The China Beat blog, despite being completely outside my field, is one of my favorite history-themed blogs.  The engaging mix of articles keeps me thinking and learning more about China than I ever knew I wanted to.

Of particular interest to MHP followers may be Susan Jakes’ review of Jonathan Spence’s Reith lectures at Yale University. I found her description of his narrative style to be particularly provocative as I’m currently struggling with the framing of a difficult chapter in my dissertation, and I’ll take his advice to heart, to “put individuals front and center”:

The lectures had the feel of finely crafted short stories, and at times full-length novels. They were beguilingly titled—“The View from Below,” “All in the Translation,” “Into the World,” “Bombs and Pianos”—and they built in intensity to end in startling revelations or quietly delivered lines of poetry. Often they played on the juxtapositions in their titles to explore social tensions: “Famine and Finance,” “Sects and the Social Fabric,” “Warlords and Bandits,” “Socialists and Revisionists.” Spence liked to put two biographical sketches side by side to capture different dimensions of a given moment, a technique he used to electrifying effect on Yuan Mei and Zhang Xuecheng in the “The Poet and the Historian,” and on writers Ding Ling and Xu Zhimo in a lecture called “Being Modern.”

Even in less experimental modes, he always put individuals front and center. No event worth mentioning was too large to be refracted through a single human life and no life was too minor to have its humanity summoned up from the past alongside the abstraction of its historical significance. Spence could manage this level of detail even in a 50 minute lecture because of his knack for drawing a profile out of a single image—the Kangxi Emperor advising a bondservant on his health, Ding Ling’s mother running around an athletic field on her newly unbound feet, a Boxer victim’s Steinway piano, Mao aboard his private train. He could “catch the essence,” as he sometimes describes it, of people and of historical moments so they lit up like lightning bugs in a jar.

The interview with historian Paul Cohen is another China Beat article that MHP listeners might find relevant. Cohen’s most recent book is Speaking to History: The Story of King Goujian in Twentieth-Century China. On historical storytelling, Cohen says:

What does it mean for a story to “speak” to history? This question is, in the broadest sense, what my book is about. But before getting to that it might be helpful to briefly introduce an entirely different kind of relationship between story and history. Recently I started reading Barend ter Haar’s Telling Stories: Witchcraft and Scapegoating in Chinese History (Brill, 2006). The book is about the relationship between a certain kind of story (rumors and other forms of “local news,” often part of Chinese oral tradition and centering on popular fears) and collective action. Years ago I corresponded with ter Haar about some of his core ideas, some of which I later cited in the chapter on “Rumor and Rumor Panic” in History in Three Keys. I am intrigued now by the qualitative differences between the stories he deals with in his book and the Goujian and other stories I am concerned with in Speaking to History. My stories, unlike his, generally have a real historical basis and are widely known within the Chinese cultural realm. Although in many cases emerging out of Chinese oral tradition, they have often played an important part in the written history of Chinese literature as well. Another key point about my stories is that, unlike the ones ter Haar is concerned with, they are more important for their part in shaping the cognitive environment surrounding historical events than for directly giving rise to these events. And also, in this connection, the historical events they resonate with are in most cases national in scope rather than, as in ter Haar’s book, local or regional.

A central riddle that I am concerned with in my book has to do with the relationship between past story and present reality that in China, as elsewhere, has exerted such power. Why are peoples, at certain moments in their collective lives, especially drawn to narratives—commonly derived from the distant past—that resonate strongly with their present historical circumstances and speak to these circumstances in compelling ways? This mating of story to history, abundantly demonstrated in the career of the Goujian saga during China’s turbulent twentieth century, forms a stratum of veiled meaning the illumination of which is one of the main tasks I set for myself in the book. A larger point to be made about the connection between past story and present history is that it serves as a potent instrument for defining a culture’s boundaries, both objectively and subjectively. Narratives like the Goujian story that are widely known among a culture’s members constitute a form of symbolic sharing that is absolutely key both to the culture’s objective existence and to an individual’s subjective sense of belonging to that culture. Although missing from conventional historical accounts, such stories are important because of what they tell us about the interior world of a culture at particular moments in time, how those inhabiting this world felt—and how they talked and wrote—about the predicaments facing them, individually and collectively. What is so astonishing is that, in spite of their importance, Western students of twentieth-century China (including myself) have in the past shown little awareness of their existence. My hope is that, in Speaking to History, by focusing on one such story and the rich variety of ways in which it functioned over the past century, I have been able to convey some sense of what we have missed.

