October 23, 2006
Leaving Las Vegas
Tags: The UWO-GMU axis of digital evil, a virulent meme.
I was and still am hoping to blog about the SHOT conference in Las Vegas a week ago, but this week finds me a bit overmatched, so what happened in Vegas will have to stay in Vegas a little longer yet. I can tell you that I met Josh Greenberg, one of the clever elves at CHNM and a fellow plot point on the “UWO-GMU axis of digital evil,” along with many other excellent people who inexplicably do not have weblogs. I can also tell you that I was in Las Vegas for about 72 hours, and probably heard or made one “what happens in Vegas…” reference per hour. Apparently my wife actually went to college with the guy who originally came up with that “…stays in Vegas” ad campaign. I hope his boss let him take the rest of that afternoon off.
October 12, 2006
Superman III
Tags: Kicking ass for justice.
I can’t believe I left this out of the History Carnival: I got an email last month from a guy named Jake Lowen, who saw my post about Superman vs. the Klan and did a video podcast about it. Jake is a community organizer in Kansas, Superman’s adopted home. He trains disenfranchised people, including kids, to fight for self-determination and political change. “I have the greatest job in the world,” Jake says on his site. “I fight evil for a living.” He keeps a video blog describing his adventures “kicking ass for justice,” and it’s pretty inspiring stuff. He gives me too much credit for digging up the Superman / Stetson Kennedy / KKK story, which was in Freakonomics after all, but I’m chuffed that somebody who is actually out in the world fighting for “truth, justice, and all that stuff” found something relevant or useful in my scribblings.
In other news, I’m leaving right this instant for the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) annual conference in Vegas, baby. I’m commentator for a panel on “The Rhetoric of Telecommunication Policy,” comparing the political and rhetorical construction of telecom networks in the U.S., Canada, and Sweden. We have scored the less-than-coveted Sunday morning slot, but it’s a good trio of papers, and I’m looking forward to the panel. And there’s lots of great stuff on the program this year, plus apparently this Las Vegas is something of a tourist town. So if you happen to find yourself on the Vegas strip early Sunday morning, in the vicinity of the Imperial Palace, fresh out of chips and looking for something to do… We’ll even waive the usual two drink minimum. Seriously, though, if anyone reading this is on their way to the conference, hit me with an email and we’ll get together.
In the hopper: What happens in Vegas, biographical sketches of eccentric characters, what I’m not reading.
October 01, 2006
History Carnival XL
Tags: “The links simply multiply like maggots in a cheese.”
About a month ago, Dave Davisson posted something called the Patahistory Manifesto at his blog, Patahistory, and ever since I’ve been wondering how best to respond. The Patahistory Manifesto starts like so:
Patahistory: A Positive Manifesto for Time Travel, Immersive History, and Synchronic Societies
Patahistory is the beginning of history. Today’s historical works are written for contemporary consumers. Patahistorical works are created for future Patahistorians. The Patahistorian expects his or her work to be changed, to be altered, reworked, and revised. The Patahistorian expects an open and democratic editing of raw history. Patahistory celebrates open-source archives and creative commons works.
And it goes from there. Like all the best manifestoes, the Patahistory Manifesto is a fertile mix of genius and manure, so well tilled that I am not sure where one substance ends and the other begins. It’s also kind of a Rorschach blot, in that it reflects the interests of its readers back to them: as I planned to write a response, all month I was bookmarking interesting things I read in the history blogosphere that seemed to illustrate or illuminate Dave’s Manifesto. This became a bit tedious, as I was also bookmarking interesting things I read in the history blogosphere for this iteration of the History Carnival. The solution came to me in a blaze of patahistorical imagination: the Patahistory Carnival.
So, with insincere apologies to Dave, here at last is History Carnival XL. My thanks to those who submitted entries, and my apologies, sincere this time, for the many fine entries I did not use. There was too much good stuff to cover, even in a frightening barrage of links like this, and I freely admit to being fickle, erratic, and unsystematic in my selections. If there is a larger point to all this (a big if), it is that Dave spake better than he knew: Patahistory is already here.
What is Patahistory?
