, and am often inspired to look at an old thing I've been turning over in my mind in this new way as well. 

Sometimes I gain a new understanding of what I want to say; sometimes I realize something I've already been expressing, but which has remained opaque to me. One of the most amusing events in my academic life was attending a wonderful talk on campus by Natalie Lira and not only learning quite a bit of historical information but also coming to some realization about my project (I've now long forgotten exactly what it was). When I told my advisor enthusiastically, she said, "Yes, I knew that's what you were doing." It was apparently clear in my writing, but it wasn't clear in my head until I'd had the chance to reflect on it from a different angle. 

An Example: A UIUC Writers Workshop Workshop

So, after a difficult spring, I found myself in an hourlong presentation held by the UIUC Writers Workshop: "Staying on Track With Thesis and Dissertation Writing," facilitated by Logan Middleton and Adrienne Pickett. You can probably imagine what this sort of thing consists of-- a discussion of the various stages of writing (from research and organization to prewriting and drafting to revision and writing groups), some recommendations about writing consistently, some sharing stories around the room about how we organize our notes, how we sit down to write, how we deal with feedback. It had all of the ingredients that you might expect, and little information that was brand new to me.

If I wasn't confronted by wildly revelatory information, why did I find the writing workshop so helpful? Some brief factors:

• It's sometimes necessary to be reminded of things you kind of know already because as humans our memories are short. Anyone who's discussed anxiety with a professional knows that they should do their breathing techniques in times of struggle; anyone who's tried to manage anxiety over an extended period knows the feeling of sheepishness they get when reminded that breathing is an option available to them which they have rudely cast aside.
• Several organizational choices made by the facilitators were also a key factor: beginning the workshop with time to reflect on our own struggles with or approaches to writing; the opportunity for attendees to engage in conversation about each topic as the program proceeded. These tactics created a casual but engaged atmosphere.
• It's also nice to devote some time just thinking about the process of a large task you need to do, to have some outside confirmation that the strategies you are using are considered worthwhile by others.

But these are all preludes to the main topic I want to discuss here. More than any of these other aspects, I was heartened by the ways in which Pickett and Middleton offered options about writing, rather than prescriptions for writing. 

What do I mean by this? Let's take the portion on drafting the dissertation as an example. The facilitators suggested that one should consider scheduling a time to write, and that one should try to schedule more frequent short periods to write rather than fewer long stretches of time. They gave specific examples of this concept: try two hours of writing time four days per week, rather than eight hours on Saturday-- same number of hours, but more spread out. Additionally, they advised setting "small achievable goals"-- for example, 300 words per day; or an hour revising the introduction.

Set goals based on time or words; be consistent-- this is advice that is common, yes, but is also commonly given like this:

• "Oh, you have to write first thing every day if you want to get anything done."
• "You need to write 500 words per day. Every day. Even if you are going to Disneyland."

In other words, many offer prescriptions for what exactly you must do to achieve your larger goal. They take the specific application of a general principle and make it the sole factor in success. Without doing this one weird trick, you'll never make it! (Weirdly, the one weird trick is different for basically everyone in its specifics, and yet everyone persists in believing that theirs will work for everyone else.) This kind of thing always stresses me out more than it motivates me to try it because I can already envision the many ways in which I could fail to carry out the maxim. Middleton and Pickett, conversely, offered parameters for what those goals can look like, which gave us the tools and the freedom to determine our own goals.

I don't mean to suggest that this workshop is the only place to get an option-based approach to writing, or that one can't find success with a prescriptive approach. But it did inspire me to reflect on what I found compelling about the style that the facilitators used and reflect on how I could incorporate this into my own teaching. 

What's the Point? 

It should be no surprise to any consistent reader of this blog by now that in many ways, I teach by learning; that is, my first step is to consider how I have learned and try to mimic that process. Fortunately or unfortunately, variety is a big part of how I learn-- switching settings while writing or studying, typing some notes and handwriting others, coming up with new ways to read or annotate when I have tired of the old ones midway through a semester. 

I tend toward emphasizing variety in my teaching as well. I like to switch between different types of sources to see how something looks different as told through different media or by different types of people. I don’t like to do small group work often because it tends to fall into the same types of patterns, preferring instead the random observations that tend to come out of large class discussions or paired conversations. 

So obviously I liked this idea of emphasizing options rather than prescriptions about completing assignments-- it certainly offers variety! It's hard to provide writing support in our classes because writing is such a solitary activity, and there's something endlessly mystical about it. How does something get written? How does a good something get written? The answer, of course, is that there are as many ways that this happens as there are people who write good somethings. 

When teaching first- or second-year level courses, we are also confronted with the idea that part of our goal is to teach good processes for writing and other forms of analytical work so that students can maintain them for the duration of their lives. How can we encourage the divergent work processes of people who haven't necessarily developed an effective work process yet? Faced with the enormity of this, we tend to double down in our teaching on the things that we can know or declare: we want thesis statements, we want topic sentences, we want evidence and analysis. The only thing we say about the process is, "Don’t start it the night before! We can tell!" 

Incorporating Options

So, how do we lean toward options rather than prescriptions in our classes, while still maintaining clarity about expectations and assignments? 

Outside of Class

I've talked about this a bit before in terms of assigning unstructured research time-- offering students an "excuse" to spend some time thinking over a topic without the pressure of creating some artifact for grading. In a course with a big final paper or a consistent smaller written assignments, this could be broadened into an assignment which encourages students to reflect on what kind of goals might work well for the writing assignments they intend to complete and the time they have to work with. If there is a paper due every other Friday, a student might make a goal to spend fifteen minutes jotting down the main points of every reading after completing it so that she can remember them. Another student might focus on the actual drafting of each paper, committing to have a page written by the Wednesday before the due date each week. And another student might wish to focus on actually having time to edit the paper, and resolve to commit an hour on Friday mornings for a final readthrough. 

This process should also incorporate a continual renegotiation of those goals based on changing circumstances. For example, the student who wished to focus on editing may realize a month into the semester that his work schedule or his other courses never allow an hour for editing on Friday, and so he may wish to alter his goal to be more achievable.

Inside of Class

As far as in-class activities go, lots of teachers do this by spending time on prewriting strategies. Prewriting is perhaps the most wiggly step of the writing process and there are a lot of good resources out there about the many ways that one can prewrite-- brainstorming, freewriting, journaling-- a lot of these are really just fancy words for "starting to write and seeing what happens," which in my experience isn't so far removed from "drafting an undergraduate paper." There are also approaches that diverge from these, like clustering, which is a bit more graphical; and outlining or journalists' questions (what we used to call the 6 w's-- one comes at the end, see?). I like presenting these as options for beginning an independent writing project, and I also like the idea of fostering the opportunity for students to dabble in several of these in class and discuss how each worked for them. Perhaps it doesn't come naturally for someone to cluster (it certainly doesn't to me), but it’s a wonderful thing to try in class when you're not actually scrambling to get the paper done right at that moment.

However, I must admit that I remember finding these sorts of activities only minimally helpful when I've been in classes where they've happened, and I think much of the difficulty there is timing. You've gotta talk about prewriting early, while people have time to benefit from it before they really should be writing the paper, but it's also hard to do prewriting before you've done any research, which I had rarely done at that point. So, I think a spirit of experimentalism is best-- ask students to use prewriting activities to brainstorm a hypothetical paper based on something you've all already discussed together in the course, and talk about the results. 

How do you balance options and prescriptions for writing, as a teacher or a student?