Given that I am always curious about the books that historians read for inspiration (and recreation), I particularly enjoyed this list from the Cohen interview:

Generally, when books I read that don’t have to do with China shape or reshape my understanding of Chinese history, it happens in the course of my research and writing when I’m actively looking for non-China perspectives. In thinking through some of the core themes in Speaking to History, for example, I found much stimulation in the work of people like Jerome Bruner (Making Stories), Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory), Roger Schank (Tell Me a Story: Narrative and Intelligence), Avishai Margalit (The Ethics of Memory), and Yael Zerubavel (Recovered Roots: Collective Memory and the Making of Israeli National Tradition). When I read other books not relating to China—recent examples are Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, David Lodge’s Home Truths, Jhumpa Lahiri’s Unaccustomed Earth, Omer Bartov’s Erased: Vanishing Traces of Jewish Galicia in Present-Day Ukraine, and Nicholas Dawidoff’s The Crowd Sounds Happy: A Story of Love, Madness, and Baseball—I’m mainly interested in nourishing the rest of me, not in coming up with new ways of understanding China (although this of course could—and sometimes does— happen).

• An interactive view of the 1918 flu pandemic.  Scrolling through this site is a painless way to learn about the impact of the disease, yet I found myself wondering if there could’ve have been graphical representations showing the scope of influenza to augment the vintage images and news accounts.  Also, the site navigation moved a bit too slowly to be highly engaging.  This vid about XDR-TB was far more emotionally effective even though it offers scant information about the disease itself.
• A tribute to Studs Terkel (a hero of mine) and a challenge for everyman to become an oral historian.
• I haven’t yet tested Zotero 1.5, but I’m thrilled about the promise of its sync feature as I weary of  transferring zotero files from my research laptop (an AUSU UMPC) to my home computer.
• My teenage kids think Sarah Vowell is far more entertaining than any of the other historian podcasters they’ve listened to (including, of course, their Mom).  So we’ll be tuning in to Sarah’s take on the Puritans this week as we bake our pumpkin pies (from scratch, of course, because there’s nothing better than a homemade pumpkin pie!)

This computer is finished. Its silver casing shows the years of scratches, bumps, and smudges. It bears the scars of balancing one too many books, of leaving the computer too casually on an ottoman, of eating and working feverishly for a deadline.

On the console, paint is worn away and dirt permanently applied. Unexplained keystrokes are not unknown. Above the hard drive, the metal is warped away from the rubber lining, so that one more spill could spell calamity. Where the power cord connects, the metal is so misshapen that the charger must be threaded into place, as it fits only one way. Even then it glows an angry, unforgiving red-orange—it’s not described in any manual, but so far it has not meant a total cessation of function. And of course these problems aren’t covered by the warranty, which has expired now anyway.

But, then again, this computer is finished. Despite aged software and questionable printer drivers, despite an overloaded hard drive that no longer communicates directly with its backup, my computer has completed its mission. Purchased in May 2005, on the cusp of my dissertation research, it organized archival trips, stored thousands of digital photographs, held hundreds of document transcriptions, and facilitated dozens of drafts. Never lost, never stolen, never broke down, it has survived. The goal has been reached—the dissertation is completed, printed, filed—and so the computer is done. Its gleaming replacement, upon which the dissertation will become a book and the next projects will be born, sits quietly in the box, waiting.

