A fifty-minute radio programme which mentions Hiroshima, antichrist, massacres, war criminals, Afghanistan, 9/11, ethnic cleansing, Nagasaki, enslavement, bigotry, racism, military dictators, lunacy, zealousness and Adolf Hitler ought perhaps to be of interest to a wide audience. In this case, the subject was Oliver Cromwell, a name which on its own is sufficient to attract considerable attention in Ireland.
Radio history, like television history, is difficult to get right and is rarely satisfactory for the specialist. But specialists need to remember that these programmes are not particularly designed for them, and that for the duration they ought perhaps to exchange their shoes or shades for those worn by the ‘ordinary’ public.
Oliver Cromwell (Wikimedia Commons)
Dr Patrick Geoghegan’s Talking History on Newstalk is one of several history-focused programmes regularly broadcast nationwide in Ireland. Topics of discussion in recent weeks have included the Battle of Waterloo, Mark Anthony, the American Civil War and George Bernard Shaw. On 14 March, the programme took the form of a debate about Cromwell in Ireland, focusing on his nine-month campaign in Ireland in 1649-50 and its legacy.
A few weeks ago the University of Saskatchewan Department of History held a “Publishing your Dissertation” workshop. Organized by the graduate students, the workshop was an important opportunity to treat grad students not just as students but as junior historians, as future professionals. And the benefit was not limited just to them, the postdocs were avid participants as well. None of us are writing dissertations and manuscripts purely to earn a credential, but rather as a first step in a professional trajectory that will include publication and dissemination of our research.
How do we publish our work? (Wikimedia Commons)
The most important and inspiring statement of the day was a comment made by our department Chair, Valerie Korinek. She concluded by assuring the audience that they had already made the first step to publishing their manuscripts simply by participating in the workshop. By attending, by engaging, we had taken ourselves and our work seriously on a professional level, and this was truly the first step to publishing our work as professional historians.
I was inspired by Prof. Korinek’s comments more than I expected.
Can you briefly summarize the article for our readers?
I’m happy to – in this article I have endeavoured to bring together the Canadian, Australia and New Zealand literature on soldier settlement of the 1920s as well as a smaller literature on empire wide ex-soldier settlement schemes. It forms a surprisingly cohesive body of literature even though it is quite dispersed and various authors reside in history, geography and economics departments in a number of different countries. There was a considerable degree of similarity amongst many of these schemes in terms of their objectives and the institutional arrangements for their implementation as demobilisation took place and as allied governments sought to repay debts of honour to returning soldiers. There was also a wide spread view that the schemes were largely a failure regardless of whether you are reading about Canada, Australia or New Zealand. A closer reading of the literature suggests however, some of these judgements were particularly harsh and that there are some pitfalls in too easily using and assigning labels such as ‘success’ or ‘failure’. Read the rest of this entry »
If you have a funny/poignant/thought-provoking/etc. idea for a history cartoon, please send it to Angela.C.Sutton[at]Vanderbilt[dot]edu. If I use your idea I will give you credit here.
Students rely on Wikipedia. Professors can pretend that their threats of Fs on assignments matter, but in reality it offers little deterrent. Students can and do weave facts, information, opinions and interpretations that they find online into their papers. If the material seems reasonable, or general, or cited elsewhere, it might not even draw our attention, particularly when we have to grade 50 or 75 or 90 term papers on a weekend. What is the solution?
One answer, probably the most common, is to scold and threaten. We tell our students that Wikipedia is an inappropriate and unacceptable source for historical research and writing. We threaten them with Fs and rewrites. Another answer is to explain to students why Wikipedia is an unreliable source. It lacks appropriate documentation of sources, and is written by individuals with uncertain research skills who base entries largely on sometimes-dubious secondary material. And then we threaten them with Fs and rewrites. But is there a third solution? We know our students use Wikipedia. Can we use this to our advantage? Can we teach them about online sources and how to determine the credibility of what they read and discover? Can we undermine their reliance on Wikipedia, while at the same time use it as a teaching tool?