In 1896, the Manifesto tells us, Alfred Jarry coined the word “pataphysics” to describe a whimsical “science of imaginary solutions.” Patahistory, then, is “the whimsical history of imaginary solutions.” I’m writing a paper on “useless research,” and Tim Burke is planning a course on the history of failure, which sort of seem like they should count. But the best imaginary solution I read about this month was Barista’s tale of utopia in a box, starring a well-traveled chest of hopes and dreams whose story connects the sinister Panacean Society, psychic investigators of the 1920s, the divinity of Princess Diana, and the Guild of the Brave Poor Things.
“Historians don’t think big enough or small enough,” says the Patahistory Manifesto. “Billion year histories are just as important as histories of this morning.” The Voltage Gate dips a toe into billion year history with a post on the Cambrian Explosion and the Burgess Shale. You remember the Cambrian Explosion, don’t you, about half a billion years ago, when previously unicellular life mutated into an immense variety of phyla and fauna? I couldn’t find any good histories of this morning, except in the sense that all blog posts tell the history of this morning, but Gus Van Horn tells the history of just last year in his memories of the Hurricane Rita evacuation.
“Patahistory is a team sport, more interested in wikis than tomes,” the Manifesto continues. Jeremy at ClioWeb agrees that history is a perpetual beta. “How do you do history when everything is recorded?” the Manifesto asks. “The next generation of historians will have to find ways of dealing with avalanches of information.” This is a challenge the next generation of digital historians is already considering. As I sample various student blogs, I’m pretty convinced they are all Patahistorians in training, wrestling with the panopticon and the problem of too much information. Their shining light, my colleague Bill Turkel, was kind enough to riff on my post about the secret syllabus in “No Secret Syllabus for Digital History.”
Time Travel and the Participatory Panopticon
“Time travel is the cornerstone of Patahistory,” says the Manifesto. “Patahistory utilizes theories of time as instruments of its philosophical inquiry.” The cutting-edge digital history classes are already discussing Back To The Future and the Choose Your Own Adventure novels as models of narrative and time. (Blog Them Out of The Stone Age, meanwhile, asks you to Choose Your Own History Department, a different sort of adventure.) Other students contemplate something called “Wikipedia”—po-mo encyclopedia or vanguard of digital Maoism? I thought it was just an online reference to comic book plotlines, soon to join MOOs, Madonna videos, and Max Headroom as cultural entities for which the volume of academic theorizing they’ve inspired vastly overshadows any actual significance in the world. But another young historian reminds me, in Wikipedia and Citizendium, that Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger is about to launch Citizendium, a more top-down, less free-for-all wiki encyclopedia that TechCrunch dubs “Wikipedia for stick-in-the-muds.” There’s a market for that, I’m guessing.
The Patahistory Manifesto has a fair bit to say about something called the “participatory panopticon,” in which every life is grist for the patahistorian’s mill. Today’s panopticon is surely Google, which celebrated its eighth birthday this month without turning evil, as far as we know. What happens to a website when it falls away from Google’s all-seeing googly eyes? Infocult points to Ghost Sites, a blog tracking web pages that have “decayed, been abandoned, unupdated, or otherwise left to wither in the howling cruelty of cyberspace.”
Participatory panoptics have been with us longer than you’d think. Several bloggers pointed out Surveillance Society, Caleb Crain’s wonderful New Yorker essay on the Mass-Observation movement of the 1930s, which sent hundreds of Britons into the streets with notebook and pencil to record for future patahistorians such matters as the shouts and gestures of motorists, the anthropology of football pools, behavior of people at war memorials, and the number of outdoor copulations on a typical night in Blackpool (four, including one in which an observer participated). Crain himself is a history blogger (at Steamboats are Ruining Everything) and Sharon Howard has amassed a mass of Mass-Observation links at Early Modern Notes. Does the death of Mass-Observation offer any warning for Patahistorians? Sixty years before the blogiverse, a critic of Mass-Observation carped, “The facts simply multiply like maggots in a cheese.”
Patahistorical Tools and Publishing
Clearly, Patahistory will require new and special tools. At Noise and Impertinence, Matt Neale presents some tools for undergraduate success in history, but I think postgraduate patahistorians could make use of them too. The Foxit PDF Reader he mentions will pay for itself (well, it’s free) solely in the time you don’t spend waiting for Adobe Acrobat to open. I’m Too Sexy For My Master’s Thesis plugs an Endnote plugin for Firefox users, but if you’re really leet you’ll make the jump to Zotero, open-source bibliographic software from the Center for History and New Media. AcademHack, a blog of techie tools for academics, also plugs Zotero, and points to Notemesh and Notesengo, two wiki-based sites for collaborative student note-sharing. Finally, William Tozier’s Notional Slurry promotes the Distributed Proofreaders concept with a great excerpt from The Knickerbocker calling for better labeling of marriageable young ladies—call it metadata, circa 1844. As all historians of technology know, our tools themselves have histories; at ClioWeb, Jeremy points out a blog on the History of the Button.
