Dr. Moses Ochonu, courtesy of Vanderbilt University History Department, 2013

Revisiting major debates on the impact of colonialism on Africa’s economy is a big task. So big, that History Compass allowed African historian Dr. Moses Ochonu of Vanderbilt University the space of two articles to re-open the conversation.

As we’re all aware, issues of poverty and economic marginality on the African continent have assumed more urgency in the world. Now, more than ever, people are asking: how did it come to this?

Historians are in the unique position of returning to historical questions in order to answer the economic questions of the present. The future of Africa’s economy will be determined by the forces of globalization, the international market, as well as domestic innovation, investments in infrastructure, and trade. In light of this future, which is becoming increasingly clear and urgent, Ochonu wanted to revisit the debates over the history of African economies.

In his History Compass articles (available here and here), Ochonu wanted to provide a one-stop overview of colonialism’s economic impacts on Africans as well as Africans’ own impacts on colonial economic events and outcomes. He points out that Africa’s colonial economies give us a window into the contemporary debates about Africa’s economies. Already during colonial times, African economic outcomes were determined by the actions, devices, and the maneuvering spaces Africans created themselves. This often occurred in spite, or in defiance, of exploitative colonial policies.

Colonial Map of Africa, 1910s. (Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Current debates about African economies, whether about colonial times or the postcolonial

period, present Africans in a perpetual state of reaction. Africans are shown to experience colonial economic structures and globalization, act on them, and negotiate them, but are never able to shape their outcomes.

But it isn’t that simple. “They also found their niche in the colonial economy, took advantage of it, and created maneuvering space in it.” Ochonu found it crucial to write African economic agency back into discussions of colonialism and poverty. Africans were and remain proactive actors in their economic affairs. Their actions should be essential to the story.

And despite drafting two full articles to guide historians wishing to revisit the story of African economic agency in light of colonialism, poverty, and globalization, there were a lot of stories and examples that didn’t make the cut. A section on gender was too large to be included, and may become the centerpiece of another project.

Colonialism put power into the hands of men in Africa. For many African males, this was the first time, and women reacted by becoming autonomous economic entities operating within emerging urban spaces. Victorian understandings of male and female roles created a host of what Ochonu calls unintended consequences.

“Colonial authorities in Africa all had particular views of African female economic actors. This created unique challenges as well as opportunities for women in Africa, in ways men did not have to contend with.” Ochonu speculates that this gave rise to female innovation: they rose to meet the challenges and overcome colonial prejudice. In the process, they invented new vocations, reconfigured the household economy, and reemerged as major players in agriculture, commerce, and artisanal guilds.

“Colonial authorities in Africa all had particular views of African female economic actors. This created unique challenges as well as opportunities for women in Africa, in ways men did not have to contend with.”

This is important because historians often overlook the unintended consequences. We write about cause and effect, but the unplanned and unintended, and the seemingly implausible or illogical is just as interesting, if more challenging to trace. But African historians must do so, because it projects a less rigid and deterministic picture of colonial planning and decision-making. In many respects, pragmatism took precedence over the metropole’s grandiose intent, and Africans, particularly women, took advantage of this pragmatic atmosphere of on-ground colonization.

African women disrupted the colonial economy in profound ways that affected the economic realities of today: Informal economies today are dominated by women whom scholars rarely fold into studies on poverty and globalization in the developing world. A multiplicity of voices changes the narrative of Africa’s economy from a reactive one of endemic weakness and unchallenged exploitation, to one in which Africans had, have, and will continue to have opportunities to determine their economic futures in our world.

A special thanks to Moses Ochonu for the interview. For more on this topic, check out his latest book, Colonial Meltdown: Northern Nigeria in the Great Depression.

Spot the Future Historian, by Angela Sutton, 2012

If you have a funny/poignant/thought-provoking/etc.  idea for a history cartoon, please send it to Angela.C.Sutton[at]Vanderbilt[dot]edu.  If I use your idea I will give you credit here.

History Compass

Science, Technology, Health

Available free online until the end of the year.

Disability in the Middle Ages: Impairment at the Intersection of Historical Inquiry and Disability Studies
Irina Metzler

New Directions in the Study of Religious Responses to the Black Death
Justin Stearns

Blood in Medieval Cultures
Bettina Bildhauer

Recent Perspectives on Leprosy in Medieval Western Europe
Elma Brenner

Integrative Medicine: Incorporating Medicine and Health into the Canon of Medieval European History
Monica H. Green

Writing the History of the Natural Sciences in the pre-modern Muslim world: Historiography, Religion, and the Importance of the Early Modern Period
Justin Stearns

Religion and the Enlightenment(s)
M. Sandberg

Science and Technology in India: The Digression of Asia and Europe
Aniruddha Bose

‘Dead Meat’ Dramas: Diseased Meat and the Public’s Health
Keir Waddington

The Ties That Bind: Infanticide, Gender, and Society
Brigitte H. Bechtold and Donna Cooper

The Fertility of Scholarship on the History of Reproductive Rights in the United States
Joyce Berkman

Eugenics and Historical Memory in America
Alexandra Minna Stern

Having a Clean Up? Deporting Lunatic Migrants from Western Australia, 1924–1939
Philippa Martyr

Re-visiting Histories of Modernization, Progress, and (Unequal) Citizenship Rights: Coerced Sterilization in Peru and in the United States
Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney

Flu: Past and Present
George Dehner

Malaria in Africa
James L. A. Webb Jr.