Recently I attended Dr. Sue Onslow’s stimulating talk ‘War and Memory: Narratives of the Rhodesian war in the UDI era,’ part of the Institute for Commonwealth Studies Seminar Series on Decolonization. Onslow’s presentation explored on oral history interviews she had completed of 120 Rhodesian Army veterans. Onslow’s research focused around the question of “Why did you fight?” and her discussion included reflections on her methodology as well as some preliminary conclusions and questions that have arisen out of her research. Onslow discussed the difficulty of interviewing former combatants many of whom were still marked by the trauma of their experiences. Though Onslow clearly demonstrated the wide variety of views held by former Rhodesian soldiers, she also discussed the challenges of gaining the trust necessary for a successful interview of people who often had attitudes about violence and race that were quite different from her own.
Of course, one way around this problem is to limit your research to people or causes with whom you are sympathetic or broadly agree. This of course happens frequently and is probably more likely to go unexamined than if you are researching those with whom you have a strong personal disagreement. But of course, it comes with its own problems and can result in an unquestioning acceptance of a particular narrative. And, just as it is necessary to research those who suffered under oppressive regimes, cruelty or discrimination, it is important to research those who committed acts that we today see as reprehensible, whether slave-holders, those behind genocide and other atrocities or common criminals. Read the rest of this entry »
March is Women’s History Month. Along with uncovering and rethinking images of the woman and her contribution throughout history comes the responsibility to challenge the accepted stereotypes and persistent misinformation already out there.
For example: to this date, no historian has been able to uncover any evidence of bra-burning feminists of the 1960s.
This month, I pledge to use my historian super-powers for good instead of evil. Although women did not create the documents I use to write my dissertation, I will read against the grain to find their voices between the lines. To write a history without women is to write only half the story.
If you’re curious about what it takes to incorporate women in your historical research, I recommend historian Tanya Roth’s blog. Roth is completing a dissertation on the integration of women into the US military (1945-1978) and has written many thought-provoking posts on how she makes sense of the documentation and oral interviews.
If you have a funny/poignant/thought-provoking/etc. idea for a history cartoon, please send it to Angela.C.Sutton[at]Vanderbilt[dot]edu. If I use your idea I will give you credit here.
Bartolomé de las Casas and the African Slave Trade (p 1526-1541)
ARTICLE ABSTRACT
A revisionist view of Bartolomé de las Casas as the ‘author’ of the introduction of African slaves to the Indies/Americas in the early 16th century. The article details Las Casas’ thinking and actions and concludes that while Las Casas did—among other contemporaries—suggest the importation of African slaves to lift the burden of oppression off the Amerindians, his perspective and view was altered radically in the last third of his life. The article explores the meaning of African slavery in the context of the place and time where Las Casas grew up—Andalucia in southern Spain—where slavery was quite different from the way it developed on the plantations of the Americas. And the article relates how Las Casas’ theoretical and practical defense of Amerindians eventually was extended by Las Casas’ into a defense of liberty for all men, including African slaves.
With the German winter semester drawing to a close, the members of the Graduiertenkolleg Freunde, Gönner, Getreue (Friends, Patrons, Clients) gathered last weekend in the village of Altglashütten along with some guests. The topic of the weekend was ‘Methodological approaches to friendship and patronage’, with the main attention being focused on discourse analysis and network analysis. The variety in the weather (overcast on Friday, sunny on Saturday and a blizzard on Sunday) was matched by the diversity of approaches and perspectives at what proved to be a very worthwhile event.
A snowy Sunday at Altglasshütten (image by author)
Paul Deslandes, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Vermont, is a scholar of modern Britain and the history of gender and sexuality. He has published widely on the history of masculinity, male sexuality and British education. Deslandes is the author of Oxbridge Men: British Masculinity and the Undergraduate Experience, 1850-1920. His current research explores the history of male beauty in modern Britain.