Serious writing demands its own environment, its requirements exacting but replicable. For me, that means sunlight and a vista with distance, however drab; the promise of regular, extended periods of silence; the space to pace; a chair supportive enough but not too hard on the muscles; the screen raised to the proper height; easy access to books on the shelves and files in the cabinet; and a tap for water within reach—but not so close as to bring the clatter of the kitchen pipes. At the center sits the computer, the keyboard angled correctly, the mouse movements registering on the screen. To work best, it should all stay arranged, so that scant writing time can be devoted to writing, not setup or packing up, not searching for files or wondering when that banging will stop. For the system to work best, it should go unnoticed for days at a time. And so it did.

And so, after these three years, when the laptop has finished its tasks and stands ready for replacement, I do notice.

These are the last words to be typed before the awkward process of file transfer commences. Under the inglorious name “Things I Need,” the folder of older items will migrate into unfamiliar territory. And a new computer, with a new name, will start a new relationship with me and my academic work, with the case unscratched, the keys undirtied, and the quirks as yet undiscovered.

I have been grandiose in my name choices. There was Nehemiah, who kept the visions of the prophet Ezra recorded; then Blue, reflecting a mood and the color of the curving iMac plastic, but also the possibilities of a jazz sensibility; then Be My Yoko, a play on an early project name (“One Night Only,” or ONO, for short), and reflecting the wish of The Barenaked Ladies’s chorus: You can be my Yoko Ono / You can follow me wherever I go—an excellent goal for valuable possessions, and especially a work laptop.

The new computer has a university bar code and the standard-issue name “Macintosh HD.” Changing it will renew my compact with another machine. It will maintain order and process queries while I get back to the process of writing history without thought to such physical requirements.  For that, once again, I will be thankful.

A list of links for my “No More Notecards” workshop.

Zotero:
~Adding items into a collection and organizing sources
~Creating a bibliography via Word or GoogleDocs
~Managing your collection through tags
~troubleshooting
~Endnote file transfer (in litigation)

Scrivener (for Mac):
~intro vid
~other Mac resources:DEVONthink
~similar PC software

Project Management:
~Hiveminder/GCal
~Remember the Milk (Also works with GCal)

UPDATE:
Some resources that were suggested during the workshop:

• iGoogle, as a portal to all of the diverse Google applications including GoogleBook, GoogleScholar, GooglePatent, etc

• Mind Mapping software (H/T Stephen Franklin), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mind_mapping_software, lists as external refs, Innovation Tools: Independent site dedicated to introducing accelerated learning tools. It includes a survey of Mind Mapping software use. Mind-mapping.org, independent site claiming to have every piece of mind mapping software in its list of over 178 packages. It also includes on-line mind mapping services, software for concept mapping and outlining and a historical record of past software in these categories.

• ArtStor and Flickr for image searches

• UCI resources such as WorldCat (through UCI library’s portal) and webfiles

Note: workshop hosted by Humanitech, which is also a sponsor of the Making History Podcast

We will read and discuss an excerpt from Alexander Nemerov’s Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures (University of California Press, 2005).  Focus will be on the Introduction and Chapter One, “The Madonna of the Backyard.”  We hope this will be a wide-ranging discussion of his study, with special consideration of the writerly challenges of incorporating visual artifacts–particularly film–into historical analysis.   All are welcome.

Alexander Nemerov is Professor in the History of Art at Yale, where he researches and teaches on American visual culture from the eighteenth to mid-twentieth century.   Painting, film, sculpture, theater, and literary works are among his subjects of study.  His previous publications include The Body of Raphaelle Peale: Still Life and Selfhood, 1812-1824 (2001) and Frederic Remington and Turn-of-the-Century America (1995).

NO MORE NOTE CARDS: NEW WEB-BASED TECHNOLOGIES FOR HUMANITIES RESEARCH
Mon., 10/6, 12:00-1:30, 137 Humanities Instructional Building
Join us for an informal workshop/demonstration/discussion about popular web-based applications for use with graduate-level research and writing. We will discuss programs such as Zotero, GoogleDocs, Scrivener, and the digital imaging of archival resources. If you’d like, bring your laptop with you.

