Adventures in History and Digital Humanities
On Friday, I am headed to Ireland for four months. The purpose of the trip is to fill in the cracks in the research I’ve already done, and hopefully get two chapters written in the process. I’ve packed my computer, my ipod, my ipad and some DVDs. I am somewhat upset that I can’t bring the small-terror-that-is-called-dog.
What is essential for your research trips? What have you packed that you’ve regretted?
Nineteenth-century headlines are occasionally wonderfully understated. Take “Conflict between a man and a Wolf” published in the Cherokee Advocate of December 9th, 1847.
So, my father happens to be a psychologist, and because of this, I happen to be more aware of trends in psychology than I might otherwise be. Over dinner tonight, we were talking about institutional sexism, and I was pointed towards a few articles that seem to echo many of the claims made by gender theorists about how gender effects perceptions of individuals’ social value and utility. One argues that among men who demonstrate some gender bias, sexist jokes were more likely than not to prime listeners to discriminate against women – in this study discrimination was measured by inclination to fund charities that benefited women. (More than “just a joke”…) The other uses social psychology tools to make an argument for why things that are gendered female are valued less than things that are gendered male. (Glick and Fiske in Revisioning Gender.) I am still working my way through these, but on first blush they seem to confirm a lot of what gender theorists (and others) have been saying about perceptions of gender norms and discrimination.
The contention that “sex is the primary category by which people automatically classify others” (Glick, Fiske) seems a lot like the claim that we need to think about issues of gender when pursuing projects of social justice, to think about how gender intersects with other categories (race, class, age), how the negatives in those categories are feminized or masculaized and how that gendering denotes value. For instance – women who exhibit aggressive behavior “are penalized for being successful in domains that are considered to be male, and are disliked and interpersonally derogated as a consequence.” (Madeline Heilman, Sex bias in work settings project description) Similarly, the notion that sexist jokes are bad for perceptions of and reactions to women is a common-place assertion for people (wonderfully demonstrated in many ways at Shakesville) who talk about rape culture and how it is perpetuated. In fact, a lot of what psychologists of gender are saying seems to sync with what activists and gender theorists have been saying for awhile.
At the AHA before last, at a panel on the history of emotion, the suggestion was floated that historians and psychologists might benefit from working with one another. I think that we might add activists to the mix, both to give us more tools to de-center the oft-poorly-reported evo-psych stories that perpetuate tired gender stereotypes without much cause, but also as a means of connecting the people who are approaching the same problems from different perspectives. This is not, by the way, an argument for “science justifies arguments that other people have been making for awhile, but only with the addition of science are those arguments valid.” Also, the discussion of how certain disciplines are valued and gendered is an important one, but for another day. I know that my work has benefited from social scientific and psychological work on philanthropy and social obligation, and this brief foray into psychological studies of gender suggests the same is true for other fields as well. Perhaps this is already happening – in which case, I’d love to hear about interdisciplinarity in action, but if it’s not I think we (wearing my academic hat) need to make a better effort.
There’s almost never a “dear diary, here’s how I feel about [Anelise’s dissertation topic]” source, but its nice to find things that come close:
Returns are still coming in from all parts of the country, showing that the spirit of benevolence is as general as the information (thanks to the American newspaper press,) respecting the distress of our transatlantic brethren. New York Herald, March 11th, 1847
The New York newspapers in late 1846/early 1847 seem very interested in the case of the “female Lothario in Canada,” a woman who dressed like a man in order to seduce women. The New York Herald comments that “there is something strange and romantic about the practice of two ladies making love to each other.”
From the Arkansas Intelligencer of February 21, 1846:
“England and Scotland for ages were rival kingdoms, inhabited by distinct tribes of men, the former loyal to the sovering and the latter ready upon all occasions to quarrel with power and war with unkilted neighbors.”
It’s true: the kilts made all the difference.
Tenured Radical has an excellent post reviewing Gordon Wood’s review of Jill Lepore’s The Whites of their Eyes: the tea party’s revolution and the battle over American history. Among the very smart things that she says about women’s voices and authority in the academy and historical fundamentalism, she says this:
the point of Lepore’s book, as I understand it, is that history is a highly public project whether we scholars like it or not. It cannot be confined to the archival work, truth seeking and critical methods that we historians see as fundamental to our craft, and we have some responsibility to grapple with and shape those larger belief systems. As the public latches on to history as a way of discussing their political concerns, they develop fetish objects. For the Tea Party activists in particular, the Founding Fathers operate as fetish objects, as well as intellectual touchstones for a set of political beliefs that are at least as presentist as they are located in any coherent eighteenth century intellectual world.
In light of recent and not-so-recent attacks on the humanities, and history in particular as politically motivated drek by people in ivory towers, I think that it is important to talk about the “highly public” side of history, and the links between that, research and teaching. In particular, I’ve been thinking about how, as a teacher of undergraduates, I can connect history’s “highly public project” with the content in my classroom, without reifying what TR calls historical fetish objects, while providing students with skills that they can use beyond the U.S. survey.
One of the teaching pedagogy panels at the AHA that really struck me talked about how, at the survey level at least, it might behoove teachers to focus more on analytical skills than narrative, that being able to place a source in a historically specific setting, to make arguments about the motivations of the author and the possible responses of the audience, will be a longer-lasting lesson than the battles of WWI. I don’t think that it needs to be one or the other, but in my classes I am going to try to think more critically about historical skill sets that better equip students to engage with history vis-a-vis larger belief systems, like founding father fundamentalism.
