As most of you know, I have been reading part of a collection of nineteenth century daily journals written by an Associate Reformed Presbyterian minister as part of my grad school historical research class. [For a better introduction to the work, here is a podcast I recorded with some background.] When I get passed the fact that I'm drowning under the work and the volume of work that still remains pushes me to the brink of my mental faculties, I have to admit that there is a lot in these journals that really interests me. The little glimpses into the life of a rural family and neighborhood in mid- to late- nineteenth century Mississippi can shed a lot of light on the history of our present customs, problems, and ideas, as well as show what we have lost, for better or worse. Subtle references to the present that only a historian can really grasp (e.g. referring to William Jennings Bryan, a very important figure in late and early nineteenth century political history, only as "Bryan," etc.), as well as referring to the writer's recent, local past (which in turn is the distant, obscure past to the modern reader).
One such reference occurred a journal from 1899 that I've been writing on. When eulogizing a man who died, Sam Agnew (the minister) referred to the fact that "Jim" was born "9 years before the Stars fell, which makes his birth year 1824." When I first read it without fully understanding it, I thought it was a Civil War reference. Of course, the Civil War began in 1861, but the connotation with "Stars," especially in that capitalized form, is political. When I came across it again, I decided to simply google the phrase and see what came up. What I found really caught me by surprise.
"The Night the Stars Fell" is a reference to the Leonid Meteor Shower that occurred in 1833. The shower was apparently so intense and awe-inspiring that it became a cultural phenomenon as well. The song "Stars Fell on Alabama," though written in 1934, is actually about the meteor shower. If it's important enough use as a landmark for births and deaths, it is fair to say that the event was a truly spectacular one and very important to nineteenth century Americans.
Here's a link to the song as sung by Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong on iTunes, as well as a link to a more complete story about the details of the shower itself. The picture below comes from the description of the event.
I am a history grad school major, and I’m currently in a research class in which we’re reading the daily journals of a semi-prominent Mississippi pastor who wrote between 1851 and 1902. I am responsible for reading the journals covering years 1891 through 1902. This podcast covers one very specific but very interesting and revealing event that takes place in 1891.
This is my first podcast ever!
It runs rather long (around 19 minutes), but it's because I got into it and had some fun.
A thread on my old Honors forum asked a question about the most important/least important subject. My answer may seem obvious to those that know anything about me. My feelings are by no means set in stone, and while I describe history as a noble profession, I don't think most noble professional historians are, to paraphrase Voltaire, professional, noble, or really even historians.
My answer:
Alright. I promised that when I cared enough I'd get involved with this, so here I go.
History is the most important discipline. It is also the most interdisciplinary.
At one point, history was simply narrative. Establishing the narrative was the most important part of it all. History, which, when a part of the Trivium, was taught as part of Grammar, is the oldest discipline on Earth. Religion is history. Legends are history. Stories are history. These are all narratives of the human journey.
History only became professionalized as recently as the 19th century, and mostly started in Germany. We didn't really start having professional historians in America until the 20th century. So the history that we study in universities is a relatively new invention. But the discipline itself - with its specialists and its experts - has roots in something much older.
History is the story of the connections between human beings and the events that change them. It is the historian's profession to be more connected to the human condition than any other profession. Biologists look at the components that make us human. Historians look at the components of memory, which is arguably what makes us more human than our DNA.
Today, we can say, without too much argument, that the narrative has been established. The information that would be able to turn the narrative over is mostly lost, or will be discovered by armies of historians from around the world, scouring every archive, or will be declassified by some state agency. But rest assured that children in classrooms will not be learning that William the Conquerer wasn't actually the Battle of Hastings, or that John Wilkes Boothe actually shot a decoy. Nothing so drastic will come about in our lifetimes, I suspect.