Discussion Facilitator: Jana Remy, Graduate Student, Department of History

For the past few weeks I’ve been working in the papers of one particular woman whose journals and letters span a period of about 50 years. She wrote nearly everyday, with meticulous detail. I now know about her fickle friends, her bitter feelings towards her maiden aunts, and her continued money troubles. I also know of a few love affairs, that she frequently re-made her clothes to reflect current fashions, and have even found a certain monthly crochety-ness that I suspect coincides with her menstrual cycle.

Yet I remain fascinated by her, diving deeper into her life each day, mapping the various places she traveled, making lists of her associates, creating a timeline of her life. A part of me feels as if I’m smitten with my subject–she is endlessly fascinating to me. A another part of me wonders if I’m simply indulging in some rather creepy voyeuristic tendencies. Certainly none of her papers were written with the audience of a 21st century historian in mind. And while I don’t feel that I am exploiting her memory or her experiences, I’m also a bit uncomfortable with how my own life is now revolving around hers. My past research projects never led me to dive so deeply into one person’s story before, and while this is a fascinating experience, it’s also starting to make me just a bit unsure of my relationship to my subject and her papers.

Do you have any experience in this vein to share? Have you ever found yourself a historical ‘voyeur’ in the life of your research subjects? And, perhaps most importantly, did you feel a discomfort with using their life stories to serve your own ends?

My left leg was propped up on the edge of the gurney as the ER doc sliced open the abscess on my calf to release the pus he needed for a bacterial culture. He started to chatting with me deflect the tension of the moment. As he grabbed various vials and swabbed the bleeding wound he asked me why I was traveling alone in Denver. My reply, “I’m getting a PhD, doing my dissertation on 19th century medical history in the Intermountain West. I’ll be working in archives at the Historical Society this week.”

In nearly every MH podcast my interviewees discuss their personal connections to their historical research. It makes sense, for example, that Laurel Ulrich’s next project will be about Utah Mormon women, given her own LDS heritage. Jeff Wasserstrom, whose recent book of essays explores intersections of Chinese history and contemporary society, details recent travel experiences in Shanghai cafes and bookstores.

My own dissertation research about 19th century medical history is certainly fueled by many of my experiences as a medical patient. Most recently, for the past four months I’ve battled a mysterious antibiotic-resistant infection in my left leg (the jury is still out about whether the infection is MRSA or an atypical mycobacterium–just today I had an MRI scan and we hope to draw yet another wound culture by the end of the week). I can’t help but draw parallels between my own rather gruesome ailment and the “suppurating wounds” full of “laudable pus” that I’ve read about in postbellum American medical journals. This situation truly came to head a few weeks ago while I was in Denver on a research trip and my infection recurred; I became a patient in one of the very hospitals that I aimed to study during my stint in town.

In pondering my intimate relationship with my research topic, I’ve considered the writings of ethnographers Ruth Behar and Greg Sarris. Weaving their own stories with their histories adds a weight to their work that moves beyond a story frozen in time, captured by an objective observer. It seems more than coincidence that the writers’ lives are so closely tied to those of their subjects. As Behar writes, “You don’t choose to write the books you write, any more than you choose your mother, your father, your brother, or your comadre” (Translated Woman, xi). Am I to imagine that the angel of history dropped down from the sky and offered me this gift of a story, as an offering to this poor graduate student struggling to prove the significance of her obscure research topic? I’m tempted to mirror some of Behar and Sarris’ techniques in my own work, but both of these researchers are collecting oral histories and interact with their subjects–historians who study the 19th century (or earlier eras) don’t have that luxury. Such historians tend to bookend their research with their personal reflections, as do Bill Cronon and Martha Hodes.

Even while I recognize that my personal experience informs my interactions with my sources at every level–the questions I bring to the text and my interpretation/filtration of those materials–convention dictates that I keep my distance from my writing. Yet from reading bestselling accounts like Six of Six Million, I know that the researcher’s process to uncover the facts of their story can be a compelling tale in and of itself. Of course, I’ve been told many times that those are the types of books that historians write after tenure.