“The anxieties of previous historians are not those of the Patahistorian,” the Manifesto continues. “Patahistorians are less concerened about truth, tenure, and publishing, than they are about collaboration, synchronic cultures, and making bank.” Bryan Andrachuck must be a Patahistorian; his fourth post finds him wondering if his interest in public history will lead to riches. I hope Prof. Turkel will break the truth to him gently. Speaking of publishing, a number of academic publishers have started blogging. But at Crooked Timber, Scott McLemee says reading blogs from mainstream media outlets is like watching Grandma dance the frug. What’s cooler, and much more patahistorical, is when blogs (like, say, Crooked Timber) start publishing.
Says the Manifesto: “Historians disdain popular histories and yearn for popular success. Patahistory is the reverse. It disdains success and yearns for popular histories.” Historianess Rebecca Goetz discussed that gap between popular and academic history, but Sepoy at Chapati Mystery said the cool kids (specifically graduate students studying South Asia) are bridging that divide. Sepoy’s hot-blooded friend Farangi weighed in on ABC’s Path to 9-11 (as did Jon Swift’s Jonathan Swift) and found nobody looking very good. At The Rhine River, Nathanael reports that some German historians condemned TV history programs as worthless historical pornography (Egads, what would the History Channel do without German history to kick around?) Surely some TV history is worthwhile: Chris Turner, who wrote the definitive book on The Simpsons, has, for an encore, decided to save the world. At Geography of Hope, Turner links to video of the British eco-activist comedian-historian (but he hates labels) Rob Newman’s delirious History of Oil.
Is Patahistory Fun?
The Manifesto chides historians for endlessly writing about “war, disease, starvation, and oppression,” and then wondering why people think history isn’t fun. “Only perverse and idiosyncratic minds … want to learn more about this miserable past.” Must be a lot of perverse and idiosyncratic minds out there, because miserable pasts of war and oppression seem pretty popular from where I’m sitting. Airminded compared the Battle of Britain to the movie, Battle of Britain. Normblog serialized a talk on the ubiquity of gallows’ hills in Shetland while Salto Sobrius dug up gallows’ hills in Sweden. The Year ‘Round ponders the ins and outs of hanging and a series of historic Victorian homicides. Holocaust Controversies continues doing battle with a YouTube-based holocaust denier, a battle with no end in sight; they call it “fun,” but I have my doubts. That damn yankee Kevin Levin’s Civil War Memory discussed a new Civil War documentary, Virginians Desolate, Virginians Free, and also the work of Chandra Manning. Both discussions relate to the recent fracas over military history (Mark Grimsley is in the trenches of that fight; Spinning Clio surveys the battle from higher ground) and turn on the centrality of slavery to the Civil War experience. A comment on Kevin’s latter post accuses Manning of reductionism, in her insistence that ideas about slavery were fundamental to the worldview of soldiers on both sides. To which I reply: Chandra is a good and brilliant friend of mine, the one in grad school who put all the rest of us to shame. I’ve seen the size of her dissertation, to be published by Knopf next year, and I assure you it is not reductive about anything.
“Isn’t play also part of the human condition?” asks the Manifesto. “Where are the jokes? The songs? The dancing?” Well, Ali Eteraz asks if the prophet Muhammad was funny, but concludes he was more “lighthearted” and “corny” than ha ha funny. Sort of like my Dad. “Patahistory is a ludic history,” sayeth the Manifesto: that is, a playful history, a history of games. At Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog (of Serpentes on a Shippe fame), Chaucer’s son Lowys heaps derision on a computer game based on the Hundred Year’s War. Lowys’ 14th-century leet-speak is priceless: “IS ST SWITHUNZ DAY AND FOR XL MORE DAYS IT WILL BE RAINING THE BLOOD OF NOOBS!” But games can be serious business: Brett Schulte at American Civil War Gaming & Reading presents parts eight and nine of a mind-boggling ten part series on Eric Jacobson’s For Cause and for Country, a book about the Civil War battle of Franklin, Tennessee. Brett’s thoroughness testifies to the intense interest of certain gamers and simulators in accurate history. Acephalous’ Scott Kaufman has a much shorter answer for why the South lost the Civil War.
