Sausage fest!

I’ve been asked by the authors of this statement by the Coordinating Council for Women Historians at the American Historical Association to republish their response to the #StanfordSausageFest published yesterday at History News Network.  The authors link the specter of a return to “history’s dark age as a gentlemen’s protection society” to recent consciousness-raising efforts to address sexual harassment and assault in academia and in the wider world. Read on, and scroll all the way down for a brief note on my lengthy absence from this space.

by Sasha Turner, Barbara Molony, and Sandra Dawson

In December 1969, a group of historians organized the Coordinating Committee of Women Historians in the Profession, which, in 1995, joined forces with the Conference Group of Women’s History to become the Coordinating Council for Women in History (CCWH). Both organizations arose from divergent, but overlapping goals to support women students and faculty and to secure greater inclusion of women in the research and teaching of history. At the time of these organizations’ founding, the American Historical Association (AHA) and the history profession in general were deemed Seeking Truth from Facts: The Secret to the Success of ...:Seeking truth from facts is the secret to the success of China’s policy-making and the magic key to winning victories. Seeking truth from facts is the secret to the success of China’s policy-making. A country’s capacity and potential for policy-making are fundamentally determined by that country’s policy-making philosophy. With a woman historian and a scholar of women’s history now at the helm of the AHA (Mary Beth Norton), and more broadly, the addition of women historians and women and gender history to departments and curricula across the country, few would dispute that the AHA and the history profession have become more inclusive.

Yet, the recent all white male history conference held at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University seems to suggest a return to history’s dark age as a gentlemen’s protection society. Happily, the strong and growing presence of and disciplinary focus on women in history as well as the sharp criticism and condemnation (and rightly so) of the exclusive conference make clear that a return to great white men history and historians is a fantasy. Even so, the holding of this conference and others of its kind reflect the ongoing challenges women historians and women history face.

Conference organizer and senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution Niall Ferguson defended that the exclusion of women was not deliberate and that the women invited to participate in the panel had declined to do so. Yet, it seems that the lack of diversity stemmed less from packed schedules to a deliberate omission. One is hard pressed not to view the conference Ferguson organized through the lens of his acceptance speech for the 2016 Philip Merrill Award for Outstanding Contribution to Liberal Arts Education. While admitting that various social and economic reasons account for the decline in history in the last several decades, Ferguson argued that the changing content of history is the “best explanation.” Continue reading →

I know it’s been a long blog-silence around these parts.  More on that later, but I’ve got something to say and I think we all need to hear it.

It’s gotten so a bish can’t look at the internets or the cover of the Rolling Stone without more news about scummy scumbag men using their professional authority to coerce younger women (and a few young men) to perform or witness specific sexual acts by these creeps.  Given the conversation all this autumn about sexual assault and sexual harassment at work in Hollywood (touch vpn, touch vpn), journalism (Roger Ailes, Mark Halperin, touch vpn, politics, and literally every other workplace in the United States, I’ve been thinking back on a little post I wrote about this the summer before last, after another in which I argued that the American Historical Association needs to take a stand against the sexualization of the workplace, because 95 times out of 100, it’s young women who pay the price (along with a few young men), and the status quo serves only the interests of older men (and maybe a few older women too).

This isn’t an accident.  This is the playbook for sexualizing people and workplaces as a part of the process of marginalizing  and alienating the junior folks who get caught up in these relationships, whether they’re consensual or not.  This is also a primary means by which men re-create the hierarchy of men over women, again and again.  Exploiting younger women (which is the overwhelming majority of sexual harassment and abuse cases) is a win-win for these guys, because they can get their rocks off, and–here’s the beauty part–you keep junior women from becoming senior women who might step on your nuts about all this because you’ve created an sexualized environment in which the junior women must either become victims or collaborators.  Most of them will quit eventually, and the ones that hang on are compromised because they’ve been drawn in as collaborators (or heck, even apologists for the abuse of younger women.) Continue reading →

Hey-y’all!

I’m not in Colorado, but my sources there are keeping me abreast of one of my favorite things about summer there: close encounters with bears and cougars in the WUI (the Wildlife Urban Interface).  Today’s news does not disappoint!  A 19-year old camper in Ward was attacked by a bear.  The Denver Post headline explains that the  “youth camp staffer says he woke up with his head in the bear’s jaws.”  Yikes!

