Making History Podcast: The Blog

At the end of this year, John Demos will retire from his position as Samuel Knight Professor of History at Yale University. For the past decade, Professor Demos has offered a course on “Narrative and Other Histories” for graduate students, and encouraged innovative writing and the conversation between history and fiction in the classroom, in academic journals, and after hours, through support for the Writing History colloquium at Yale.

Too modest by half, in this interview, Demos doesn’t describe his role in fostering the careers of Jill Lepore, Jane Kamensky, Jennifer Price, Aaron Sachs, Wendy Warren, and others who have trail-blazed innovative historical writing in recent years, nor does he mention the namesake John Demos Prize in American Studies, at Barnard College. But he does offer insights into how his career has embraced numerous historical styles, including the Bancroft Prize-winning Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England(1982) and The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America (1994), winner of the Francis Parkman Prize and the Ray Allen Billington Prize and finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. And he discusses the openness and curiosity he considers essential to finding the best historical methods for a project and how to have confidence in one’s voice as a writer.

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Join me in welcoming Adam Arenson to the Making History Podcast team. A little bit about Adam:

I write North American cultural history, and I will be an assistant professor of history at the University of Texas at El Paso, teaching 19th-century U.S. history and contributing to the borderlands Ph.D. program, beginning in January 2009.

Throughout my Ph.D. program at Yale, I sought out the Writing History colloquium as a place to complement discussions of historiography, source limitations, and teaching obligations with musings on tone, pacing, word-craft, and public engagement. From 2005 to 2008, I was the group’s coordinator, enticing and cajoling Faculty members and my fellow graduate students into discussions about op-ed writing, teaching student writing, and article and book publishing. We also read a good deal of our own works-in-progress, writing-group-style, and entertained guests including Rachel Cohen, Walter Johnson, Jill Lepore, and James Goodman. As I leave the Northeast, I am pleased to explore other ways to create space for writing history thoughtfully, including the Making History Podcast and initial efforts toward a Writing History network.

As by dissertation-to-book-manuscript, “City of Manifest Destiny: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War, 1848-1877,” is chugging along, I have published an essay on how Dred, Harriet, Eliza and Lizzie Scott have been treated by history, separate from the Dred Scott case, in the March 2008 Common-place and two historically minded op-eds in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Among my other writings are a discussion of how Ansel Adams’ “Eucalyptus Tree, Fort Ross, California,” (1969) represents the state’s alternate pasts in California History, 2005, and an article on Anglo-Saxonist rhetoric in the Yukon appeared in the August 2007 Pacific Historical Review.

I’ll add that I am originally from San Diego, and that I enjoyed my time as a op-ed columnist and assistant editorial-page editor at the Harvard Crimson, a path that led to my interest in writing history intelligibly. Please feel free to be in touch: adam.arenson (youknowwhatgoeshere) yale.edu.

Adam has reminded me that my own bio page is lacking both picture and salient details about my studies. This will be remedied soon.
If you would like to join in the fun at MHP, please drop me a line–I would love to expand our collaborative circle: remyj(at)uci(dot)edu.

Just for the record, I’d like you to know that I danced plenty in high school, thank you very much.

With that off my chest, I do hope that you’ll take a moment to tune in to Patty’s reading of her essay “Dancing with Professors,” where she muses about the reasons behind the obtuse prose of most historical writing. Even if you don’t wholly agree with her assertion about wallflower historians, you will be inspired by her clear voice and her passion for accessible writing.

One reviewer said of Patty’s essays:

“If William Blake could see a world in a grain of sand, Limerick has the gift to find history in the small experiences of everyday life. She uses stories, anecdotes, and parables to introduce challenging ideas. She has great skill at finding ways to entice readers into her subject…[Her] skill is to take a solid historical fact or an everyday experience and twirl it around so that it catches light in new ways.

Patty is the author of Something in the Soil and The Legacy of Conquest. She is the Faculty Director and Chair of the Board of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, where she is also a Professor of History.

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Please join Yale’s Writing History group for the unique opportunity to discuss

Practically anything written by Professor Spence can offer up questions about the nature of historical writing, weighing evidence, and spinning imaginative tales, so I have chosen selections from books old and new, as well as a few other sources that might provide different angles. They are:

• Chapters 6 and 8 of his newest book, Return to Dragon Mountain

• the final 25 pages of The Death of Woman Wang

• comments on Margaret Atwood from John Demos and Jonathan Spence in the American Historical Review, with reaction to letters

• For those with a bit more time, I’d highly recommend reading Woman Wang, Return to Dragon Mountain, The Question of Hu, or another Spence book cover to cover. I’d also suggest Professor Spence’s 2005 AHA presidential address, which discussed the same material and some of the themes of Return to Dragon Mountain, to open yet another angle on how free to be, and to what audiences.

For those of us engaged in writing history, the practical reality is that we need to secure funding for our efforts. Whether you’re working on your dissertation or are polishing up a book manuscript, Rachel Sarah O’Toole’s tips for garnering research funds will be of interest.