Still, as I write my dissertation I aim to blur some of the traditional boundaries of the historical genre–adding literary elements and experimenting with the traditional textual form. Though at this point it seems too far outside of the sphere of the dissertation to inject my personal experiences anywhere except in the Intro (gotta wait for that magical tenure, first), I’m still infusing my text with my own morbid fascination for medical detail. Because how can I write a compelling vignette about battlefield surgery without injecting my freaky curiosity about the details of arterial ligature, techniques of amputation, and moist wound dressings? And, given that I may well be writing my next chapter during the hours I’ll be whiling away hooked up to an antibiotic IV drip, such details hit painfully close to home (although honestly I’m hoping for maggot therapy to debride the infected tissue–wouldn’t that be a fun story to include in the intro to my first book?).

***

Antibiotic-resistant infections like MRSA have a history, one that begins in the nineteenth century with the professionalization and routinization of allopathic medical practice. The use of antibiotics as a panacea for nearly any ailment became part of the performative “practice” of medicine by the late twentieth century–such antibiotics confidently prescribed by white-coated board-certified physicians who had little inkling of the consequences. Certainly they weren’t thinking of people like me, who have complex medical histories involving numerous necessary doses of antibiotics, and who are subsequently more susceptible to extra-resistant infections.

Thus, my fascination with medical history is profoundly personal. It is an attempt to understand the terrain of my own body. It’s what I thought about for the hours I was recently an inpatient in my university’s hospital, where I was told I couldn’t bring any personal belongings (not even a book-the horror) because of theft problems. So I was a book-less, laptop-less, podcast-less patient with not much more to consider than the view out the window (a back alley), the pain in my leg (tooth-gritting), and my research objectives.* I thought a lot about what it meant to write “professional” history and what it meant to tell stories. The paranoid hypochondriac part of me also worried whether I would ever get better and get on with my work, even as I realized that my own medical experiences aren’t just tangential to my work, they are at the heart of it. And, in one fashion or another, they will be a part of everything I write.

*Actually, I also thought a lot about Foucault, which I found one can’t help but contemplate in a situtation like mine–wondering whether one is in the “clinic” or the “prison.” But that, of course, is another story. And I should also note that there _was_ a television in my corner of the ward, but I never turned it on because I haven’t watched TV in a few decades and I wasn’t about to start just because I was hospitalized, for crying out loud.

I’m slated to present some thoughts at the Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City on Saturday, August 9th, from 4:45-6:15. The panel session, La Vida Online, will be about the blogging lifestyle.

Heather B. Armstrong (dooce.com) is also lined up for this panel. Recently named as one of the five most influential bloggers, her talk is sure to be a bit irreverent and provocative. The panel will be digitally recorded and available for download following the event.

In the spirit of “casual Fridays,” I intend to post a Friday musing each week that veers a bit off course from typical historical fare. My inaugural attempt is below.
What I’ve done lately to get my creative juices flowing:

• On a recent roadtrip our family listened to Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation, which caused me to ponder: who makes best-seller history (NPR hosts?), how to weave one’s own phobias and passions into a compelling historical narrative, and why the underbelly of history (murder, mayhem, and sexual experimentation) is always popular. I suspect that reading AV in an undergraduate class would be huge fun–my teenage kids thought Vowell’s book was a better listen than previous audiobook choices by fantasy authors Garth Nix and Philip Pullman.

• I’ve been taking pictures. As a historian I find myself analyzing the photo-making and photo-taking process on many levels–such as how do pictures create emotion and how do they portray (or obfuscate) reality? What are the ramifications of living in a digital age with the accessibility of flickr and youtube? My spouse, John, recently launched a flickr challenge group,“A Certain Slant of Light,” that will undoubtedly motivate me and its other participants towards greater creativity.

• On my nightstand right now is Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science & Sex, (a perfectly apropos book for one’s bedside, I suppose). Roach’s somewhat unobjective historical analysis of sex research is funniest in the footnotes. Her own forays into sexual experiments (yes, she participates in several of the studies that she describes) might ‘inspire’ me to become more, um, engaged in my dissertation subject matter (or not). Next on my reading list is Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. I’m thinking that Chabon might have a few things to teach me about historical writing–even if I never try my hand at fiction.

What is inspiring you right now?