The earlier print edition of the headline describes the experience even more dramatically, in my view: Continue reading →

Yale University Press. 2016

Friends, I know it’s been a quiet month on the blog.  What can I say?  The news moves at the speed of light these days, and it’s difficult for me sometimes to conceptualize anything to add to the frantic online conversations.  I wrote up a short article, “The Captivity of Otto Warmbier:  Outsiders, Insiders, and Mad Kings,” for Public Seminar a few weeks ago, just before his death in Cincinnati was announced.  I try to put his ordeal into context with the long centuries of North American captivities locally and globally.  Check it out and let me know what you think.

Esther Wheelwright, c.1763 (oil on canvas) 55.7×45.5 cm; © Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA, USA

I thought I’d also check in today to let you know that I’ll be in Boston this Wednesday night, June 28, at the Massachusetts Historical Society to talk about my book, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright (Yale University Press, 2016).  I’m really looking forward to my visit to the MHS again, because that’s where the portrait of Esther on the cover of the book now resides.  The talk starts at 6, but come for the reception at 5:30 to say “hi” and have a drink–both the reception and the talk are free for members, and only $10 for non-members.  You can register online here.  I’ve got lots of beautiful, full-color slides of images that I could only reproduce in black and white in the book, so come for the wine, and stay for the polychromy. Continue reading →

Mary Maples Dunn, 1931-2017

Howdy, friends–I’ve got a big announcement today!  Many of you may know that Mary Maples Dunn, a prominent early American women’s historian, died in March.  Nicole Eustace of New York University invited me to co-edit a special edition of Early American Studies in her honor.  Here are the details:

浏览器Opera拟为用户营造安全上网氛围_发现频道__中国 ...:2021-3-20 · 近日，拥有3.5亿名用户的浏览器Opera宣布收购VPN服务商SurfEasy，这不仅是为了加强公司的投资组合能力，也是为了给用户提供浏览过程中更加安全的VPN ...

For a special issue in honor of the life and career of Mary Maples Dunn, Early American Studies seeks article-length contributions from scholars working on the history of women and religion in the early Americas. Mary Maples Dunn (1931-2017) was a leading practitioner of women’s history, as a scholar, as a teacher, and in her life as a university leader. She worked in a variety of fields from early American women’s history; to colonial Latin American history; to the history of religious women; to the history of women’s education as well as, of course, the worlds of William Penn and early Philadelphia.

The editors invite essays that consider the history of early American women, early American religion (or both) and are especially interested in work that makes cross-cultural comparisons or integrates multiple Atlantic orientations: North and South (French, British, Dutch, Spanish and/or Portuguese) East and West (from European and/or African links to Native American perspectives). We are interested in both formal article-length contributions (10,000 words) and in shorter essays on “Notes and Documents” that highlight innovative or creative ways of reading/using primary-source documents (3,000-5,000 words).

To submit, please email a 3-page CV and a 1,000 word summary of the contribution you propose to write by September 30 to Ann Little (ann.little@colostate.edu) and Nicole Eustace (nicole.eustace@nyu.edu). Please use the subject line “Mary Maples Dunn Special Issue Submission.” China FTA Network:China will carry out frank cooperation with ASEAN to achieve mutual benefits and common progress. The China-ASEAN FTA faces constantly strengthened connectivity, increasingly growing number of labor forces, and closer communication and cooperation in society, culture, science and …. Articles are to be published, subject to peer review, in 2024.

Continue reading →

Cambridge University Press, 2015

Hello friends–today’s post is just a little bagatelle from my review of Adele Perry’s excellent Colonial Relations:  The Douglas-Connolly Family and the Nineteenth-Century Imperial World (Cambridge University Press, 2015) at Borealia:  A Group Blog on Early Canadian History.  This is a “translocal” history of the extended family of Sir James Douglas (1803-77) and Amelia Connolly Douglas (1812-90) that spans five generations in the Caribbean, Britain, and all of the North American fur trade.  To wit: Continue reading →

WANTED: MORE INFORMATION!