Rachel begins this episode with a reading from her Social Text article, “Becoming a Bran Diaspora Within Spanish Slavery,” and then offers a “funding dissection” of her writing, showing how different portions of her finished work emerged from a variety of fellowships and travel grants. During the Q&A that follows the discussion of her research, Rachel explains several practical strategies for earning both internal and external research funds.

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In this second half of her podcast interview, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich offers some favorite slogans besides Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History as she gives advice to aspiring historians. In discussing the challenges of research she advises that “serendipity seldom strikes in the shower or on the beach–serendipity most often happens in the archives.” In speaking about using archival materials, she suggests that “if your source doesn’t answer your question, change your question.”

This provocative Q&A with Ulrich includes her thoughts about the renaissance of women’s history, touches on the tensions she experiences as both a feminist and a Mormon, and gives some details about her new research projects.

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Laurel Thatcher Ulrich reads from her recent book, Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History, in this episode of the Making History Podcast. She offers selections from the Introduction as well as examples of Amazons and other female warriors. Following her reading, Ulrich discusses the challenges of writing a book that surveys a wide swath of history.

From a Booklist review:

“Ulrich never could have imagined that a comment she made in a scholarly article in 1976 would end up emblazoned on T-shirts, buttons, and coffee mugs. With that immortal line as the title of her latest inquiry into overlooked aspects of women’s lives, the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian focuses on three accomplished women who behaved badly according to the standards of their times. She presents a fascinating profile of Christine de Pizan, the remarkable fourteenth-century author of The Book of the City of Ladies, a novel that advocates for women’s education. Picking up the thread of Pizan’s recounting of the myth of the Amazons, Ulrich portrays real-life women warriors throughout the ages, including today’s women soldiers in Iraq. Ulrich provides a bracing answer to Virginia Woolf’s pointed question––If Shakespeare had an equally talented sister, what would her life have been like?––after scrutinizing and shrewdly interpreting court documents of the time. Elizabeth Cady Stanton is the catalyst for a far-reaching analysis of the abolition and women’s rights movements. Ultimately, Ulrich amends her famous bon mot: Well-behaved women make history when they do the unexpected, when their actions produce records, and when later generations care.”

Coming next week in the second part of this interview, Laurel speaks about the field of women’s history, offers advice on choosing a dissertation topic, and discusses her writing of A Midwife’s Tale.

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Zotero is really starting to grow on me. I added this bibliographic application to my browser in November and I now find that I use it constantly to create lists of books to read, to organize items relevant to my research, and so forth. I like that it’s far faster and easier to import data than EndNote (and I have been a devotee of EndNote for several years). I also appreciate that it works with my web browser so I no longer need to run a separate program while searching the web.

Another application that I’m growing fond of is Hiveminder, a task management system I’m using to manage my research goals as well as personal stuff like grocery lists and errands. What I like best about Hiveminder is that it integrates with both my browser (so I can add items via my searchbar) and with googlecalendar–showing my daily ‘to do’ list on the top of each day’s schedule. Hiveminder allows for recurring tasks and “before-after” tasks (as in, before I finish my grant application I need to contact my advisor to write a recommendation letter and after I finish it I need to go to the post office–all added seamlessly from one entry).

Are you using Zotero, Hiveminder, or other similar programs? If so, how are they aiding your research and writing?

Here’s a brief youtube overview of Zotero:

And a look at Hiveminder:

This MHP episode offers an informal interview with China historian Jeff Wasserstrom, where he discusses a variety of topics about writing history. He gives advice on publishing book reviews, overcoming writer’s block, and names some of his favorite history books. Jeff also speaks about the Writing History seminar he led at UC Irvine this past Fall.

Links to some of Jeff’s favorite reads:

• Jonathan Spence, The Question of Hu
• Amitav Ghosh, In An Antique Land
• Mike Davis, City of Quartz
• Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air
• The travel writing of Pico Iyer
• Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

Wasserstrom’s latest book, China’s Brave New World, was featured on a list of Pankaj Mishra’s favorite books of 2007. Mishra writes, “In this book Jeffrey Wasserstrom shows why he is one of the most sensible writers on a subject that most Western writers spoil with either paranoia or excessive awe.” Jeff is also a member of The China Beat blog team.

Stay tuned for next week’s episode of MHP with Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, AHA president-elect and author of Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.

Episode Three offers a selection from Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s latest book, China’s Brave New World: And Other Tales for Global Times. Following a reading of the essay “Mr. Mao Ringtones,” Jeff speaks about how he came to write a book of ‘tales’ and offers his thoughts about American perceptions of China.

From the Library Journal review:

“These nimble and knowledgeable essays from a respected historian…include commentaries on such recent events as the Tiananmen Incident, as well as light but erudite historical thought pieces, such as one on former President Grant’s world tour in 1879. Others look at the fate of globalized franchises such as McDonald’s and Marxism, the challenges of historical and cross-cultural analogies, and sympathetic critiques of reporting on China.”

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Tune in next week for Part 2 of the podcast interview with author Jeffrey Wasserstrom.