Belated AHA Blogging: Passion, Process, and Public History
It seems I went to more panels about process and the profession than about my own specific research interests this year. I can go to SHOT or the BHC to talk about pseudoscience or Gilded Age telecommunications. At the AHA it seems appropriate to reflect on things our whole profession has in common. And so, below the virtual fold: Tony Grafton gets passionate, Walter Johnson gets medieval, Gene Autry gets torched, and Scott Jaschik gets stuck with the check.
Tony Grafton Gets Passionate
A well-intentioned session on Closing the"Passion Gap" in Graduate Education was nevertheless a bit disheartening. In a panel on graduate education at last year's AHA, Timothy Burke spoke powerfully about our obligations to graduate students, and coined the phrase"passion gap" to describe the unhappy way in which graduate education sometimes works to extinguish the love or excitement for history (or any other topic) that brought our students into grad school in the first place.
Anthony Grafton and Elise Lipkowitz organized this followup session for this year's AHA, and I thank them for it. (Looking back over the last couple of AHAs, I believe I can offer a useful rule of thumb: go to everything organized by, or involving, Tony Grafton.) Nothing I say here is a criticism of them or of what they were trying to do. But I was dismayed by who turned out for the session--or more precisely, who did not--and a little disappointed by the direction of the conversation that followed. The point of the panel was to talk about things faculty and graduate chairs could do to build community among graduate students and sustain the joy of doing history. So what does it mean that the people who came to see this panel were almost entirely graduate students themselves? Scott Jaschik agrees the audience was lopsided, with more grad students than professors. I think that understates it: from where I was sitting, there seemed to be as many faculty members on the podium as in the audience. I was not hugely proud of my colleagues at that moment--I wish there had been more professors and grad chairs in the room.
Certainly, the panelists had good intentions and valuable suggestions. I'm planning to teach a grad course in U.S. historiography next fall, so I took to heart Elise Lipkowitz' remarks on the"paralyzing effect" of historiography courses that focus solely on the failings or limitations of earlier works. Is it really a good idea to expose delicate young egos to David Fischer's Historian's Fallacies?
But discussion soon turned, as it seems it always must, away from the joy of history towards issues like funding (it is not much use to be passionate if you are not getting paid!) and the job market (we're turning out more PhDs than the market can support--perhaps we really ought to find ways to crush the passion of our students earlier, in the undergraduate years). Obviously, those are fundamental issues and conversations we can't have too many times. Yet what I found touching and worthwhile about Tim's remarks last year in Atlanta was his insistence that sustaining our students' love of history was also something worth talking about, in addition to more prosaic conversations about dollars and cents. I'm not sure that message got across this year.
Gene Autry Gets Torched
On Saturday morning I went to a panel on Public History, Tenure, and Review. This is not really my bailywick, but the organizers saw that my university has a job opening this year in public history, so they cleverly sent an invitation to my chair. He, knowing I was going to the AHA, asked me to attend.
The point of the panel was to explore ways public history activities might be counted towards tenure and promotion, in light of the"talismanic power" generally ascribed to peer review. A similar conversation about digital history took place, I gather, at one of the pre-conference workshops. Like the"Passion Gap" panel, there were useful insights from all around the table, but I couldn't help thinking that the people in the audience were not the ones who needed to be convinced.
But the main thing I want to say about the Public History panel is this: it was scheduled opposite the panel on science and science fiction in film history. So I DID NOT GO to Cynthia Miller's paper on The Phantom Empire, the sci-fi singing cowboy serial from 1935 in which ROBOTS PREPARE TO TORCH GENE AUTRY. Did these robots complete their preparations? Was Gene Autry torched, and if so, had he been adequately prepared? What preparations are necessary before torching a singing cowboy? I GUESS I WILL NEVER KNOW. Greater service to his department no man can give.
Walter Johnson Gets Medieval
A toddler emergency kept me from the Progressive Historians lunch on Saturday, which was a shame. One upside is that I made it to the second half of a panel called From Notes to Narrative: The Art of Crafting A Dissertation or Monograph. I'm a sucker for these discussions, for the same reason I like director's commentaries on DVDs. I like to hear other scholars talk about their work process; I like to see how the sausage is made.
The two panelists I managed to catch were both fascinating. Walter Johnson described his work process as"so wasteful, so medieval, and so abject," he hoped nobody would use him as a model. Johnson apparently makes hand-written transcriptions of everything he works with, even long passages from secondary works sitting handy on his shelf. The purpose of this is to slow down, to think about every line of text, to sustain a dialogue between his sources and his broader intellectual questions. Then he creates a concordance as a way of navigating his voluminous notes, and it's all done in long hand on looseleaf paper. I can't gainsay any process that produces a book as beautifully written as Johnson's Soul By Soul, but I have to think there are new technologies out there that could really help him out. Newfangled gizmos like index cards and file folders.
Then Deborah Harkness made a plea for historians to think like writers of fiction: not to make things up, of course, but to pay real attention to our characters and plot. When stuck, she said, think about your protagonists. Who are they? What matters most to them? What is at stake in their story? Once you know who your characters really are, she said (and they may not be who you think they will be when you first begin to write) they will come alive, and you will find connections and arguments and relationships that you never previously expected. Along the way, Harkness cited Tony Grafton (see my Tony Grafton rule, above) as a master among her fellow historians of science at bringing characters and stories to life.
Scott Jaschik Gets Stuck With The Check
I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the Cliopatria banquet, this time generously supported by Scotts Jaschik and McLemee of Inside Higher Ed. It was just terrific to see Ralph and Jonathan and to finally meet Manan, not to mention the Tenured Radical, the Informed Commenter, the Progressive Historian and the Inside Scotts. I only feel bad that Scott Jaschik, who picked up the tab in hopes of hearing savvy bloggers deliberate the great issues of our time, was stuck sitting next to me, whose blogging strenuously avoids all matters of import. (My estimable colleagues picked up the slack.) To quote Michael Chabon quoting S.J. Perelman,"Give me an underground laboratory, half a dozen atom-smashers, and a girl in a diaphanous veil waiting to be turned into a chimpanzee, and I care not who writes the nation's laws."