Adventures in History and Digital Humanities
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?
I’ve always been fascinated with British currency. As a child, I think that I liked them because they looked more like treasure than American currency, but recently I’ve become interested in the social messages of coins. One of the last items in the History of the World in 100 Objects series was a suffragette penny. Suffragettes stamped ‘Votes for Women’ over the face of the Edward VII (leaving the female Britannia on the reverse side un-touched) and circulated the pennies. Because the coins were of such low denomination, and because there were so many of them, the suffragette message spread relatively widely, and less violently than many other suffragette strategies of the time. Currency as a combination of the symbolic and the practical is not a new notion – today’s money is even symbolic of its worth, as no coin is worth its weight in metal, and Douglas Adams even went so far as to claim in his speech at Digital Biota 2 in 1998 that money was an artificial god. But the current British currency makes reference symbolically to another practical process – that of the aging of the queen.
Until 1984, the image of Queen Elizabeth II on British coinage was a young one:
From 1985 to 1997 the image was of a slightly older queen:
And the image that has been in use since 1998 is older still:
It has been over a decade since the last image of Queen Elizabeth was commissioned, and I wonder if they will re-mint the coins any time in the future. The aging Queen both reminds the people who use British coinage daily of the mortality of their monarch – older coins are still in circulation, so it is possible to come across all three versions of the queen in one transaction – but also reminds the Queen and her family of that same mortality. I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like to be the head of a constitutional monarchy, or in a position that a rising number of citizens think should be abolished altogether. I suppose that all people in the public eye have the unique experience of seeing their histories written as they live it, but to have your aging process indelibly marked on metal, which will presumably be around longer than Daily Mail lambasts of celebrities, must be a disconcerting experience.
The financial crisis has sparked histories of money and capital, but I think that historians might also think about the incidental material culture of money, and what it means and meant to interact daily with coins and notes as objects.
Even the Freeman’s Journal has something to say about the question of the Irish “race”: “The Times is remarkable addicted to Oriental analogies when Ireland is the subject of illustration.”
The London Times never fails to disappoint for juicy quotes about the Irish, and the Freeman’s Journal similarly never fails to disappoint for snark.
I don’t think that I was aware that I had a teaching philosophy until I had to write one. Part of that came from the fact that in graduate school, I have been exposed to a certain kind of historical teaching, and had not really considered why professors were making certain decisions vis-a-vis their curricula. Now that I am designing syllabi of my own, I am struck by how many different directions one might go in, to teach something as basic, say, as British history. Do I assign new, but possibly unproven books, or classic texts? How do I balance the kinds of histories that I like – mostly social – with other approaches? How many, and what kinds of writing assignments teach the most without overloading students?
For undergraduates, I find that I am trying quite hard to create a connection with the past, and to lead students to consider people and events in the past not as denizens or artifacts of an unreachable foreign land, but approachable and accessible. In turn, students come to think about the past neither as a dull series of truths nor as a simple procession from cause to effect, but as deeply contingent and complicated as the world today.
While looking at the super-granny photospread, I came across these images by Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov.
Larenkov takes old WWII photos and “carefully photoshops them over more recent shots to make the past come alive. Not only do we get to experience places like Berlin, Prague, and Vienna in ways we could have never imagined, more importantly, we are able to appreciate our shared history in a whole new and unbelievably meaningful way.” This is an incredibly elegant visual representation of what I try to do in class, and although the conceit seems as though it might become hackneyed with overuse, I wonder if and how I might use images like these to help students better understand their connecdedness to the past.
So, I am about one-third of the way through the ouvre of Agatha Christie, and while I am noticing plot-recycling like never before (Evil Under the Sun is basically the same story as Death on the Nile, for instance) I am also coming to appreciate the ways in which Dame Christie created a world for her characters to live in. I am also watching the Dr. Who cannon in my relaxation/ sitting-up-with-the-dog-who’s-eaten-chocolate-to-make-sure-he-doesn’t-die time and I am struck by the same thing. The writers of the Whoniverse have it relatively easier, they have been building on their world since the 1960s, and also have all of time and space to fool around with. So if they want to reference a previous doctor, they can just pick an alien and be done with it.
I think that what Christie does is slightly different, insofar as she was working alone, and was limited (if you can call it that) by England between WWI, and the 1970s (although that was naturally limited further by whenever she was writing). I have noticed a few times that AC includes incidental asides that have exactly no bearing on the case – which is notable for her, most seemingly unrelated quips are brought in at the end of the novel by Poirot/Marple/Tommy+Tuppence as a key moment of deduction – like in One, Two, Buckle My Shoe, when Julia Olivera references Miss Van Schulyer, or in Appointment with Death when Nadine Boynton references Poirot turning a blind eye in the Murder on the Orient Express.
At first I thought these little references were a bit too coy and cutesy, a reward for the ‘real’ readers. And they might have been from AC’s point of view. But I think that a lesson might be learnt from this style of writing. One of my goals as an historian is to recreate the worlds in which people lived. One of the most rewarding, and most difficult parts of writing my dissertation is imagining how 19th century Londoners, Dubliners, Corkonians, Mancuinians, Liverpudlians, Glasgwegians, New Yorkers, Cherokees and Choctaws would have experienced reports of the famine. Were they shocked? Did some people cry, upon reading reports of abject suffering? Why did they donate so much money to famine relief? At any rate, elegantly conveying through prose the world in which people lived, read, and reacted is a rewarding challenge for me, and reading AC recently has made me think anew about how I can employ prose to create that world for my readers. Of course, I am even more limited than AC – I have to confine myself to the actual past, but as proponents of speculative history have reminded us, sometime when the sources aren’t there, we have to do our best to critically imagine the worlds we are studying. I am working on the Dublin chapter, and having done much of the theoretical work on Irish nationalism and the famine, I am now trying to describe what it was like for Dubliners to read about the suffering and death of their own countrymen. It is a whole bunch of fun to write.