I was at the AHA in Boston this weekend, and was able to meet/talk to/listen to a lot of people who are doing really innovative things in historical research and teaching. I like to treat big conferences like this as an opportunity to think about methods, more than about new findings or interpretations, and the AHA planning committee made this particularly easy by including many many panels on teaching and pedagogy. I am still sifting through all that I heard from those, and a whole other chunk of my brain is devoted to parsing what I saw on social network theory, so some more in-depth thoughts on both of those will come later. I do want to play around with some ideas that came out of the coincidence of those teaching panels, some others on the uses of narrative and “reading against the grain” in historical scholarship, and a video podcast walking tour that I stumbled across while looking for something to do in Boston over a particularly long lunch break.
Murder on Beacon Hill is both an iphone app and video podcast, made by the creators of the documentary Murder at Harvard, which is about the murder of George Parkman by John Webster, a Harvard doctor. The murder and subsequent trial have turned up a lot in my own research, because they were widely reported in both the New York and the Cherokee press in 1849-50. I had idly wondered who this Webster was that papers kept referencing, but I put it largely out of my mind because the case seemed to have no relevance to Irish famine reportage and relief. I am a big fan of podcasted walking tours, and also of murder mysteries, and I was trebley happy to find that this particular podcast was dedicated to a relatively un-remembered event that I happened to be familiar with.
But I think that this thing (podcast, art piece, cultural artifact – I’m not really sure what to call it) also connects in interesting ways with the panels on teaching I’d been attending in the past few days. It’s creator, Eric Strange, says that he was compelled to make it because
People have told us they now understand connections become the geography of the area and the cultural history, and between the architecture and the social and political climate of 1850s Boston, that they never realized before. All because of a 45-minute walk. We want people to take the tour and afterwards never see the streets and buildings the same way again. I think we achieved that. (Interview with history news network)
A lot of what I try to do as a teacher is to help students to never see the events of the past, or what follows them in the present the same way again. I don’t mean that in a radical way, but in my ideal world, students who leave my classroom after, say, an intro to British imperial history class will pause when they hear about sectarian violence in Pakistan, and remember what they learnt about the historical circumstances that lead up to that event. Although at its most basic we might think about Murder on Beacon Hill as entertainment, salacious and murderful at that, it makes me think about alternative approaches to teaching, and the incorporation of the oft-ballyhooed “digital humanities” into the classroom. Even more so, about the nature of the “classroom” itself. I am teaching a class on natural disasters in America this summer, and I am trying to find ways to get students out of the physically inscribed space of the classroom, and into the world in which historical events have happened. It might be worthwhile to think about how to trouble the boundary between academic space and the “real world,” and if troubling that boundary can serve students well by connecting the often dry text of their readings with tangible lives. C and I are going to play around with the idea of creating an interactive tour of New York this summer – we’ll see how that goes.
From the Choctaw Intelligencer of February 12th, 1851:
You may make a horse follow you in ten minutes. Go to the horse, rub his face, jaw and chin, leading him about, saying to him, come along, a constant tone is necessary. By taking him away from other persons and horses, repeat the leading and stopping. Sometimes turn him around, and all ways keep his attention by saying, come along. With some horses, it is important to whisper to them, as it hides the secret and gentles the horse, you may use any word you please, but be constant in your tone of voice. The same will cause all horses to follow.
This, in a paper which advertises a remarkable number of horse thefts.
One of my perennial problems with American tv shows with occasional British themes is the way in which Irishness is leveraged. Irishmen are either IRA terrorists or benevolent barkeeps. Irishwoman are almost universally objects to be had by charming American male leads. Stereotypes aside, for the time being, I have noticed a trend in recent portrayals of the ‘nasty’ IRA mode of Irishman. A recent episode of ‘Human Target’ featured an ex-IRA ‘enforcer’ who makes good by helping the British royal he once put a bounty on. Movies like ‘Boondock Saints’ feature thuggish men with northern accents who make good by ridding Boston of bad guys. Is the implication that (a) all Irishmen with northern accents are IRA men? and (b) that consequently all Irishmen with northern accents owe something to either the U.S. or Britain?
Narratives about Northern Ireland in the American press are few and far between. A botched car bombing in Derry in November got almost no attention in the U.S. press, marching day riots receive little but brief mention while the publication of the Saville report, arguably one of the more important news items vis-a-vis northern Ireland in recent years garnered three mentions in the New York Times, one of them in an op-Ed written by Bono. However, northern Irish characters seem to pop up regularly in American television, from Leverage to Lie to Me to Human Target to Burn Notice. These characters are a knowable unknowable – exotic enough to be a change-up from the normal thuggery, but familiar enough to make audiences receptive. Frequently, these characters find redemption in the end, or die protecting ‘worthy’ American or British allies.
In the most recent iteration of the Sherlock Holmes cannon, Moriarty is cast a dilettante Irishman, a modern day Oscar Wilde, but with a northern accent. Are we to learn that only non-northerners can be trusted? That northern Irishmen can only be redeemed through service to crown or American flag? Or is this simply a correlation/causation problem, based on the assumption that Americans can’t recognize Derry from Dublin, let alone Ireland from Scotland?
If the myth of Irish-America is one of the 26 counties rather than the 32, how do we teach Irish-American or even Irish history in America? Put another way, if the only Irish that we accept in American popular culture are from the republic, how can we responsibly talk about the 6?
In terms of teaching Irish and British history, how do we undermine the othering of Northern Ireland without giving students the impression that we are advocating for violent republicanism?
