The best quote from a great article on the concept of repugnance . . . yes, repugnance . . .in today’s NYT:
“The problem is not that economists are unreasonable people, it’s that they’re evil people,” [Yale Psychology Professor Paul Bloom] said. “They work in a different moral universe.”
Historians study how everybody else’s moral universe has changed over time.
I’ve been reading a lot of really good posts about blogging in general and history blogging in particular over the last few days. The one that got me thinking the most was Jeremy Young’s “Blogging and Peer Review” over at Progressive Historians. He writes:
[B]logging is about . . . : distilling historical knowledge into something juicy, fun, and intelligible and sharing that richness with laypeople and with one another. In some ways, it’s like teaching, but the goal is not to impart knowledge to people who are there for the purpose; it is to reach out into the community and begin a discussion on historical issues of importance. Though we utilize our training as academics, we take a very egalitarian role as facilitators of the discussion, not authorities who know the answers to society’s problems. Most importantly, we bring historical knowledge to bear on topics of direct importance to ordinary people, which can include historical debates but is more likely to serve questions of interest to the community, whether political, cultural or social. In this kind of work, our “peers” are not merely academics but interested individuals from all walks of life. As such, their comments on our blogging work are every bit as valid as that of the “gatekeepers” who provide more trusted and substantial feedback on our scholarly writing.
He had me all the way until the end. It’s not that I don’t think comments are useful, it’s just that the kind of writing one does for a blog and one does for a scholarly publication strike me as entirely different. Blog writing is, if nothing else, supposed to be fun to read (or else nobody would visit you). Academic writing is supposed to be informative. Fun is secondary, if it’s present at all.
Don’t get me wrong. Good blog writing is not easy. I think a line from an article Ralph Luker linked to over at Cliopatria yesterday from a professional blogger describing his craft makes that point well:
We are not looking at a blank page and trying to fill it; we are looking at yesterday’s work and realizing it means nothing. The next thing you do is all that matters; every day—every minute—is a test to grab eyeballs with something fresh and inspiring. You write because that’s your job; you won’t hear a blogger ever say they’re “blocked.” Writer’s block is the luxury of those who have no one expecting to hear from them today.
University Diaries recently excerpted an article that made a similar point here.
It makes me think of a complaint that I heard Steve Martin make once about being funny. People expect him to be hilarious all the time, and sometimes he’s just not in the mood. I can’t imagine what 38 posts a day would be like if that was my job. Thank goodness it’s not.
The point of Young’s entire post seems to be to get Academia to treat blogging the same way it treats traditional scholarship:
What the profession is saying when it refuses to give academic credit to bloggers is that it doesn’t value this sort of outreach, that the only thing that matters when evaluating scholars is the quality and quantity of their scholarship.
In order to get academic credit, blogs would have to look a lot more like scholarly books: theoretical, serious, laden with evidence. When that happens is about the time I stop reading blogs as they’re where I go when I’m sick of reading what my job requires me to know.
HTML Mencken (What a great name!) at Sadly, No! has a great post up comparing Herbert Hoover and Jonah Goldberg. As nobody has bothered to send me a review copy of Liberal Fascism yet, I’m not going in the Goldberg direction here, but I find Mencken’s excerpt of William Appleman Williams discussing Herbert Hoover absolutely fascinating:
…Hoover was not a revolutionary. He was not even a modern liberal. And he does not deserve uncritical acclaim. But he was an unusually intelligent, and often perceptive, conservative who understood that the system was a system; that it was based on certain clear and not wholly absurd axioms, and that it would work only if the people acted in ways that honored those principles.
“I want to live in a community that governs itself,” Hoover explained very simply, “that neither wishes its responsibilities onto a centralized bureaucracy nor allows a centralized bureaucracy to dictate to that local government.” “It is not the function of government,” he continued, “to relieve individuals of their responsibilities to the public.” “You cannot extend the mastery of the government over the daily working life of the people,” he warned, “without at the same time making it the master of the people’s souls and thoughts.”
If you are Hoover, that is to say, then your moral imperative demands that you let the system come apart at the seams rather than violate the principles by saving the system for the people. One of your principles is that the system is their system, and hence the moment you save it for them you kill the dream. For when you do that you rule the people instead of serving the people.
Like Mencken, I have a strange fondness for Herbert Hoover, but I think it’s for the exact opposite reason that Williams did. I don’t like Herbert Hoover because he stuck to his principles, but because he didn’t.