So history isn't self sustainable by looking at old documents anymore. The untapped history that remains is not just in documents no one cared to look at before (like the writings of women or immigrants), but in the ground and in numbers. History is now the combination of many satellite disciplines - psychology, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, linguistics, religious studies, political science, literature, journalism, folklore, and even philosophy - all set to compliment, strengthen, or destroy the prevailing narrative.
Arguments that English and writing are better because they came first are moot, because history is rooted in language, which was at one point only spoken. Arguments for language as the most important discipline because it came first is moot for the exact same reason - history is rooted in the very language we use to tell its story, and the study of language is so modern that it never touched these roots. I am partial to the Quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), but even they are embodied within history to a certain extent - the discoveries and inventions contained within each are also contained with a historical context. The Quadrivium does not provide the same context for history.
Feel free to challenge me, but I have thought about this a lot and I will take on any challenge without much hesitation. I'll close with this: history is the most important discipline because it is so intertwined with the human condition. No human being can be expected to know all of history. But with historians in the world, they keep the richness of the human experience close to the surface instead of forgotten in the passage of time.
This all according to the history grad student. Take it for what you will.
So many things have happened in the last few weeks that it's hard to recount them all, so I won't. However, there are a few major things.
The GRE and my inability to speak of it without great acrimony(thanks, GRE guide makers, for giving me over 490 of the most often recurring words on the GRE and it being completely useless in application): Without disclosing too much, the GRE is hard. Though I only studied for a day, I came out ahead of where I could have been, but I can't help feeling that $140 I spent wasn't worth the plastic I put it on. We'll see once I start hearing back from grad schools. There's always window-washing if things don't work out, I s'pose.
Two all-nighters later, and I have somewhere around half of my thesis done: You may think that I've done well from that alone, but keep in mind that the rough draft was due last Monday. God, someone shoot me. I just want it to write itself already. It almost literally does except for pesky things like "continuity" and "chronology."
The "Oh-my-God-how-does-someone-forget-a-midterm-*headdesk*" moment: I'm varying back and forth between being disgusted and being apathetic about this, but I let a Monday-after-Fall-Break midterm sneak up on me and bite me pretty hard. From the looks of the study guide, I could wing it and make a passable grade (the first identification term is "Hernando de Soto" - hellooooo, sixth grade!), but why on earth do I need to take that chance. I'm filling out the study guide and studying before class tomorrow, but I am not happy that I forgot.
I've had an otherwise eventful weekend, but it's been one of those survive-now-and-live-to-tell-the-tale type weekends. I will say that it's been one of my most interesting as well as one of my most (negatively) enlightening weekends of my life, and that's excluding the GRE.
I'm planning on starting either a new blog or posting a new page with .pdfs of some of my work (papers and such) so that grad schools have URLs to access my presented-but-unpublished papers and articles. What do you all think? .PDFs and a new blog, or .PDFs on this blog? My only worry about this blog is the possibility that it's inappropriate. I don't think it is too much so, but it is certainly not professional. Let me know what you think soon so I can take your thoughts into account when I decide this week.
Oh, and the top five list changed.
1. UT at Austin 2. Vanderbilt 3. OU at Norman 4. Ole Miss 5. Duke
Now to contact professors in each history department! Hurray for the most time-consuming high-risk activity I've done thus far in my academic life.
Edit: Also, a review of the Fall movie Blindness is up at VDCC.
Barack Obama suggests we need to consider moral issues in intervening with combat forces. He mentions intervening in the Holocaust and how we should have done that.
Um Senator, we did intervene in the Holocaust. It was called World War II.
As one of the comments on the above post states, the Holocaust was not, I repeat, not the U.S. casus belli for entering the war. That was called Pearl Harbor.
Yes, you can argue the entire f*cking live long day that the U.S. could not have stopped the Holocaust if it had not entered the war, but that would assume that the U.S. was solely responsible, as well as that the U.S. had been itching to get in the war to help. In fact, it tried to remain isolationist, and only fought when provoked. By that logic, it was the Germans who wanted the U.S. to liberate the concentration camps and decided to give them a reason to get involved. It also ignores that the Holocaust was going on eight years before the U.S. even joined the war.
