Buffalo is very yummy!

I cut, sold, and presented a large portion of my purchase, so that it might be thoroughly tested as to its qualifications for the table; and I also tried different parts of it roasted, broiled, etc. The general answer returned to me was-it was excellent eating, being very tender, juicy, and fine-flavored, with a slight “gamey” taste: while some described it as being like the breast of quail, others something like long-killed, sweet, juicy venison….

In comparing the flesh or meat with that of beef, it appears somewhat darker, both flesh and fat, the latter much redder-in fact, the whole appearance was like that of an overheated animal, when killed in that state, and I found it much more juicy than I expected….

Mr John G. Bell, the well-known taxidermist, of our city, who travelled [sic] with “Audubon,” informs me that he had killed many buffaloes, and that the meat which had been cut off from the cow buffalo, when fat, he always found excellent eating. He compared the flesh of one with that of beef from a domestic cow, and thought the choice was in favor of the bison beef.

- Thomas De Voe, “Bison, commonly called buffalo,” The Market Assistant, 1867, pp. 112-13.

The “Little Giant” can’t catch a break.

Stephen, not Frederick. And while we’re at it, it’s Douglas with one “s.” Frederick had two at the end of his name. That second one just drives me crazy, and is common from students who know much more history than the anchors at Fox News do.

Thanks Robert for the tip.

What are the best YouTube clips for classroom use?

Greetings AHA Perspectives readers! As I promised in my May 2008 article, I am devoting this thread to a discussion of the best videos on YouTube for classroom use.

You can find my favorites here. However, I hope to add many more possibilities that I’ve missed on the basis of the comments you leave below. Please include a link so that we can all find the clip easily ourselves.

Food: The way it used to be.

I just discovered Feeding America, historic cookbooks online at Michigan State University and am now deeply engrossed in Thomas Devoe’s The Market Assistant (from which the above picture is taken) and Artemas Ward’s The Grocer’s Encyclopedia. I think there’s a pretty good chance I might not surface for days.

The Military Industrial Complex.

Atrios has the complete version (voice only), but if this is probably the best version for classroom use:

Bunk history from Peggy Noonan.

Since I named my blog after a Henry Ford quotation, I feel obliged to chime in on Peggy Noonan’s latest attack on Barack Obama (via Blue Texan at Firedoglake):

Main thought. Hillary Clinton is not Barack Obama’s problem. America is Mr. Obama’s problem. He has been tagged as a snooty lefty, as the glamorous, ambivalent candidate from Men’s Vogue, the candidate who loves America because of the great progress it has made in terms of racial fairness. Fine, good. But has he ever gotten misty-eyed over . . . the Wright Brothers and what kind of country allowed them to go off on their own and change everything? How about D-Day, or George Washington, or Henry Ford, or the losers and brigands who flocked to Sutter’s Mill, who pushed their way west because there was gold in them thar hills? There’s gold in that history.

Blue Texan takes this in the obvious direction, which is that Henry Ford was an anti-semitic Nazi sympathizer. That needs to be said because I bet most of her readers have no idea that Ford did anything but build and sell cars. However, I want to go somewhere else with this.

Look at most of that list of events she wants Obama to cry about: Ford, the Wright Brothers, Sutter’s Mill. She actually wants people to cry about the success of free enterprise and stop crying about racial progress.

Free enterprise over recognizing our collective humanity. That’s modern conservatism in a nutshell if I’ve ever seen it.

Greetings AHA Today readers!

To see the links to all my available work on “Teaching with YouTube,” click the button that says “Teaching With YouTube Posts” above.

McGovern?

So there’s a debate over at the New Republic on whether Barack Obama is the second coming of George McGovern.  Never mind the fact that I wouldn’t mind seeing the second coming of George McGovern since the man (who is still very much alive by the way) has principles – what both the pro- and con- sides forget is Richard Nixon’s role in McGovern’s campaign.