Polio in Nigeria
Elisha P. Renne

Sowing the Seeds of Progress: The Agricultural Biotechnology Debate in Africa
Noah Zerbe

The League of Nations and the Debate over Cannabis Prohibition
Liat Kozma

The Medical History of South Africa: An Overview
Anne Digby

Constructing a Narrative: The History of Science and Technology in Latin America
María Portuondo

A Survey of the History of Science in New Zealand 1769–1992
Rebecca Priestley

History for the Anthropocene
Libby Robin and Will Steffen

The “Discovery” of the New World, by Angela Sutton

Christopher Columbus, and the holiday (or holidays, as the US isn’t the only country who celebrates him) named after him are fantastic opportunities for teachable moments in virtually any history classroom.

In the past, I’ve asked students to read passages of Christopher Columbus’s journal or his letters to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. Together, we’ve reflected on what they have learned in the past about Columbus, and discussed all the things you do when teaching with primary sources: we talked about the reasons sources are generated, and their historical context, and how and why the source came to be preserved in the present.

Then I’ve show them blogs and opinion articles by historians who discuss the less palatable facts about Columbus, by historians like Howard Zinn who highlight how dangerous he was for the Americas,  and by Native American activists who denounce Columbus for what he has done to their Amerindian ancestors.

I’ve asked students to find more information on the controversy surrounding Columbus Day, and they came back in full force with news of protests, and more opinion articles.

I then asked students why I’ve asked them to find these things.

“Because Columbus was bad?” asked one.

Before I could answer, another student chimed in. “No, because he’s still important now. What he did is still affecting populations in our country.”

Bingo.

Then I asked what our honoring this man each year says about how America values its native populations. Then the class moved into a discussion of how the US perceived of itself and why we use this day to celebrate Columbus instead of the contributions of Native Americans.

By this time the class was fired up. I didn’t have to ask any more questions, and instead focused on moderating the discussion between students. The class touched on many important points related to imperialism, racism, colonialism, colonial legacies, hegemony, and power – all the things a good history class should uncover.

In this way, Columbus Day has become a valuable teachable moment to show students that history is living, and that something that happened in the 1400s can still affect the way we perceive of ourselves as a nation today.

Opponents of marriage equality and some free market supporters have asked what gay men and lesbians hope to achieve by calling for boycotts against Chick-fil-A. Many see economic action against Cathy and Chick-fil-A as anti-Capitalist, even un-American, arguing incorrectly that it violates his freedom of speech. The history of queer economic activism, however, demonstrates just what is at stake, and what boycotting can achieve.

Even before the modern homosexual rights movement gained momentum in the 1970s, gay men and lesbians recognized the relationship between economic forces and human rights. Already in 1963, in response to UK tabloid press sensationalism that vilified homosexuals, author Douglas Plummer called on gay men and lesbians to boycott publications that demonized them. “If homosexuals stopped buying those particular newspapers,” he foresaw, “some circulations would drop by many hundreds of thousands of copies.” Plummer recognized the economic clout that homosexuals might have, but before a larger coordinated community existed, his call for economic action went unanswered.

Following the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, in which gay men and lesbians stood against police raids and harassment in New York, a greater community began to form. This wider community soon saw economic action as a strategic tool against state and legal oppression. Just five years after Stonewall the Los Angeles Police Department responded to the threat of a boycott against Hollywood businesses by revising its policies toward gay Angelenos.

And in 1977 the most famous gay boycott demonstrated the potential of economic action to oppose anti-gay sentiment and further build a cohesive community. In January, Dade County (Miami) passed an ordinance to prohibit discrimination in the areas of housing, employment and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation. In order to overturn it, Florida Citrus Commission spokeswoman, entertainer and former Miss Oklahoma Anita Bryant formed Save Our Children, which collected sufficient signatures to force the issue to a voter referendum. The stage was set for the first time for coordinated national action among a broad spectrum of gay men and lesbians.

Responding to Bryant’s anti-gay positions and her links to the Citrus Commission, calls for a boycott of Florida orange juice rang out across the nation. As today, gay leaders and ordinary citizens were mixed about the tactic of using a boycott to oppose personal beliefs and business interests. Some questioned the desirability of silencing Bryant or threatening her employment through economic action against her employer. Others worried about a boycott’s effects on economically vulnerable farm workers. In California, however, columnist Harvey Milk, who would become the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States, called on the city, unions, and gay leaders to boycott Florida orange juice. He argued that buying orange juice amounted to “supporting a person who is preaching hatred towards every Gay person.” Milk, who continued to promote gay equality while he sat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, would be assassinated the following year.

According to Herndon Graddick, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Cathy and Chick-fil-A are responsible for some five million dollars in donations to “anti-gay” organizations like the American Family Association and the Family Research Council as well as support for organizations that promote therapies to “turn” homosexuals straight. Chick-fil-A’s support for “the biblical definition of the family unit” has now made this an issue not only for gay men and lesbians, but for a broader range of consumers. The debate is not restricted to those whom it most directly affects, but instead to anyone who might use their money to support Cathy’s business and his cause, or to deny them funds by boycotting Chick-fil-A and spending their money elsewhere.

Economic action against Chick-fil-A is unlikely to dissuade Cathy from supporting or funding groups dedicated to fighting marriage equality. But despite the media interest and apparent success of former Arkansas Governor and Fox News contributor Mike Huckabee’s August 1 “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day,” history shows us that queer economic action and boycotts can in fact have broader successes beyond the immediate issue at hand. Economic action against Chick-fil-A implicates all consumers of fast food, asking them to make decisions with their dollars either to support marriage equality or to fund Cathy and anti-equality groups. The explosion of support across social media suggests increasing demand for marriage equality beyond just gay men and lesbians.

