September 28, 2006
Secret Syllabus Redux
Tags: Diddly dum, diddly dum, diddly dum… wee wah wooooooo!
Two and a half addenda to my post about secret syllabi:
1. My colleague Bill Turkel assures me that his graduate course in digital history has no hidden syllabus; the questions he’s assigned his students are exactly the questions he’s wrestling with right now. In which case, I intend to get his students to see if they can hack my TiVo so it works in Canada. This reminds me: Bill’s course here at the University of Western Ontario and Josh Greenberg’s similar course at George Mason University have unleashed twenty-six new history bloggers on the ‘sphere. Blogrollers take note, and completists despair.
2. The second half of my post was basically a mash note to Eric Rauchway… and that was written before he outed himself as a Whoey! If you thought I was a Rauchway fanboy before this, just watch me now. Eric sees the good Doctor (who?) as one in a long line of English heroes who are “crypto-foreigners,” used by their creators to meditate on what it means to be British. I’d add to his list Christopher Banks, the Consulting Detective from Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, and, since he’s already opened the door to geek culture, the principals in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. The other consequence of Rauchway’s post? If he can talk about Doctor Who at TNR’s Open University, never again will I refrain from posting something at Cliopatria because I think it might be too nerdy.
2 1/2. I will be hosting History Carnival XL (extra large?) right here at Old Is The New New on Sunday, October 1. Keep those nominations coming to electromail - at - robmacdougall - org (not com) or use the handy form.
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September 27, 2006
The Secret Syllabus
Tags: Aqua Teen Hunger Force; all Rauchway, all the time; is it good? Sir, it is pie.
Doesn’t that have a nice ring to it? The Secret Syllabus. It sounds like one of those erudite, but not too erudite, thrillers by photogenic Harvard undergrads who somehow score million-dollar advances for their first novels. Alas, it’s really just a blog post by me.
Every course we teach has two syllabi, I think. There’s the visible one, the actual list of readings and topics we assign to our students. And then there’s the secret syllabus, made up of whatever assortment of books and articles we also happen to be reading while teaching the course. These are the various bees and bats in our belfries and bonnets, the things we’re chewing on as we walk into the classroom, the new interpretations and the rediscovered classics that get us fired up about a topic we may have taught several times before.
Ideally, one syllabus will bear some resemblance to the other. In my first year of grad school, a Certain Eminent Historian sometimes came to our methods seminar more interested in talking about the previous night’s Chicago Hope than The Rosicrucian Enlightenment or Time On The Cross. I don’t think our Eminent Historian had any particular affinity for Mandy Patinkin, but it was the 1990s, and that’s what people watched on Wednesday nights. Unless of course they were dim-witted graduate students busy plodding through Fogel and Engerman. His Eminence was pretty disgusted with us when he realized nobody was prepared to discuss last night’s hospital drama. Was he more up to date with pop culture than his twenty-something grad students? What part of “Must-See TV” didn’t we understand? I mean, it was a given that he’d be smarter than any of us, but he seemed a little put out by the indignity of being cooler than us too.
Truth be told, I always enjoyed that seminar. And who am I to cast snark at someone of that stature? When I win a wall full of Bancrofts and Pulitzers (do Bancrofts and Pulitzers hang on a wall, or sit on a shelf?), then maybe I can turn my seminars over to discussing Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Until that day, I try to keep the extracurricular material I bring to class in the same general area as the topic at hand.
A friend told me not to put the books and articles I currently find most interesting on my syllabus. I probably find them interesting, he said, because they build on, complicate, or reverse the standard histories I’ve learned. My students are still learning that basic history. So the thing to do is to assign them the foundational works as reading, let those sink in, and then save the cool twists and surprises for the classroom. Best of all, he added, my students might give me credit for all those brilliant new ideas.
Three weeks into my new seminar on twentieth century U.S. history, the secret syllabus is pretty simple: all Eric Rauchway, all the time. Because this is my secret syllabus, Eric isn’t getting any extra book sales or royalties. But he does deserve some kind of teaching credit for making me look so good. Our very first class was on the September 11th anniversary, which occasioned talk of the twentieth century’s historical “bookends.” As events near the start of the century that offered possible pairings with the 9-11 attack, I mentioned the explosion of the USS Maine, the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, and the assassination of William McKinley in September 1901—the latter suggested and explicated, of course, by Rauchway’s ferociously readable Murdering McKinley: The Making of Theodore Roosevelt’s America.