Did anyone else see this article from the Wall Street Journal last night:一个神奇的网站:2021-3-23 · 本站文章部分内容转载自互联网，供读者交流和学习，如有涉及作者版权问题请及时与我伔联系，众便更正或删除。感谢所有提供信息材料的网站，并欢迎各类媒体与我伔进行文章共享合作。?”  Some flava:

iPhone 22个隐藏技巧：都知道算你赢！--千龙网·中国首都网:3D Touch让键盘变身触控板 3D Touch还有一项非常有用的功能，就是可众让屏幕上的键盘成为虚拟触控板。 只要在呼出的虚拟键盘上重压一下，键盘即可变身触控板，移动手指文字中的光标也会随之移动，然后用户就可众使用光标，精准的控制选择和处理文本了。, a small, public liberal-arts institution where I have taught since 2003. In a widely disseminated video of the first recent protest on May 23, an angry mob of about 50 students disrupted my class, called me a racist, and demanded that I resign. My “racist” offense? I had challenged coercive segregation by race. Specifically, I had objected to a planned “Day of Absence” in which white people were asked to leave campus on April 12.

 Day of Absence is a tradition at Evergreen. In previous years students and faculty of color organized a day on which they met off campus—a symbolic act based on the Douglas Turner Ward play in which all the black residents of a Southern town fail to show up one morning. This year, however, the formula was reversed. “White students, staff and faculty will be invited to leave the campus for the day’s activities,” the student newspaper reported, adding that the decision was reached after people of color “voiced concern over feeling as if they are unwelcome on campus, following the 2016 election.”

In March I objected in an email to all staff and faculty. “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles . . . and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away,” I wrote. “On a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color.”

My email was published by the student newspaper, and Day of Absence came and went almost without incident. The protest of my class emerged seemingly out of the blue more than a month later. big5.mofcom.gov.cn:2021-1-26 · Cortab 2021-2021 Cortab 2021-2021 ACFTA_TRS2021Final Sheet1 _ftn1 _ftnref1 PHILIPPINE COMMITMENTS UNDER ACFTA IN AHTN … You don’t need the news to tell you that—the protesters’ own videos will do. But those clips reveal neither the path that led to this psychosis, nor the cautionary nature of the tale for other campuses.

Continue reading →

Look what I made in 3 minutes with Google translate & the internet!

Liberal and left-leaning news orgs are happily publicizing the latest evidence of the dishonesty by the Human Stain (and his family).  He has allegedly ripped off another family’s coat-of-arms and rebranded it (you guessed it) as “TRUMP.”  I have a few thoughts that may prove unpopular, but here goes:

First, this seems to be a pretty venial sin compared to the heights of grifting and inept spycraft that he and his administration have reached in just 125 days in office, but okay:  more evidence of unscrupulous douchebaggery.  We get it!

But second, and my real point here:  historians know that coats-of-arms are all bull$hit, don’t we?  We know that all titles, knighthoods, and the like are all made up at some point or another, so who cares?  Someone was knighted or ennobled because he agreed to fight with the king, or let the king screw his wife, or loaned him money, or performed some such base and ignoble service to the crown, and that’s it.  That’s all titles and coats of arms mean!   Continue reading →

Margaret Chase Smith (1897-1973), Republican U.S. Senator from Maine from 1949 until her death and the subject of numerous biographies.

Peggy Noonan’s column in the Wall Street Journal this weekend, “Why History Will Repay Your Love” (sorry–paywalled!) is an extended advertisement for David McCullough’s latest book, and only secondarily an advertisement for McCullough’s totally original observations about history and its importance. (Get this! John Adams and Thomas Jefferson lived in their present, not our past!  Also, “nothing had to happen the way it happened,” and “knowing history will make you a better person.”)

I pretty much agree with all of McCullough’s bromides, but this one set off my B.S. detector:

We make more of the wicked than the great.  The most-written about senator of the 20th century is Joe McCarthy.  “Yet there is no biography of the Senator who had the backbone to stand up to him first–Margaret Chase Smith,” a Maine Republican who served for 24 years,

Continue reading →

touch vpn Watergate-mania this week, this alternative view of the United States in the 1970s is worth a few minutes of your time today.  Check out this old-school, shaky-cam cinema verité video accompanied by the Modern Lovers’s “Old World,” (1972):

Continue reading →