In the end, the boycott against Florida Orange Juice and the backlash against Anita Bryant failed to prevent the overturning of Dade County’s anti-discrimination ordinance. In the immediate context of Miami, the boycott seemed to have failed. But most local and national gay and lesbian organizations nonetheless highlighted the action’s success in creating a national movement devoted to gay and lesbian human rights that contributed to the mobilization of a national consciousness.

Twenty years after the Stonewall Rebellion, protesters on Fifth Avenue in New York rallied together around the cry “We’re Here, We’re Queer, and We’re Not Going Shopping.” By 1989 they recognized that their choices as consumers could be strategically employed to support some businesses or boycott others for their employment practices, marketing and advertising or promotion of social and political causes. In 2012, a US election year, consumer choices are even more political as they become mainstream news and affect policy statements among future candidates.

Like the Florida orange juice campaign, which solidified a national gay and lesbian political movement, non-violent economic action against Chick-fil-A is likely to have greater impact beyond protesting the specific policies of this fast food restaurant and its executives. It may in fact galvanize a broad coalition of gay men, lesbians but significantly also allies in support of marriage equality in the US. This concrete expansion of the movement for marriage equality beyond those whom it affects directly to include progressive men and women, religious leaders, and average folks everywhere may turn out to be the greatest strength of this economic action.

Rules for the Observance of Feast-Days in Medieval England
Volume 34, Issue 90, November 1961

The Book of the Disguisings for the Coming of the Ambassadors of Flanders, December 1508
A. R. Myers
Volume 54, Issue 129, May 1981

‘For refreshment and preservinge health’: the definition and function of recreation in early modern England
Elaine McKay
Volume 81, Issue 211, February 2008

Sports and celebrations in English market towns, 1660–1750
Emma Griffin
Volume 75, Issue 188, May 2002

The Cult of the Centenary, c.1784–1914
Roland Quinault
Volume 71, Issue 176, October 1998

Bonfire Night in Mid Victorian Northants: the Politics of a Popular Revel
D. G. Paz
Volume 63, Issue 152, October 1990

Queen Victoria opens Parliament: the Disinvention of Tradition
Walter L. Arnstein
Volume 63, Issue 151, June 1990

Reynolds’s Newspaper, Opposition to Monarchy and the Radical Anti-Jubilee:Britain’s Anti-Monarchist Tradition Reconsidered
Antony Taylor
Volume 68, Issue 167, October 1995

The ‘Last Night of the Proms’ in historical perspective
David Cannadine
Volume 81, Issue 212, May 2008

Exhibiting a new Japan: the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 and Expo ’70 in Osaka
Sandra Wilson
Volume 85, Issue 227, February 2012

The Olympics, documentation strategy and the Minnesota Method
Cathy Williams
IHR Archives and Society podcast, February 2012
Read the HistorySPOT blog post for this podcast

‘A Man Cannot See His Own Faults’: British Professional Trainers and the 1912 Olympics
David Day
IHR Sport and Leisure History seminar series, February 2012

Sport’s Role in 1951′s Festival of Britain 
Iain Wilton
IHR Sport and Leisure History seminar series, March 2012

Part of Interior of the Comédie-Française (A.Meunier, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies is pleased to present a Special Virtual Issue on Eighteenth-Century French Studies, comprising previously published papers and an original Introduction by David McCallam.

Introduction
David McCallam

Voltaire and War
Haydn Mason
Volume 4, Issue 2, September 1981

Illegal Gambling in Eighteenth-Century France: Incidence, Detection and Penalties
John Dunkley
Volume 8, Issue 2, September 1985

Images of Islam in Some French Writings of the First Half of the Eighteenth Century
Ahmad Gunny
Volume 14, Issue 2, September 1991

Sexual/Textual Politics in the Enlightenment: Diderot and d’Épinay Respond to Thomas’s “Essay on Women”
Mary Trouille
Volume 19, Issue 1, March 1996

“Vous avés achevé mes tableaux”: Michel-Jean Sedaine and Jacques-Louis David
Mark Ledbury
Volume 23, Issue 1, March 2000

Candide and La Nouvelle Héloïse
Robin Howells
Volume 29, Issue 1, March 2006

Rehearsals at the Comédie-Française in the Late Eighteenth Century
John Golder
Volume 30, Issue 3, September 2007

“La différence de couleur n’en fait point dans l’âme”: Behn’s Oroonoko and the French Anti-Slavery Debate
Ursula Haskins Gonthier
Volume 31, Issue 2, June 2008

Part of Frontispiece, Mary Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories (courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies is pleased to present a Special Virtual Issue on Education in the Eighteenth Century, comprising previously published papers and an original Introduction by Michèle Cohen.