After that, we moved on to the United States’ place in the world around 1900. The students read primary sources from the debates over American imperialism in the Philippines, debates that feel excruciatingly current today. My favorite piece is probably Mark Twain’s sardonic “To The Person Sitting In Darkness,” and not just because I’ve adopted the phrase “Is it good? Sir, it is pie” for any and all occasions. That part near the end about the vacant seat in the trinity of national gods? “Washington, the Sword of the Liberator; Lincoln, the Slave’s Broken Chains; the Master, the Chains Repaired.” It gives me genuine chills. “It will give the Business a splendid new start,” Twain concludes darkly. “You will see.”
But the science I dropped on our discussion came from Rauchway’s new Blessed Among Nations: How The World Made America, which I pestered our librarians into rush ordering in time for this semester. Thomas Bender’s similarly-titled A Nation Among Nations, which we discussed at Cliopatria back in April, uses transnational history to argue against American exceptionalism. Rauchway, on the other hand, finds in transnational history the most plausible explanation for America’s exceptional qualities, and more importantly, for its own fervent belief in American exceptionalism, that I’ve yet seen. The idea that America might actually be that way for a reason hit my Canadian students like a clap of thunder.
Next week, our class will get back to domestic politics, tackling that old standby, “who were the Progressives?” And what do you know, Eric’s obliged me with this post. “What [the Progressives] could agree on,” he writes, “was the need … not for progress toward anything in particular, but progress away from something—away from the existing political-economic system. … The sense of progress as movement-away as opposed to movement-toward may not seem like much of a basis for anything, but it provided the foundation for the most fertile period in American thought since the Revolution … and for the most successful of third parties since the Republicans.” At the end, Rauchway promises to explain more—how did Republican Progressives end up to the left of liberals?—in his “next book but one” (so in addition to being brilliant, he’s got his next two books planned out, at least). But he’ll give us a sneak preview in a blog post if anyone asks. Well, I’ll bite, Eric. But what would really help me out would be if you blogged about Progressivism next week, and then about World War I the week after, and then spent a couple of weeks on business and culture in the 1920s, and then did a post or two on the New Deal…
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September 20, 2006
King Crank
Tags: Useless research. Yes, yes, clever of you to spot the irony.
So what was I up to in the Archives of Useless Research, you ask? Here (below the fold) is the prospectus for a paper I’ll be presenting in November at the University of Virginia, for a conference called “Inventing America: The Interplay of Technology and Democracy in Shaping American Identity,” loosely tied to the Benjamin Franklin tricentennial (I just can’t get away from that guy, can I?) and sponsored by the Smithsonian’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. (I wonder if the AUR’s hollow earths, perpetual motion machines, and secrets of the pyramids revealed are the sort of invention and innovation the Lemelsons had in mind…)
King Crank : Technology and Democracy in the Golden Age of the American EccentricThe late nineteenth century was, it has rightly been said, “the golden age of the crankâ in America. Literally, a crank is a piece of machinery, and Americans in these years embraced machine technologies with enthusiasm. Scores turned their hands to tinkering and invention in hopes of becoming the next Thomas Edison or Alexander Graham Bell. Figuratively, a crank is an eccentric individual obsessed with a single idea, and America was rich in these too. Eclectic druggists, backyard inventors, and political prophets toiled over patent medicines, perpetual motion machines, and social or financial nostrums for the ills of American democracy. Members of this eccentric fraternity often turned their hands to both technological and political reforms. This paper explores the interplay of technology and democracy in the personal imaginations and the public images of the great American cranks.
Before the late nineteenth century, there had been little systematic effort in America to define the boundaries of legitimate and illegitimate scholarship. In Benjamin Franklinâs day, the scientific American was not a specialist but a generalist, dabbling in a variety of academic disciplines. âThe book of Nature is open to all,â Franklin saidâany humble tinkerer might remake the nation. Nineteenth-century Americans continued to cherish Franklinâs democratic vision of technology and applied science. The professionalization of American engineering, science, and medicine around the end of the nineteenth century, however, required purging these professions of dabblers and dilettantes. In the same way, the growth and bureaucratization of government pushed enthusiastic amateurs away from the machinery of American democracy. By the early twentieth century, a would-be Franklin who dabbled simultaneously in electrical, political, and moral experiments might well be regarded as a kook or a crank.