In his recent History Compass article “The Male Body, Beauty and Aesthetics in Modern British Culture,” Deslandes explored the historical significance of male beauty. Across studies of sport and physical culture, disability and WWI disfigurement, and queer history, he argues, awareness and understanding of beauty and aesthetics offer insights not only to histories of masculinity but histories of British society as a whole. For this reason, Deslandes argues, historians must pay greater attention to physical appearance, value placed on male beauty, and the adornment and manipulation of the male body to better understand the British past.
I had the opportunity to interview Professor Deslandes about the arguments in his History Compass piece, its broader implications, and place within his current research.
Justin Bengry recently wrote on this topic and I have been thinking about it as well. It has often occurred to me that, especially in the lower division survey classes for which I worked as a teaching assistant, there was a lot of emphasis on teaching the mechanics of historical writing and explaining the difference between primary and secondary sources and only rarely did students engage with examples of argument-driven history based on primary research. Commonly their reading would consist of a text-book supplemented by primary sources that we would analyze in section. This is often because of time constraints, particularly in the ten week quarter system of my university and the desire to expose students to primary sources, but also because of concerns that many articles or monographs would be too difficult or inaccessible to students. However, when I did have the chance to teach such material, I found that students often rose to the challenge. Discussions were often better, largely because once I made sure that students understood the argument and its relevance, I could ask them whether they agreed with it and why, what they considered its strengths and weaknesses. These are all topics likely to provoke debate rather than to have my students uncomfortably searching for the “right” answer that they often assumed I was looking for in our discussions of primary sources, despite my best efforts to assure them otherwise. Read the rest of this entry »
Of course, not all historians have this strange a way of showing love, but should you be on the receiving end of a getaway like this, let me assure you that it was meant to be both romantic and beautiful.
Besides, who turns down free photocopying at an archive?
If you have a funny/poignant/thought-provoking/etc. idea for a history cartoon, please send it to Angela.C.Sutton[at]Vanderbilt[dot]edu. If I use your idea I will give you credit here
I have always enjoyed wandering through library stacks and inhaling the smell of accumulated books in all their crumbling, moldy, physical glory. In the midst of a long Maine winter 25 miles away from a big bookstore, however, I finally caved in and purchased a Kindle. I intended the e-reader to be my insurance against inhospitable weather, my back-up source for mystery novels and popular fiction. Since getting it, however, I have also downloaded Jstor articles, copy-right expired books in PDF files online, and I recently used it in class instead of printing out a book chapter. In many ways my Kindle has become a professional tool as well as a vehicle for leisure reading. I also noticed that when I read an academic article on my e-reader, I did exactly the same thing that I do with the printed version – I scanned the footnotes as I read. Some thing don’t change regardless of the format I guess.
Well before e-readers, the ancient Chinese heated and cracked cow scapula bones and carved upon them records of divinations.
As I write, I can hear voices coming through the wall. In the coffee room, two postgraduates from the Freunde, Gönner, Getreue Research Group are passionately discussing their work.
In recent months, I have been fortunate to occupy an office within the research space which is home to Graduiertenkolleg 1288, Friends, Patrons, Clients, at the University of Freiburg. The work of this interdisciplinary PhD group, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, is focused on the ‘practice and semantics of friendship and patronage in historical, anthropological and cross-cultural perspectives’. Within these broad parameters, there is a great deal of varied and exciting work happening. Students sitting side by side investigate issues as far apart, chronologically at least, as ‘Revenge as social practice in Archaic and Classical Greece’ and ‘The Internet and Egyptian concepts of friendship in transition’. If those topics don’t appeal to you, how about the Maori and Pakeha in New Zealand, Seneca, Qing-China, or the punk and hardcore-scene in Buenos Aires? Read the rest of this entry »