Read it exclusively online:

Introduction
Michèle Cohen

The Treatment of Education in the Encyclopédie
D S Wilson
Volume 11, Issue 1, March 1988

Berquin’s L’Ami des Enfants and the Hidden Curriculum of Class Relations
John Dunkley
Volume 16, Issue 2, September 1993

Capturing (and captivating) childhood: The Role of Illustrations in Eighteenth- Century Children’s Books in Britain and France
Penny Brown
Volume 31, Issue 3, September 2008

“The Proper education of a Female …is still to seek”: Childhood and Girls’ Education in Fanny Burney’s Camilla; or, a picture of Youth
Coral Ann Howells
Volume 7, Issue 2, September 1984

London’s Charity School Children: The “Scum of the Parish”?
Dianne Payne
Volume 29, Issue 3, September 2006

“A Little Learning”? The Curriculum and the Construction of Gender Difference in the Long Eighteenth Century
Michèle Cohen
Volume 29, Issue 3, September 2006

“Leisure to be Wise”: Edgeworthian education and the possibilities of Domesticity
Richard De Ritter
Volume 33, Issue 3, September 2010

History Teaching in Late Eighteenth-Century Russia
David Saunders
Volume 10, Issue 2, September 1987

The British Reception of Madame de Genlis’s Writing for Children: Plays and Tales of Instruction and Delight
Gillian Dow
Volume 29, Issue 3, September 2006

Educating Christian Men in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries: Public School and Oxbridge Ideals
William Van Reyk
Volume 32, Issue 3, September 2009

Autonomy and Perfectibility: The Educational Theory of Godwin’s The Enquirer
K. E Smith
Volume 5, Issue 2, September 1982

Two Zwarte Pieten, courtesy of Wiki Commons

People from outside of the Netherlands are often shocked when confronted with the Zwarte Pieten. They associate these figures with  the American tradition of blackface minstrel-shows which contributed to the proliferation of racist stereotypes, attitudes, and perceptions within a racially divided society. The Dutch are aware of this issue, and how it looks to outsiders. This year, Vancouver’s cancellation of the Sinterklaas celebration due to Zwarte Piet made it into the Dutch news. The organizer of the festival said “We will have to teach the Canadians and the entire North-American population what Zwarte Piet really is.” This attracted much commentary and criticism from the Netherlands. But foriegn outrage and rejection to the Zwarte Piet isn’t new to the Dutch:  In 2008, Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, made the decision to remove Zwarte Piet  from its holiday lineup in response to tourist and layover flyers’ protest. Yet despite criticism from the outside world, Zwarte Piet remains a popular figure whom the vast majority of Dutch people want to keep at the center of Sinterklaas festivities.

I have interviewed a Dutch anthropologist from the University  of Utrecht, Pooyan Tamimi Arab, to get the perspective of an insider academic. Though Tamimi’s parents are both Iranian, he grew up in the Netherlands and considers himself Dutch. As a child, he enjoyed the figure of Zwarte Piet alongside his classmates. In high school, however, Tamimi experienced an increasing discomfort with Zwarte Piet as he came to understand the way in which he is portrayed and the reasons he is embraced. Yet whenever he tried to broach the subject, he was rebuffed with an explanation that Zwarte Piet has always been a part of the Dutch Sinterklaas festivities. This explanation almost implied that those who questioned Zwarte Piet were in some way un-Dutch.

Tamimi feels that as an academic, it is his role to point out the fallacies surrounding Zwarte Piet’s historic origins. Arguments such as the debate over Zwarte Piet and his racist image have everything to do with the ways in which history is presented.  Dutch nationalists focus on preserving tradition at any cost, and often invoke history to do so: they stress that tradition and nation is old and has old roots. As historians, could it be our job to stress that traditions are invented and not as rooted as people think?  Tamimi gives an example: Most Dutch people claim that Zwarte Piet has been around forever. They don’t know that Zwarte Piet was invented in the 19th century and became a family-friendly Sinterklaas icon only in the 20th century, “..and that’s not old.”

I asked Tamimi if this spirited clinging to Zwarte Piet could be connected in any way with the election of Dutch Parliamentary leader Geert Wilders of the PVV, the Netherlands’ right-wing anti-immigration political party. Tamimi believes so: “the immigrants and nonwhites who oppose Zwarte Piet have to do with Wilders. They are edgy, and unsure of how to respond to Holland’s new anti-immigration legislators.”  Tamimi says that the Dutch who voted Wilders into power supported the leader’s vote against the European constitution. “They are closing themselves off from the rest of the world. You see it in all kinds of things. In the Zwarte Piet discussions, they don’t care and they feel no shame about how they are perceived. If a nonwhite immigrant says that they believe Zwarte Piet to be racist, they will be shut down.”

Zwarte Piet blackface Kit which can be found in most Dutch supermarkets during the holiday season. (Angela Sutton, 2011)

Tamimi says that most Zwarte Piet supporters get angry when called racist. They are  not interested in engaging in debate, and instead reject all criticism of this figure. But for many non-white Dutch people, Zwarte Piet is the elephant in the room. Sometimes, Tamimi doesn’t dare talk about it because he can sense the anger coming from other Dutch compatriots before he opens his mouth.

“But what nonwhites say is paramount. If black people in Amsterdam say the figure of Zwarte Piet is racist, then it is racist because they say so. Sinterklaas is a white guy on a horse surrounded by black fools. The Pieten are morally risible characters. Fans of the Zwarte Pieten can laugh at them, and take candy from them, but they don’t want their daughters to marry one.”

Though Tamimi is still in the minority with his view, he isn’t alone. The “Zwarte Piet is Racisme” movement is at its all-time strongest, and the internet is splashed with bloggers weighing in on the debate. Blogger  Peter Breedveld writes (my translation) “Yet Zwarte Piet is self-evidently racist. The explanation that he is so black from a chimney is an insult to everyone’s intelligence…Zwarte Piet is a typical negro-caricature.”  Breedveld  goes on to explain that over time the different explanations given for Zwarte Piet only serve to worsen the racist imagery. He asserts that the very fact that Zwarte Piet exists in a racist country full of anti-immigration laws is proof of the racist nature of Zwarte Piet. “We were the last to abolish slavery and we are the only ones who still wear blackface,” he writes.