Maybe some time around late-1930, Hoover woke up to the fact that the Depression was serious business and rather than stick to his guns, Hoover went crazy, at least compared to the laissez-faire Republicans of that era. If I were in my office now, I’d crack open some books, but since I’m not, I’ll just rely on this article from Prologue, the magazine of the National Archives:
Refusing to accept the “natural” economic cycle in which a market crash was followed by cuts in business investment, production, and wages, Hoover summoned industrialists to the White House on November 21, part of a round-robin of conferences with business, labor, and farm leaders, and secured a promise to hold the line on wages. Henry Ford even agreed to increase workers’ daily pay from six to seven dollars. From the nation’s utilities, Hoover won commitments of $1.8 billion in new construction and repairs for 1930. Railroad executives made a similar pledge. Organized labor agreed to withdraw its latest wage demands.
The President ordered federal departments to speed up construction projects. He contacted all forty-eight state governors to make a similar appeal for expanded public works. He went to Congress with a $160 million tax cut, coupled with a doubling of resources for public buildings and dams, highways, and harbors. Looking back at the year, the New York Times judged Commander Richard Byrd’s expedition to the South Pole—not the Wall Street crash—the biggest news story of 1929. Praise for the President’s action was widespread. “No one in his place could have done more,” concluded the Times in the spring of 1930, by which time the Little Bull Market had restored a measure of confidence on Wall Street. “Very few of his predecessors could have done as much.”
After that, you could mention the Reconstruction Finance Board and the President’s Organization for Unemployment Relief as other Hoover efforts that hardly fit the conservative laissez-faire agenda of that time. Granted, Hoover’s efforts to fight the Depression were woefully inadequate to the task and they pale in comparison to Roosevelt’s efforts right afterwards. Nevertheless, he changed course when changing course became a necessity.
I read Mencken’s post as being about how a real conservative can recognize fascism when they see it, rather than just me-too it no matter how un-conservative it happens to be. But rather than compare Hoover to conservative bobbleheads like Goldberg, I want to briefly compare Hoover to Bush. In good economic, what did Bush want to do? Cut taxes. With economic catastrophe looming, what does Bush want to do? Cut taxes. The last war you started isn’t going well? What’s the solution? Start a new one with Iran.
The man is not just totally inflexible, he’s utterly incapable of learning from his mistakes. Hoover tried to do the right thing – albeit badly, but at least he tried. If we had had a President like that over the last seven years, maybe things would be a little better in America right now. Not much, but at least a little better.
PS to Mencken: Williams is not forgotten by me. In graduate school at Wisconsin, he was the only diplomatic historian I could stand reading. Luckily, his student Tom McCormick had just retired so I knew we weren’t going to get any foreign policy questions, but I figured I ought to read it since Williams was on our home team (so to speak).
I love Williams. I just think he was wrong about Hoover.
You have gotta see this at the Huffington Post. And if anyone can explain to me why I can’t embed it here, I’d appreciate the advice.
There is an article in the new issue of AHA’s Perspectives about blogging as a history teaching tool. The author, Russell Olwell, used student blogging as a student assignment in his undergraduate methods course at Eastern Michigan University, and as a means to virtually interview Chris Appy of U Mass Amherst, the author of a text he assigned. He concludes:
Properly used, blogs are a quick, cheap, and technologically simple means of encouraging communication, especially when people are separated by space and (lack of) time. While certainly it would have been more meaningful for my students to interview Appy in person, it was not a possibility for logistical and financial reasons. The advantage blog discussions have over course management software is openness to those outside the campus computing network. While this can be a drawback (someone once posted a stock tip in the middle of the class blog) it allows for discussions among a range of people, some inside and some outside of a class.
Couldn’t you just e-mail him? Or do a Listserv?
As I’ve said before in this space, I’ve been requiring grad students to blog and is a pain to get 30 blogs set up (in WordPress, at least) and then to teach students the HTML they need to actually do it.
Blogs also allow students to take history class material to a more personal level than in-class discussion might. The students in the class wanted a sense of what it was like to interview veterans, or travel to Vietnam today, or to have written a book. They sought to connect the information in the book to their own lives, families, and communities, and the blog allowed them to ask questions that they had on their mind while they were reading, but might not ask in a class discussion.