Were there humanitarian concerns? Of course there were, but they were most certainly a secondary objective. To claim that the U.S. interevened makes it sound as if the U.S. intervened in the nick of time, which makes the 6 million Jews and four million Gypsies, Christians, Slavs, and other ethnic and religious groups into what, exactly? Unworthy of liberation? The necessary prelude to provoke action? How ridiculous and demeaning.
To Red State and Erick Erickson: When you go out of your way to make someone you don't like look like an idiot, make sure you don't trip all over yourself.
Matt Yglesias, a blogger for The Atlantic, dabbles in Civil War history for a moment today. He was responding to Publius' post on the end of the Civil War, and how it was ultimately to our benefit that Robert E. Lee did not pursue a guerrilla war after the South had lost. Matt disagrees not with the "Thank God for good sense" sentiment, but more to the fact that there would have been a chance for guerrilla warfare at all:
I'm not sure that reflects a correct understanding of the strategic conflict during the Civil War. It's true that in a conventional war of national liberation, this kind of guerilla strategy would be the expected line for the Confederacy to take. But the rebels had a very specific goal in mind -- they seceded from the Union after Lincoln's electoral victory because they wanted to preserve slavery. It's very hard to see, however, how a guerilla strategy could have been consistent with the goal of maintaining slavery or the plantation economy.
I commented with this:
I'll respectfully disagree with that analysis of what the Confederacy was fighting for. Yes, slavery was part of it. It was as much a part of the cause of going to war as it was for Lincoln to adopt it as one of the reasons to keep fighting. But the primary reason? It was about states' rights more than any of the rest of it, because the South felt that the North was violating them in more ways than competing for slave/non-slave states.
Slavery is so often cited as the reason for the war. While it's wrapped in big flashing blinking letters, it wasn't the only reason, or even the primary reason. In the eyes of the South, there was more at stake than losing slaves. If it was only about slaves, then the non-slave holding South wouldn't have gotten involved. Around 1/3 of the South owned slaves at the beginning of the war, and it's very loosely estimated that close to 1/3 of the Southern armies came from slave-holding families (though I've heard it estimated lower than this).
So, for your original hypothesis, it would still make since for guerrillas to fight for states' rights and independence, as they do all over the world now. You're right about guerrillas fighting for slavery. It would be a hopeless cause if there ever was one. But states' rights? That's the stuff of revolutions.
I understand Matt's point, but I also see that he's missed the boat a bit on what the Southerners were trying preserve. Their way of life was not to go out and beat slaves all day, as revisionists often believe. Slavery was an horrid institution and the world is better to be rid of it, but it mischaracterized the demographics of the South when roughly 2/3 or more of the population didn't even own slaves. No, there were other reasons for these people to fight.
Let's put it another way: If your neighbors are so upset about gas prices for their SUVs and Hummers and decide to go to war (metaphorically or otherwise) with an oil-producing country to preserve their way of life, would you fight if you didn't even have a car? Or would you fight, for lack of choice, when that oil-holding country invaded your land? I don't believe it was much different than that for our ancestors.
But don't worry about it. It will never happen, right?
See, I had some important things to tell Mr. Clinton back in '94 or '95 (I'm not sure - I just know it has to be some time between the 29-cent stamp and my handwriting). I snuck a stamp out of someone's purse, put it on my envelope with my very important letter, went down the hill to the mailbox, stuck it in, and raised the flag. Thirteen or fourteen years later, my grandmother finds it while cleaning the house.
This was my very important message:
It's fascinating to me now to look back and see how my little mind grasped the world. I knew the president had money, and I knew, if he really wanted to and I could show him that we weren't completely without (the penny taped to the page), he could help us out, even a little.