George McGovern was up against a sitting Republican President who hand-picked him to win the nomination by helping his competitors implode, broke campaign finance laws and tried to wiretap the Democratic National Committee to help his effort along.  The McGovern campaign’s biggest self-inflicted problem was the selection of a VP candidate who had had electroshock therapy.  In contrast, the Obama campaign is extraordinarily talented.  They are about to pull off the biggest Democratic primary upset since I don’t know when.  It will be as if Gary Hart actually knocked off Walter Mondale in 1984 (which, of course, he didn’t) since Mondale had the same kind of advantages that Clinton once did.

Is Obama George McGovern?  The better question is whether John McCain Richard Nixon, and the answer to that question is obviously no.

History departments are not the problem.

I really wanted to agree with this article about contingent faculty from AHA Perspectives by Andrew Bell. He diagnoses the problem right:

On many campuses, contingent faculty and adjuncts are treated like part-time retail workers. A survey conducted by the AHA in 2000 shed light on some of the problems they face: outdated equipment, job insecurity, lack of support for research trips and conferences, and limited prospects for career advancement. Of course, the same survey also indicated that not all of these workers are unhappy; some reported a high level of job satisfaction. But evidence from subsequent surveys suggests that most of these contented instructors were able to overlook the less pleasant aspects of part-time pedagogy because they derived the bulk of their income from sources outside the academy. School administrators seem either unable or unwilling to differentiate between adjuncts who depend on per-class stipends for survival and those who view their paychecks as icing on the cake.

The result of this indifference, whether willful or not, has been the steady growth of a largely invisible underclass of struggling instructors whose concerns are rarely addressed by the academy.

That’s horrible, but to me the AHA’s solution misses the mark:

So what can be done to improve the quality of life for adjuncts and contingent faculty? In 2003, the AHA and the Organization of American Historians issued a joint resolution which listed a clear set of guidelines for departments to follow. First, the resolution recommends that part-time and temporary teachers be eligible for raises and promotions after a clearly defined probationary period. Second, it acknowledges that part-timers and temporary workers deserve access to the same benefits their tenured colleagues enjoy such as health care, parking spaces, photocopying services, and research grants. Third, the OAH and the AHA strongly feel that administrators should limit the number of adjuncts and contingent faculty (including graduate students) they hire to teach courses. The guidelines state that part-time teachers should make up no more than 40 percent of the instructors at community colleges, 30 percent at research institutions, and 20 percent at four-year colleges.

Am I missing something here? My department doesn’t control the size of its budget. That’s the norm, right? The problem is with administrators who think they can make up for budget shortfalls off teh backs of their faculty. Even the third part of this program uses the word “administrators” in a way that makes me think the AHA means department chairmen because the deans I know play no role in actually hiring faculty.

Besides, go to hard-pressed dean for better adjunct salary and benefits and they’ll probably plead poverty. In Colorado, the deans at state schools at least would be right. The key to solving the adjunct labor crisis lies in convincing administrators above the level of department chair that paying adjunct faculty a pittance is really cutting off your nose to spite your face for the reasons that Bell outlines in the article: Bad job conditions hurt teaching and therefore make students unhappy. Unhappy students hurts revenue in the long run.

Is there really a history department chair anywhere in the country who’d disagree with that assessment?

Not quite an early snuff film.

Scott Martelle, author of a fantastic new book on the Ludlow Massacre, Blood Passion, just told me about this film at the Library of Congress American Memory site:  ELECTROCUTION OF CZOLGOSZ (William McKinley’s assassin).  The description from a contemporary film catalog reads:

A detailed reproduction of the execution of the assassin of President McKinley faithfully carried out from the description of an eye witness.

Yeah, right.  Compare that film, for example, to the very brutal death of Topsy the elephant which was filmed live that same year.  I know an elephant is bigger than a man, but look at all the smoke there while there’s none in the Czolgosz recreation that I can see.

There’s a good social history lesson here about capital punishment propaganda, but I’m not sure where to teach it.