In searching for the balance between honoring holiday traditions and forging an inclusive society, the historians’ role becomes key. The world becomes more global every day, and not less, despite the policies racist leaders like Geert Wilders might implement. Nations can never truly shut out the rest of the world. The Netherlands in particular will  be unable to sustain an immigrant-phobic stance because its history as a colonial slave-trading powerhouse of the Atlantic World will catch up with the nation. By including the voices and wishes of all Dutch people, not just the Caucasian ones, the Netherlands can begin the healing process that invariably accompanies such a brutal past.

Now is the time to begin, while the Sint Nicolaas Genootschap Nederland is attempting to get the tradition of Sinterklaas on a UNESCO list to protect it as a world heritage. Tamimi asserts that it is important now more than ever to showcase the controversy surrounding the figure of Zwarte Piet before he becomes enshrined and protected in his current racist form.

Rainbow-Petes, an alternative to Zwarte Pieten (courtesy of the Facebook Regenboog Pieten Fan Page)

I would argue that Zwarte Piet protestors are not a group of Grinches and Scrooges. They do not want to destroy Dutch children’s holidays. Removing the racist elements of the Sinterklaas festival does not have to mean obliterating Dutch tradition, only amending it to fit a more inclusive society.  While the Afro-Caribbean majority former Dutch colonies of Suriname and the Antilles still celebrate Sinterklaas in the Dutch way, some people there are questioning Zwarte Piet. Last year, some groups of  Paramariban revelers have adopted the figure of Zwarte Piet in innovative ways which fuse Dutch culture with national pride: they have brought back the tradition of rainbow Pieten to Suriname. The video clip of this parade shows both black and white Surinamese celebrating the arrival of the inoffensive rainbow Pieten. The rainbow Pieten do not seem to mar the joy and spirit of the event, and revelers in Paramaribo appear to love their rainbow Pieten as much as their counterparts in The Hague enjoyed the arrival of the Zwarte Pieten.

To close out, I asked Tamimi what he thought about the future of Zwarte Piet.  He replied “It’s a very sensitive issue and it is too soon to tell. I have a saying that goes ‘In Holland you can say nasty things about God, but don’t mess with Zwarte Piet.’”

They are available here.

This two-day event brought together a large number of Irish history scholars, from the postgraduate to the professor. Judging from the number of speakers and the attendance levels, the organisers were right to assume that there was a need for such a conference, and plans are already afoot for a further instalment next year.

Among the highlights was a round-table session to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Ciaran Brady and Raymond Gillespie (eds), Natives and newcomers: essays in the making of Irish colonial society, 1534-1641 (Dublin, 1986). Chaired by Professor Nicholas Canny, this session brought together a number of the contributors to that seminal volume. The reflections offered by this group, all of whom have since made substantial contributions to scholarship on early modern Ireland, made for interesting listening.

The keynote address was delivered by Professor Marian Lyons on the subject of ‘The variegated Irishness of the Irish in seventeenth-century Europe’. This wide-ranging lecture offered, amongst other things, a useful overview of the experiences of Irish natives as newcomers on the continent.

Alongside these offerings, there was plenty for anyone interested in early modern Ireland to digest; the availability of the podcasts
goes some way towards offsetting the problem of having to choose one out of the three parallel conference sessions running at any one time over the two days.

I am not aware of any conference proceedings publication plans, but it is to be hoped that a good deal of the research presented will find some appropriate outlet in print over the coming years. This should help to reinforce the growing vibrancy of this field, just as Natives and newcomers managed to do a quarter-century ago.

History Compass is pleased to present a Special Virtual Issue on the Occult in History, freely available until the end of the year.

Table of contents as follows:

Astrology in the Middle Ages
Hilary M. Carey

Magic in the Middle Ages: History and Historiography
David J. Collins

Magic and Impotence: Recent Developments in Medieval
Historiography
Catherine Rider

Kabbalah: A Medieval Tradition and Its Contemporary Appeal
Hava Tirosh-Samuelson

Magic and Divination in the Medieval Islamic Middle East
Edgar Francis

Traditions and Trajectories in the Historiography of European Witch
Hunting
Thomas A. Fudge

A New Trumpet? The History of Women in Scotland 1300–1700
Elizabeth Ewan

Deference and Dissent in Tudor England: Reflections on
Sixteenth-Century Protest
K. J. Kesselring

Sexuality, Witchcraft, and Honor in Colonial Spanish America
Nicole von Germeten

Vaya con Dios: Religion and the Transnational History of the
Americas
Pamela Voekel, Bethany Moreton and Michael Jo

The History of Prophecy in West Africa: Indigenous, Islamic, and
Christian
Joel E. Tishken

The Missionary Impact: The Northern Transvaal in the Late Nineteenth
Century
Alan Kirkaldy

In the midst of my railroad enthusiasm a colleague mentioned to me that I should construct a ‘travel course’ around the theme of 19th-century American railways (my university offers many very popular travel courses during the interterm and summer) with Chicago as the ‘hub’ of the course.  In that vein, here’s my idea:

We would take the train into Chicago, following in the footsteps of so many Americans during the 1890s who were using that mode of transport to get to the ‘big city.’ Depending on time constraints we might take the Coast Starlight up to northern California and then the California Zephyr all the way into Chicago. If that was too much train-time, we could fly to Denver and take the train from there.