Bill Clinton was a bad word in my house, and I never really understood why. I had an inkling it was because he was a Democrat (though Arkansas has elected all of seven Republican governors in its history, and four were during Reconstruction). The hatred of Bill mostly came from my grandfather, who could hold grudges for very small things. Maybe Bill made one too many jokes about watermelons, or perhaps he gave the cold shoulder to one of our cousins ten times removed. For the life of me, I don't know. But it was a cornerstone in the politics of our house that, whatever you did, you didn't say, "Well, I like Bill."
I believe I was in the second grade when we held mock elections for the next president. In a combination of peer pressure and rebellious determination, I voted for Bill Clinton. I remember my face growing hot and my heart racing as I marked his name. When I went home, I told my family that I had voted for Bob Dole. Lies. All lies. Even though I had enjoyed voting for Bill, I knew I couldn't hide my dark secret forever.
One day I went up to my grandfather, my head hung low. Papa asked me what was the matter, and I finally blurted it out.
"Papa, I didn't vote for Bob Dole!" "Why, who'd you vote for?" "Bill Clinton! I'm sorry!"
And I remember the look on Papa's face as he sighed so deeply that his chest rose and nearly touched his chin.
"It's alright, Honey. That's what we died for."
I felt my heart sink really low, but he patted his lap, and I dutifully crawled up and laid my head on his shoulder.
I don't know why my grandfather, war veteran and farmer, hated politicians so vehemently. But that day, I realized that he had put all of that aside for me, at least for a little while.
Looking back, I'm sure beyond a doubt that my grandfather took the letter out of the mailbox. I really don't know why, but I don't think it matters anymore. It's now an artifact and a conduit that makes the memories easier to recall. I'm almost positive that's not what he had in mind when he took out of the mailbox (and read it, no less). Whatever reason he had, I'm glad he did so.
Besides, it's not like Bill would have come down for supper anyway.
You may remember that I'm looking at grad schools. Well, the search goes on. Here's the checklist for my search:
Take the GRE.
Figure out subjects that I'm interested in and that will be worth five cents in five years (when I get out of my long-term imprisonment - hopefully).
Figure out schools I want to go to that offer said subjects.
Email professors at said schools who teach said subjects.
Figure out if I really want to work with those professors at said schools who teach said subjects.
Apply to chosen school(s).
Cross fingers.
I'm planning on taking the GRE soon after I get back from D.C. in early June. I don't know when it's offered yet (add that before #1, I guess), but I do know that I have to do it soon. Things are starting to get hectic, and it's not even really summer yet. My summer checklist is far longer than this grad school excerpt, and I'm working full days at my job, so my days are shorter at home - when I am home. I just happen to be home at night all this week because my car is in the shop and it was too expensive to rent a car.
This field stuff is getting to me, though. I know that those wiser than I have told me (warned me, even) that sometimes it takes a while for field interests to gel. As good of advice as that is, I know I've still got to figure out the general vicinity of my focus. You don't go to seminary to get a physics degree, and, while not as drastic, I'm not that far away from being completely clueless as to what I want to do.
Don't get me wrong - the Pickelhaube of Professorship has settled upon my brow and I think it fits rather well. However, my accoutrement, such as the Sword of Specialty, or even the Faulds of Forte, have yet to come into my possession. I am a little worse for the wear worrying about it, and I haven't figured out how to overcome this.
In the meantime, while my brain is whirring and ticking and spontaneously combusting, I have begun the slow and oh-so-envious! task of emailing professor after professor after professor. So far, I have been very daring and emailed professors and grad secretaries and grad recruiters at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Berkley, University of Oklahoma, and the University of Texas at Austin, all of whom I'm sure are now regretting putting their email addresses online. So far, only those at Austin have gotten back to me and been very helpful at all. Unfortunately, I contacted them about American or International diplomatic history, which I was promptly told by a professor who's helping me that that field was, and I quote, "as dead as Vanilla Ice's career."