You can’t get that in a paper? Students only get introspective when only everyone in Cyberspace can read it? And:
Finally, the informality of blogs allows students to see more of what goes into historical research and writing. Sam Wineburg argues that studying history is an apprenticeship in how to think like a historian, and blogs allow students to interrogate what this means with an expert, and to get the reasons behind the choices and interpretations that professional historians make. While students may not go on to write history books, the experience of blogging with an author seems to make them more aware of the issues that historical researchers face, and how they justify the choices they have made.
You don’t need a blog to make that happen. You can just tell them your own experience! Or maybe assign a research paper.
I’m afraid I seem much more hostile to the idea of blogging as a class assignment than I actually am. This blog exists because I’m doing precisely this, but I’m doing it for much different reasons than Professor Olwell is. At its heart, a blog is nothing but a diary with links and comments. Therefore, when we got a Teaching American History Grant to take teachers to historical sites, blogging crossed my mind immediately because travel diaries are about the only writing they’d have time to do.
I’ve used history blogosphere posts in class before. There was one by Eric Rauchway on archives at Cliopatria that I really liked (but I can’t find the URL now for some reason). And I think I’ll use this one some day (although I’m not even sure I agree with it). More importantly, I think the travel blogs (go to the blogroll if you’re interested in example) have worked out really well for the class that goes with our trips, and they’ll be even better the more experience we all get. But this kind of blogging strikes me as a whole lot of trouble for benefits that could be obtained through much easier means.
The recent National Endowment for the Arts report (.pdf) on the continued decline of reading in America has led to some fabulous magazine pieces on the subject of reading in recent weeks. You can tell the thesis of Caleb Crain’s “Twilight of the Books” in the New Yorker just from the title. It certainly depressed me when I first read it, but then I encountered Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Staying Awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading” in Harper’s and felt much better.
It’s not like Le Guin’s article is a happy story for those of us who make people read for a living, but it really does help put things in perspective. Here’s the passage that made me go aha!:
For most of human history, most people could not read at all. Literacy was not only a demarcator between the powerful and the powerless; it was power itself. Pleasure was not an issue. The ability to maintain and understand commercial records, the ability to communicate across distance and in code, the ability to keep the word of God to yourself and transmit it only at your own will and in your own time—these are formidable means of control over others and aggrandizement of self. Every literate society began with literacy as a constitutive prerogative of the (male) ruling class.
I feel like an idiot for not realizing that before I read her article. At the very least, this point certainly makes the “crisis” in reading seem more understandable. I have to admit that whenever I ask my students what the last book they read for pleasure was, some of the answers (most notably, “I can’t remember.”) always make me cringe. Thanks to Le Guin, I’m going to recognize this as normal from now on. Also thanks to Le Guin, I’m going to start to think of part of my job description as inculcating these students into the cult of the book. Here’s Le Guin again:
I see a high point of reading in the United States from around 1850 to about 1950—call it the century of the book—the high point from which the doomsayers see us declining. As the public school came to be considered fundamental to democracy, and as libraries went public and flourished, reading was assumed to be something we shared in common. Teaching from first grade up centered on “English,” not only because immigrants wanted their children fluent in it but because literature—fiction, scientific works, history, poetry—was a major form of social currency.
To look at schoolbooks from 1890 or 1910 can be scary; the level of literacy and general cultural knowledge expected of a ten-year-old is rather awesome. Such texts, and lists of the novels kids were expected to read in high school up to the 1960s, lead one to believe that Americans really wanted and expected their children not only to be able to read but to do it, and not to fall asleep doing it.
Literacy was not only the front door to any kind of individual economic and class advancement; it was an important social activity. The shared experience of books was a genuine bond. A person reading seems to be cut off from everything around them, almost as much as someone shouting banalities into a cell phone as they ram their car into your car—that’s the private aspect of reading. But there is a large public element, too, which consists in what you and others have read.
Exactly. There is both a social and economic value to reading. Students who look at college merely as a means to a piece of paper may know how to read, but they won’t learn the skill of critical reading – devouring rather than merely consuming a book – the way all their professors do. Professors who simply assume that their students have the same reading skills they do are more likely to alienate their audience rather than help them enter the “cult of the book.”
I think I understood this point instinctively before Le Guin got me thinking about it. In order to improve student reading skills, I’ve always tried to:
1) Pick the best-written books I can to assign in class, rather than the ones with the most facts. Sometimes less is more.
2) Always spend time in scheduled discussions talking about the books I assign, rather than just assigning them and hoping for the best.