Readings:

Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West

Sister Carrie

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America

The Pit: a Story of Chicago

Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930

 We’d use HistoryPin to map historical happenings and perhaps also Hypericities (which I’m hoping will have a mobile-device component soon) to drill down through layers of spatial history as we navigate the contemporary spaces.

My questions for you:

Do you have any suggestions of readings or of tools that I should use for this hypothetical class?

If you were leading a travel course where would you take your students?

What advantages can you see of actually going to the place that you’re studying rather than simply learning about it within a classroom setting?

A McArts degree? NO! (Wikimedia Commons)

Throughout the fall term last year, every time I entered the Arts Building of my campus I had to walk over the words “McArts Degree.” In the first week of term someone had painted them in two-foot-high, whitewashed letters at the entrance to the building. They were impossible to miss. It dominated the small outdoor plaza. These words remained there, confronting me and everyone else who entered the building, until they were finally obliterated by the snow and cold.

This message affected me every day that I went to the university.

I can only imagine how this message felt to undergraduates (or even graduate students) who saw it every single day. I’ve earned a PhD, been selected for a Postdoc at a respected institution, and proven myself to my intellectual peers. And yet, I still felt that this simple insult took something away from me. But what about new students? What message might they take from this prominently placed message at their university?

This year I came back to the university after a summer away and the first thing I remember noticing was that the words were not there. In their place, using half-foot-wide masking tape, someone had marked out the words “Use a Condom.” I was thrilled. Not only were the offensive words gone, but someone had co-opted this space for a useful and important message that new undergrads away from home should hear often and loud.

Days later my optimism was undermined by a new insult. Painted in even larger blue letters, and obliterating the healthy message advocating safer sex, was another jibe at arts majors: “I have an Arts degree. Can I take your order?”

I’ve written elsewhere on the History Compass about the denigration of the humanities. It is a pervasive problem. Messages like these tell students that the arts and humanities are impractical, selfish studies without the merit of science programs and professional schools. Funding priorities that sacrifice the arts and humanities further reinforce this message (while making it more and more difficult to teach them well.) At the History Compass we’re particularly concerned about this.  Jean Smith has written about the value of history specifically, while Angela Sutton has sought to debunk the myth of the humanities as a financial burden on institutions.

At their worst, these messages of denigration and attacks on funding are mutually reinforcing. In a culture that dismisses and denigrates the arts and humanities, it is hardly surprising that those with the authority to do so remove their funding and deprioritize them further.  In the UK, Middlesex University closed its History and then its Philosophy Department. The Conservative government has advocated removing state funding entirely. In the US, SUNY Albany cut language and theatre programs. And in Canada, the $200 million Canada Excellence Research Chairs initiative included no scholars in the Arts and Social Sciences. Not one. Bombarded with messages such as these, it’s hard enough to contemplate study in the humanities. It’s even more difficult when your own studies are dismissed as merely a “McArts Degree.”

What can we do?

Happily, the best course of action is to prove these accusations wrong. Our many successes are our best response. They are examples of the value in the arts and humanities. But we must also confront these attacks. I hope to be able to write an update to this blog soon, where I can congratulate my university for recognizing the harm of this kind of message and removing it.

If you have a funny/poignant/thought-provoking/etc.  idea for a history cartoon, please send it to Angela.C.Sutton[at]Vanderbilt[dot]edu.  If I use your idea I will give you credit here.

The highlight of this occasion was the lecture on Yeats given by His Excellency Ambassador Dan Mulhall to a room packed full of university staff and students. Mulhall has both researched and taught extensively on the period during which Yeats lived. His extensive knowledge of his subject and his experience in giving poetry readings duly lent assuredness and clarity to what he had to say.

Mulhall’s lecture explored the consequences of the fact that Yeats enjoyed such a long career as a productive writer, as opposed to a figure like Wordsworth who apparently produced nothing worthwhile beyond the age of forty. Had he died in 1900, Mulhall argued, Yeats would be remembered as a fine romantic poet. Instead, he remained active right across World War I and the upheaval in Ireland in 1916 and the years following, and Mulhall explained how such momentous events in turn helped to shape the marked evolution in Yeats’s writing.

It was nice to hear an admission that the speaker was not too keen on the later Yeats’s mysticism, as I remember quite well how the undergraduate class of which I was a part was none too enthused by gyres, whether they turned or not.

Mulhall finished his lecture with a digression on Irish culture more generally, even asserting that Ireland had preserved more of its traditional society than other European countries, particularly through Gaelic Games. The locals seemed interested in his description of the game of hurling, but I’m not sure they were convinced by the closing diplomatic remarks to the effect that the current crisis in Ireland would eventually be resolved without costing German taxpayers a cent.

According to a post on H-Asia, the Ohio State University is collecting statements from faculty that will be passed on through the University’s government affairs office. In private emails and on Facebook, established scholars and grad students have acknowledged the utility of the DDRA program, and lamented its sudden departure for this year. But so far I haven’t seen much public comment, beyond this post, and an eloquent post on China Beat, in which Maura Cunningham makes the point that we can ill afford to lose area studies specialists at this geopolitical moment.

“By not providing the funding necessary to support this year’s crop of applicants, the government is implying that such work isn’t important, that we can exist in a global community but don’t need to understand it.”

This year’s cancellation is devastating to the research plans of a particular cohort of graduate students. Cruel as it is, the loss of one year of research will not cripple a field. But if the program is suspended for several years, or indefinitely, then scholarship that requires specific language training and long in-country research will be restricted to private universities with endowments to support such research.