I'm doing the grad school shuffle, and I'm feeling a bit more pressure than I should (I think). I'm a junior, going into my sixth semester (third to last, if you want to look at it the other way), and I'm completely perplexed at what I'm supposed to be doing. I feel at once bogged down with possibilities and disappointed with the lack of them. Sure, I want to go to grad school for history, but dear God, what kind?
I've bounced among classical, Germanic, early American, Western, American Western, Central American, South American, ancient Chinese, ancient Japanese, American Indian, Southern, political, and military history, just to name a few. But, as I've been told before, it's not just finding the right program, but the right professor. That complicates things a bit, considering that I don't truly know what I want my discipline to be. I'm leaning toward the American West (which is why I'm looking at University of Nebraska at Lincoln right now), but it still doesn't seem... fulfilling.
I'm frustrated with the entire process, because I didn't want to do history forever. This has been further complicated by the relative satisfaction and disappointment I get from my museum internship as well as my thesis research. Anything you research enough can become the bane of your existence, and I've found that that has happened with nearly everything I've touched. By the time I'm done researching something, for whatever it may be, I have to suppress the desire to strike a match and set it all ablaze.
So I'm stuck considering places I thought I'd never go, languages I never knew existed, and subjects that seem so trivial that I would rather not even waste my time. I think that's why I gave up classical and medieval subjects in the end. Not that they aren't important, but that they've become over-studied to the point of triviality. Yes, it's important that many of our major documents are based on bits and pieces of those that came long before, but is it really crucial to our understanding of Etruscan culture to argue that they cut their nails in a square rather than a semicircle? The kneejerk answer is yes, of course, because without our retelling of the stories, those cultures are effectively written out of history without even a whimper. But that elephant in the room - the one with TRIVIAL and UNIMPORTANT written across its sides - isn't going away, and is only getting bigger.
Academia is competitive and territorial. Not only must you compete with others for the limited job prospects, but there is a imperialistic tendency amongst academics to grab the last bit of terra incognita and plant a tiny flag with pitiful fanfare. If I'm trying to find a piece of genuinely undiscovered ground, should I be reduced to studying the diets of horses before, during, and after the Revolutionary War? It almost seems that, to be a scholar, the question of Who cares? has to be tossed to the wind - along with caution and perhaps dignity.
This very competitiveness reduces Medievalists to Medievalists with a specialization in 12th century southeastern Irish female mercenaries (I hope that's an exaggeration). What's the point, really and truly? Yes, it was important someone. Yes, it's a part of our history. But how does that affect us?
Contrary to what this has sounded like so far, I'm not against this specialization. It does seem tedious, and it seems like it makes ingenuity and unintentional self-parody synonymous. But to dismiss it so quickly is to forget the reason for having historians in the first place - so we don't forget.
Humans have a depressingly short memory. Even with written language, what gets remembered is still privileged. Who survived the Classical era? Plato, Socrates, Aristophanes? You know them. You've heard of them. And think of how much they have affected our understanding of the world. Yet how much are we missing, because of great fires or bloody conquests? It is the historian's responsibility to find a way to preserve these ideas for the future, because history is the depth that we pull from, whether knowingly or not. To stop having these records, to stop digging, to simply give up on that which we know we cannot reach or rediscover, is to fail those who succeed us and to take away what could have been another layer to life.
Historians also preserve the notion that we are not special and that we aren't really doing anything new. The notions, thoughts, words, and actions have almost always been preceded by something similar, and hardly anything we do invents or reinvents, or even improves. To be a historian doesn't necessarily mean that one is humble (few historians I know would even bother describing themselves as such), but it means we are closer to the human condition than other professions. We see the patterns (as do most professions that have at least some historical basis) that link us to our ancestors.
That said, I still don't think I want to be an Etruscan toenail specialist. But I'll find my niche somewhere.
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