3) Never compromise on the number of books I assign per course. The best way to learn how to read well is to read. It’s that simple. My normal book load per course is 6 per semester. [OK, I compromise a little because I can't go to far off the norm in the rest of my university or else most students will avoid my courses entirely, but I will always keep on the high end because I'm a historian gosh darn it and that's what we do!]
Additional suggestions would be much appreciated.
I see that Glenn Beck is now sounding off about historical issues now ( via Think Progress):
The part that Think Progress highlights is Beck blaming FDR for making the Depression go on and on. However, the notion that FDR was for nationalizing energy and health care deserves some attention too since he’s making stuff up out of thin air. The same goes for his guest Stephen Moore’s notion that FDR was the first President to encourage Americans to live “high on the hog.” [What were the 1920s then?]
Nevertheless, Beck’s length of the Depression critique is interesting because it is not at all new. Indeed, I remember a review of a book just last year that made the same argument. Doing some Googling I rediscovered it - The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes.
According to its top Amazon.com reviewer, none other than Newt Gingrich:
This is a remarkable book which will forever change your understanding of the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s role and the lessons to be learned from government intervention.
As to that I couldn’t say, as I haven’t had the chance to read that book, but I can say that the argument is practically beside the point. Americans in the 1930s didn’t vote for FDR because he ended the Depression, they voted for FDR because he made them suffer less than they would have had he not been President.
Think Progress links to a blog that mentions FDR’s role in establishing Social Security and WWI as reasons to love Roosevelt. I suspect Glenn Beck’s grandfather probably had other reasons in mind like the WPA, the Civilian Conservation Corps or maybe the National Labor Relations Act; all supported by FDR to help people in the tightest economic spot in American history.
But Glenn Beck can’t see the Depression through the eyes of his own grandfather. Maybe if he slapped Glenn back that would help give Beck a little perspective.
I knew the IWW has been trying to organize Borders for years. I did not know about Starbucks. From the Wall Street Journal:
The Industrial Workers of the World, or IWW, has been trying to organize workers at Starbucks since 2004 and has been able to organize only several dozen at a handful of stores in New York and a few other cities.
According to several emails, in early 2006, Starbucks managers discovered that two pro-union employees in New York were graduates of a Cornell University labor program. According to an email, managers took the names of graduates from an online Cornell discussion group and the school’s Web site and cross-checked them with employee lists nationwide. They found that three employees in California, Michigan and Illinois were graduates of the program and recommended that local managers be informed.
Gee, I wonder why they thought their managers should be informed? To talk about Ithaca’s gorges during breaks?
I’ve been having way too much fun reading posts at Sadly No! and Orcinus making fun of Jonah Goldberg’s new book, Liberal Fascism. Thank goodness Brad at Sadly No! has promised:
I swear by all that is ungodly and unholy, I will never stop laughing at this book.
This, as well as Dave Neiwert’s promise to post leftovers that didn’t fit in his American Prospect review of the book means I will likely get scads of amusement in the future on this front. This is a good thing.
However, I do want to take issue with one line in Neiwert’s review:
Liberal Fascism may come complete with copious but meaningless footnotes, but it is in the end just a gussied-up version of a favorite talking point of right-wing radio talkers that the real fascists are those nasty liberals, those feminazis and eco-fascists.
OK, it’s not the whole line, but just a phrase that I have a problem with here. No footnotes are meaningless. Unless Goldberg made up quotes out of thin air (which would of course be interesting by itself) the footnotes offer another path into the twisted manner in which he has constructed his “argument.” Lay the line from Liberal Fascism next to the original source he’s quoting and I’m almost certain a whole new line of humor will likely emerge. Certainly it did when people still bothered to fact check Ann Coulter.
I’m not saying Goldberg plagiarized anything, but to make the kind of argument he’s making something funny (in the “ha ha” sense of the word) has to be going down. I hope these bloggers with the complimentary copies have the time to look into this because I’m sure not going to send any money in Goldberg’s direction in order to do it myself.
From “8 Ways to Impress Me,” by CNBC anchor Erin Burnett:
Reading is a passion of mine, so a gathering with a couple of my favorite authors, especially Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel) and Robin McKinley (The Blue Sword) would make for an exceptional evening.
I don’t understand this at all. She’s a CNBC author and she likes Jared Diamond? Does she know what Collapse is about? Maybe if Diamond were to come over to her house he could explain that she’s part of the problem rather than the solution.
And if you want to see why I doubt Erin Burnett ever made it through Guns, Germs and Steel, try here.
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