Yet the so-called cranks pushed back. They attacked the increasing specialization and stratification of American science and society, and appealed to popular traditions of democratic anti-elitism and homespun common sense. In an era of economic crises and social upheavals, they portrayed American democracy itself as a marvelous but malfunctioning machine that required only some small adjustment to resolve the growing contradictions between morality and progress, poverty and prosperity. In this, the so-called cranks reflected and responded to the anxieties and attitudes of a much larger public.
This project draws on the Archives of Useless Research, a remarkable collection of fringe inventions, pseudoscience, and eccentric political philosophies from the âcrank filesâ of Scientific American and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Archivesâ contents date back to the late nineteenth century, and they document in a strange but compelling way a period of great change in American political and intellectual life. Scholars have examined the fervid politics of Gilded Age reformers and the technological ferment of the simultaneous âage of invention,â but not united them. In this paper, I aim to understand the interaction of technology and democracy in the eccentric enthusiasms of that age, and to explore the changing place of scientific and political expertise in a nation torn between its faith in scientific progress and its commitment to egalitarian ideals.
Not my most elegant writing, but it sounds like fun, no? And the Archives were full of good stuff (expect a series of excerpts and highlights here). Now I just have to write the paper. In all my copious free time.
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September 08, 2006
In The Archives
Tags: dentistry in America, quotable quotes, blains, dyspepsia, flatulence.
I’m at the MIT Archives today, not the NYPL, but I, and I imagine most historians, can relate to the following description of our work:
In the reading room of the New York Public Library, the vast mausoleum, designed by some schoolmaster with memories of hard oak, dust and gloom, there are men who sit day after day, bulwarked by stacks of books, scribbling, scribbling in the little pools of light from the green-shaded lamps on the long oak tables, and you look at them and wonder what will-o’-the-wisps they are pursuing day after day, year after year. One of them may be writing a history of dentistry in America, another studying explosives in order to blow up the world, a third gathering evidence that Shakespeare wrote the Bible. Their faces are pale and grim. The only cheerful people in that place are those who do not read the books, but only handle them as they come from the dumbwaiter, and set them on the counter like moldy slabs of beef. Those who sit at the long tables day after day are dedicated men; some of them are brave men. There is death in old books from the stacks of a great library; the dust that impregnates their pages is death and darkness; the dust says, ‘These are books that no one have opened for twenty years, fifty years, eighty years; and when you have written your book, it too will gather dust.’ White book dust, bone dust; garden dirt and axle grease are clean in comparison; they are living and unctuous; rubbed into the skin, they do good. The dust of books causes blains and hangnails; ingested it provokes dyspepsia, flatulence, and heartburn; in the lungs it is cancerous. Who would not choose, if he could, to sit chained to an oar in a Roman galley, in the sunlight and salt air, rather than in this sunless crypt?
That’s from Prophet of the Unexplained, Damon Knight’s 1971 biography of Charles Fort. I actually quite like working in the archives—blains, dyspepsia, and flatulence notwithstanding—but it’s still a great passage.
(I am put out, though, that MIT of all places does not allow digital cameras in their archives, even though the material I’m looking at is not copyrighted, and my flash-less camera will do no more harm to the documents than the pressure of my eyeballs.)
September 05, 2006
Eternal September
Tags: The class of 2010, Generation Gibb, useless research, ode for Caleb, the perils of Storrow Drive.
Prof. Wooderson, on life in the academy: “I keep getting older, they stay the same age.”
The class of 2010 has arrived on campus. 2010. That’s not a misprint, sci-fi novel, or Rush album. And with them arrives that annual email, the “mindset list” from Benoit College, the one that makes even 22-year-old seniors feel out of touch. (Speaking of which: Nick Milne, Western’s least representative student blogger, is reading our student paper and lamenting the culture of his peers.)