I trained at a public university, and benefited from the Fulbright-Hays DDRA program for a year of work split between South Africa and the Netherlands, a trajectory I could not have self-financed, and that would not have been possible only with the support of the African Studies Center at UCLA. My research—and more importantly, my teaching of hundreds of undergraduates a year at a public university—would not be possible without the foundation I received in a year of overseas research as a graduate student.

While it is unlikely we can affect the decision to suspend the Fulbright-Hays program for 2011, concerned scholars need to let decision-makers in Washington know that this funding is crucial for what we do now as teachers and researchers, for how we can educate graduate students, and how we can effectively teach undergrads—who deserve to learn about places outside the US from people with a deep first-hand understanding of other cultures. Without ongoing new research, the significant body of knowledge created from the rich history of Fulbright-Hays grants will soon be out of date, and we will have no way to know it.

Urge your university to make a response. Contact your campus Fulbright-Hays coordinator and ask him or her to object (and to contact this year’s applicants so they don’t hear this news through the grapevine first). Write to your congressional representative and senators, letting them know there is a constituency for informed study and teaching about the world beyond America’s shores.

The global financial crisis is real, and its consequences grave. It should not, however, be reason for the US government to retreat from global engagement.

Yet sometimes, it can feel as if the cycle of applying for these grants and fellowships is endless.  That’s where this comic comes in:

For those of you waiting to hear back from your summer grant application process, good luck!

If you have a funny/poignant/thought-provoking/etc.  idea for a history cartoon, please send it to Angela.C.Sutton[at]Vanderbilt[dot]edu.  If I use your idea I will give you credit here.

The papers presented are of the sorts that really force the historian to think and rethink about what exactly s/he is doing when doing history, and that can only be a positive thing. As Professor Jörn Leonhard noted at the opening of the proceedings, the existence of historical time is perhaps the one thing all historians agree upon.  Yet, at the same time, they rarely historicize time.   

Freiburg Münster (Wikimedia Commons)

The keynote lecture on ‘Globalization and Time’ was presented last night by Professor Lynn Hunt of UCLA. It is possible to draw attention here only to some of what Professor Hunt had to say.

She began by drawing attention to the fact that globalization, an ‘elastic term’, has only recently been discovered by most historians. She was able to demonstrate this point in a stark manner by referring to the use of the word ‘globalization’ in book titles, as recorded on Worldcat®. Before 1980, it hardly featured at all. Needless to say, it has been rather more prominent since then. Hunt suggested that this may have something to do with the fall of communism and with the prevalence of the untestable assumption that there is no available alternative to capitalism.

This lecture was packed with marvellous insights. We were taken on a tour through the Julian and Gregorian calendars to the Prime Meridian Conference of 1884, and on to the various efforts to introduce calendar decoupled from the birth of Jesus. The potential consequences of the fact that most students now prefer to study twentieth-century history at the expense of earlier periods were touched upon too. Hunt also linked this development to the manner in which the discipline of history has begun to follow the sciences in their search for constant innovation and the ‘new’. At the other end of the time scale, ‘deep history’ throws up a range of further issues.

This ranging from questions of recent history to those of deep history brought us to the question of modernity, and ways in which the concept of the ‘modern’ can foster a teleological view of history. Hunt insisted that modernity ought to be seen as a provisional location, where some are, rather than where others are headed.  

The clear message emerging from this lecture, and from the rest of the conference so far, is that we need to think more about time. It is hard to argue with that.

Everyone here is feeling the strain, and straining for the relief that the end of term promises. The winter has been unseasonably cold and long in Saskatoon. Many of us are looking forward to research trips abroad. And of course, grading responsibilities and other duties tend to hit hardest at the end of the term.

University of Saskatchewan's Thorvaldson Building (Wikimedia Commons)

Reflecting on the year behind me though, I’ve gained so much at the University of Saskatchewan. I’m surrounded by generously supportive colleagues who have never wavered in helping me adjust to the unfamiliar life of a junior scholar. I can’t speak highly enough of our Chair, support staff, History Department faculty and grad students, and my fellow postdocs, all of whom have welcomed me and answered innumerable questions and requests with poise and kindness. My postdoc supervisor, a kind and gentle elder scholar, has become a mentor and friend. And with their collective help I’ve gained professional experience, credibility, increased my publishing output, and laid the foundations for a potential future in academia. I owe them more than I can express, and this blog post is in part a thank-you.

But this year has also been a challenge, and I definitely feel I’ve needed the entire year to settle in to Saskatoon. When I arrived I looked forward to having the best of both worlds as a postdoc: I could interact with the faculty while still relating to the graduate students. In reality, it wasn’t so simple, and the postdoc doesn’t immediately fit in either group. That’s the part you have to learn on the ground. A postdoc is (at least at first) a solitary experience. It takes a painfully long time to build up relationships and connections in a new department when you’re neither student nor professor. I’ve felt completely welcomed in my department from the first day, but it really is only in the last month or two that I have really felt a part of the department.

Teaching plays a big role in building relationships and sustaining that feeling of being part of something. My own work and research is largely independent, but teaching is a collaborative exercise. I’ve welcomed the advice of current profs, discussed teaching strategies with grad students, and simply been in the department more as an instructor. Without teaching this term, I might be further along in my research and revisions, but I’d also be more dislocated and detached from any intellectual or other community at the university.

A postdoc, however, really is the most incredible opportunity, particularly these days as competition for professional positions in academia becomes ever more fierce. But future employment aside, a postdoc is also an amazing opportunity to evaluate your own goals and values. How does academia look from the inside when you’re no longer a student? How does it feel to be at the front of the class with no safety net or anyone to defer to?