Weak Segues and Synchronic History
The patahistorian embraces weak segues; the Manifesto doesn’t say that anywhere, but I’m going to have to pretend it does or I’ll never get through all these links. At History Unfolding, David Kaiser looked at where the money went in 1965 and today. Adjusted for inflation, Kaiser found, almost every basic necessity costs only half today what it did in 1965—but in that “almost” lies at least one big catch. Jonathan Dresner learned from the Guardian’s News Blog that the British chocolate industry was founded by Quakers. “I wonder if the Pennsylvania Dutch have anything to do with Hershey’s,” he asks. Don’t get me started on candy history, Jonathan. Milton Hershey was in fact a Mennonite, not to mention an idealistic philanthropist who tried to build a chocolate utopian community and gave his fortune to orphans; his great rival, Forrest Mars Sr., was a notorious miser and recluse who lived out his days in a Las Vegas candy factory like the offspring of Willy Wonka and Howard Hughes. At American Presidents Blog, James Buchanan: A Lesson In Name Calling, remarks on the sexuality of the bachelor president and links to a weird but cool little exhibit called Tall, Slim, and Erect, which combines obscure biographical data on the U.S. presidents with portraits of plastic figurines for an odd meditation on the office and the men. My favorite figurine is probably Woodrow Wilson’s, my favorite entry Benjamin Harrison’s. APB also provides evidence that Barbara Bush was once a hottie.
It had no explicitly historical posts in the past fortnight, but I’m happy for the return of Petri Dish, which blogs on science, culture and history. This post on a class in science and popular culture is interesting, and it sounds like a great class. I’m also happy to welcome the second year of the Science Creative Quarterly, which seems like the sort of place Alfred Jarry would feel right at home. Editor Dave Ng combined Bruce Lee, SUVs, and DNA site-directed mutagenesis in his own manifesto of sorts, while Angela Beckett explained how to win a Nobel Prize. Collection Resurrection is a new blog by a recent graduate of my university’s public history program, now curating and restoring the collections of a small town Ontario museum. Seeds of Growth called Eli Whitney the original “Long Tail” entrepreneur. Chris Clarke’s comic book adaptation of Michael Bérubé’s What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts may or may not be up when you read this—its sheer awesomeness devoured his bandwidth and crashed his site.
Patahistory requires “synchronic history,” the history of current things. A blog called Lewis and Clark: What Else Happened, dedicated to chronicling what else happened on every day of the Lewis and Clark expedition, reached its journey’s end this month, two hundred years to the day after Lewis and Clark completed theirs. Walking the Berkshires presented Patriotic Cover, with great images of Civil War era postcards, and discussed Lincoln’s Fast Day of September 26, 1861. Other holidays and anniversaries were noted in the blogosphere: Radical Geek observed Ignore the Constitution Day on September 17th. I suspect the Bush Administration observed it too, but perhaps not the way Rad Geek had in mind. The Axis of Evel Knievel marked the 68th birthday of “the worst historical analogy ever” and the start of last century’s longest conventional war. Finally, I know you know that September 19th was Talk Like A Pirate Day. The Skwib waxed piratical all week; I’m Too Sexy For My Master’s Thesis pointed to this article on Jewish Pirates (“The first shmuck to kvetch will find his tuchus keel-hauled!” declared my friend Judd Karlman); and Patahistory’s Dave Davisson, who is ultimately to blame for all of this, gets the final word with a wordless post: Pirates vs. Ninjas.
The End of Patahistory
Ta-da! That concludes this edition of the History Carnival. Thanks for scrolling. Jeremy Boggs will host the next History Carnival at ClioWeb on October 15th. (Look! He has cute baby pictures on his blog too!) Contact him via his site or use this handy form to submit entries for the next carnival. Past posts and future hosts can be found on the History Carnival homepage or at the Blog Carnival Index. I am out of here.
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A Day Late
Tags: …and a dollar short?
The History Carnival is lurching around the bend, even as we speak, but it may be a few hours, or even a day late, this time around. To tide you over until it comes: baby pictures! I defy you to resist them!