The class of 2010 were born in 1988. They are, various iterations of the mindset list inform me, the same age as Haley Joel Osment. Bert and Ernie are old enough to be their (presumably adoptive) parents. They have never tried New Coke, which is no great loss, and they have always been searching for Waldo, which strikes me as poignant in some way. The Cold War has always been over for them; Germany has (almost) always been unified; Lucille Ball, Secretariat, and Andy Gibb have always been dead. The class of 2010 are “used to things happening in ‘real time’”—aren’t we all? John Madden has always been a video game, not a coach, though for them the adjective “video” in this sentence is redundant. What other kinds of games are there? The class of 2010 do not remember, according to my copy of the list, when “cutting and pasting” was done with scissors and glue. I hadn’t realized Windows had actually driven scissors and glue to extinction, but I wouldn’t put it past Microsoft to try. Nor do they remember a world without voice mail, Game Boys, Iraqi insurgents, jet packs, flying cars, or transporter beams.
Here’s something to give me particular pause: many members of the class of 2010 have never lived in a world without The Simpsons. I suppose I must forgive them, then, for not revering it as they should. I dropped a Simpsons reference during my first lecture last year, to stony silence from the class. (But how could I not? The class was on the history of technology, the joke was about the invention of the telephone, and the episode had only aired the night before.) This year I come prepared to bridge the generation gap with killer lines from Fish Police and Capitol Critters.
But as I watch the freshman class of 2010 run riot over campus in their Alpha Complex jumpsuits, testifying that they do have spirit, exhorting me to honk if I love Mustangs, and dyeing themselves purple with gentian violet, they don’t seem all that different from the classes of 2009, 2008, 2007, or even, mirabile dictu, my own class of 1994 1/2. Maybe New Coke and the knowledge that Andy Gibb is alive are less crucial shapers of identity than Benoit College would have us believe.
Summer, Tom Lutz observed yesterday in the NYT, is one of the great perks of academic life. But fall is too. The nights have already turned cool here. The leaves will be changing before we know it. And campus feels like an engine powering up. Everything is humming with possibility. The air is crackling with youth, renewal, and cries of “woo!” I’m full of energy myself—witness this blog post—and powered up for the new year. I have a brand new office (it’s big enough for two chairs, so I can stop holding office hours in Arnold’s bathroom), a spiffy new job title (I’m an associate director of our Centre for American Studies), and I’m teaching one new class and one repeating. I have new articles in the current issues of Business History Review and American Quarterly, and I feel pretty good about being able to straddle that disciplinary range. An old article of mine is finally seeing publication, in a book that’s appropriately titled Unfinished Business: The Making and Unmaking of Canadian Nationalisms. I had hopes of giving this blog a facelift in time for its second birthday (and also migrating to WordPress from Moveable Type), but that isn’t yet done. Still, I brashly volunteered to host the History Carnival on October 1st, so I have motivation to get the place spruced up before then.
I’m also starting a new research project, a new old research project, actually, that takes me back to one of my favorite archives, MIT’s Archives of Useless Research. So we’re zipping off to Boston and back this week. Now there’s a city that comes alive in the first week of September: more than one hundred universities and colleges, more than two hundred thousand students, more than a dozen U-Haul moving vans wedged under the low bridges over Storrow Drive on September 1st. It’s going to be a fun trip. We’re taking Yuki along, speaking of new things, to see her roots. She’s getting into the spirit too—her first tooth is erupting through her lower gums as we speak. She may not be quite as charming a travel companion as usual.
Some beginnnings are also endings: Caleb McDaniel is closing the curtain on Mode for Caleb, for my money the smartest, best written history blog in Blogtown. I’m sorry to see it go, but happy for Caleb’s reasons: a new job and a new baby on the way. Do yourself a favor and reread some of his highlights: maybe Confessions of a Coffee Drinker, On Memorial Day, Dissertation Haikus, or his essential series on Transnational History. Really, it’s all good. Here’s the first post I ever read on Caleb’s blog, a look at I, Robot that’s ten times smarter than the movie it reviews.
Me, I think I’m going to stick around for now. I hardly think I can fill the Caleb shaped gap in your RSS reader, but I do think there will be a lot more activity from me here and at Cliopatria this year. That’s how I feel right now, anyway. It’s that back to school buzz. Anything is possible.
David Weinberger is absolutely right: fall is spring.