The smartest things the organizers of my current postdoc did was to make it two years long. If it were ending now, I’d feel as if the rug were being pulled out from under me just as I was gaining balance. I’m incredibly fortunate, having built these connections and friendships, professional skills and intellectual output, still to have a second year to continue forward. So, here’s to A Postdoc’s Life, Year II !

(To be continued…)

Radio history, like television history, is difficult to get right and is rarely satisfactory for the specialist. But specialists need to remember that these programmes are not particularly designed for them, and that for the duration they ought perhaps to exchange their shoes or shades for those worn by the ‘ordinary’ public.

Oliver Cromwell (Wikimedia Commons)

Dr Patrick Geoghegan’s   Talking History  on Newstalk is one of several history-focused programmes regularly broadcast nationwide in Ireland. Topics of discussion in recent weeks have included the Battle of Waterloo, Mark Anthony, the American Civil War and George Bernard Shaw. On 14 March, the programme took the form of a debate about Cromwell in Ireland, focusing on his nine-month campaign in Ireland in 1649-50 and its legacy.

The panel was impressive: Micheál O Siochrú of Trinity College Dublin; John Morrill of Cambridge University; Eamonn O Ciardha of the University of Ulster; and Senator Joe O’Toole. O Siochrú and Morrill in particular have published widely on the subject of Cromwell, while O Ciardha’s knowledge of the Irish language sources in particular never fails to fascinate.

If anything, fifty minutes was not enough to allow each of them to tease out the points they had to make. A good deal of time was devoted to background and context, which can hardly be done without.  Yet the areas of disagreement, inevitably the most interesting aspect, lay in the finer detail. For example, Morrill and O Siochrú diverged on the point of how much blame Cromwell ought to take for what occurred in Ireland in the decade after 1649; massacre; famine; confiscation; plantation; transplantation; and transportation to the colonies. O Ciardha’s point that Cromwell was viewed by Irish contemporaries as just one of a number of English rogues is surely relevant here. A blog post is not the place to tease out these detailed points either; you can find some of my own views on the matter here.

O’Toole’s contribution was certainly the most colourful. He labelled the massacre at Drogheda in September 1649 as ‘our 9/11’, described Cromwell as ‘an absolute racist’ guilty of genocide and ethnic cleansing and drew attention to the enslavement of Irish women and children in the 1650s. This traditional reading has a good deal of truth to it, but it has been considerably refined and nuanced in recent decades by historians such as O Siochrú and Morrill.

In sum then, the show certainly highlighted something of the continuing gulf between scholarly research and the popular understanding of Cromwell in Ireland. Thanks to the efforts of O Siochrú in particular, this gulf is not now as wide as it was even ten years ago. This reality was reflected in the content of the listeners’ texts with which Geoghegan peppered his commentary. Although Seán in Wexford insisted that Cromwell was a war criminal, another listener called for Irish people to recognise Cromwell’s ‘intellectual strengths’. While Mairéad in Dublin labelled Cromwell ‘a psycho equal to Hitler’, Richard in Cork felt that ‘we could do with his likes now to knock the country into shape’.

I hope, for Ireland’s sake, that Richard does not have any political or military ambitions!

How do we publish our work? (Wikimedia Commons)

The most important and inspiring statement of the day was a comment made by our department Chair, Valerie Korinek. She concluded by assuring the audience that they had already made the first step to publishing their manuscripts simply by participating in the workshop. By attending, by engaging, we had taken ourselves and our work seriously on a professional level, and this was truly the first step to publishing our work as professional historians.

I was inspired by Prof. Korinek’s comments more than I expected.

The workshop included a variety of speakers, and should be a model for similar events at other universities. One postdoc spoke of the experience of revising his dissertation into a manuscript and the process of seeking a publisher. A junior professor who was currently involved in press negotiations described her more advanced relationship with a publisher. And finally our department chair spoke from the perspective of a published author and also as a senior historian. She described her successes, what she’d do differently, and what we needed to do to position ourselves as professional historians. We also heard from executive editors from the University of Manitoba Press who relayed to us their guidelines and what they looked for in a publishable manuscript.

I’ve been sitting on my dissertation for a year or so now. Partly because I was devoted to looking for employment, and partly because I needed a rest, I just haven’t returned to it till recently. But in the last six months I’ve made some small revisions, done a bit of extra research, and asked scholars outside my dissertation committee to read it and offer feedback. So, I’ve been thinking about the next step, but until the workshop I was unable to make the leap. Anxiety, fear of rejection, uncertainty about my own skills maybe, all of these fears kept me from moving forward until now.

But I already knew which press was the best fit for my project. Even though the Manitoba editors were helpful, I knew that my project and priorities fit better with a large US university press. I researched the press’s online presence, so I also knew the other titles in its series, the editorial contact, and the submission requirements. I didn’t know what goes into a book proposal, but I learned that at the workshop. The UBC Press even gives examples of successful book proposals. (Read them, they are invaluable guides.)

So, using these as a model, I wrote my own book proposal, asked a former professor for a letter of introduction to the executive editor, and threw caution to the wind. Now, the press is interested in my work, I have a schedule for draft submission, and a goal. I also feel more and more like a professional historian with something interesting and important to say.

Perhaps I flatter myself, but I hope some of you will read this post, check out the UBC Press submission examples, and then write up your own book proposal. Maybe you’ll send it off to a publisher. And maybe you’ll get a positive response too. Good luck!