Above is a banner painted by my art department colleague Mike Alewitz, at the rally for workers’ right at the north steps of Hartford’s Capitol this afternoon.
This banner proved to be quite popular as many in the crowd snapped pictures.
You can read more about it at Hartford Courant columnist Susan Campbell’s blog. She also has more pictures here.
Ask and ye shall receive — Cliotropic has just set up a formal Wikiproject: Women’s History. This is also accessible by the shortcut WP:WMNHIST.
Cliotropic says that anyone can participate, but would “particularly love to see more professional scholars get involved. I know that there’s significant opposition to Wikipedia in some academic quarters, but I think that the information there isn’t going to get better unless people who actually know this stuff start pitching in. I’d really like WikiProject Women’s History to deploy a good quality scalethat helps our students evaluate whether the material in any given entry is trustworthy for their own research. And, as I’ve already said, I think that competent undergrads can be involved in this work very fruitfully as a learning project.”
Here’s more information on how to help:
So, please help spread the word about this project to other women’s historians. Like Historians of Science, we cannot allow a Wikipedia gap!
via Cliotropic, who comments on the recent report that only about 15% of Wikipedia contributors are women. Cliotropic notes that ” Wikipedia’s user-demographics data is entirely voluntary and that many women, offered a chance not to identify themselves by sex, avoid doing so. Sometimes it’s an effort to avoid harassment, and sometimes it’s to avoid the women-targeted ads. So their data may well be off.”
Related to this gender gap in who writes for Wikipedia is the woefully inadequate coverage of women’s history in Wikipedia — not surprising since women’s history, after decades of research and teaching, is underrepresented in both higher education and K-12 history teaching. Cliotropic says, “if you teach history courses on women, gender, or sexuality, or on the history of any racial or ethnic minority in the United States, it’s worth considering adding a Wikipedia assignment to your syllabus.”
One of the commenters suggests using Jeremy Boggs’ “stub-expanding” course assignment for his U.S. survey course here -but there isn’t a stub section for women’s history!
It’s too late for me to assign this for my women’s history class this semester but I think I will take Cliotropic’s suggestions in the Fall.
Meanwhile, I think it’s a good idea for those of us who are professional women’s historians to think about investing our time in improving the representation of women’s history on Wikipedia. Shelby Knox’s comments to my post about her Radical Women’s history project reminded me that digital sources like Wikipedia and “this date in history” sites are the point of entry for many young women, and young people in general. Of course, we would like them to use more authoritative sources like Notable American Women and Notable Black American Women, but that still means schlepping to a bricks and mortar library (assuming there is one close by that’s open regular hours and actually owns the books). And, we academics are all familiar with Gerda Lerner’s 1975 essay in Feminist Studies that pointed out the limitations of “compensatory history” that simply looks at the “women worthies.” Still, if “great women” is where our students and feminist activists like Knox are starting, then we have to meet them there.
What do others think?
Hello readers, old and new. This is my first attempt at hosting a History Carnival. I tried to think of some clever topics around which to organize these, but decided that the simplest way to do this is by region. So, here are this month’s nominees:
Australia
Australian Postal History and Social Philately has a collection of materials from the Rev. James Fong Kem Yee, Chinese Presbyterian Church, Newcastle.
European History
Alsatia decribes the problems of decoding historical slang in the “The Milford Lane Bermudas.”
History and the Sock Merchant uses an account from a Titanic survivor to answer the question, “Did the sinking of the Titanic punture Edwardian social complacency?”
Chaosbogey argues in “Homage to Catalonia” that “The Spanish Civil War is a bellwether for humanities geeks” who think studying “a bunch of anarchists running around trying to change the world” is just as important as understanding the Holocaust.
Georgian London ‘s entry, “When I Please” describes a day in the life of 18th century London prostitute Sarah Knight.
Tripbase looks at the lasting impact of various European explorers in “8 Historic Explorers who change the world.”
U.S. History
The Huntington Blog article, “A Perfect Fit,” describes six recently acquired pages of diary entries recounting events leading up to, and immediately following, the Battle of Lexington Green, written by the noted Boston preacher and patriot Samuel Cooper (1725–1783), a friend of Benjamin Franklin. These pages complement other portions of Cooper’s diary already in the Huntington collection.
Just in time for the first year of the Civil War Sesquicentennial, Rethinking Schools offers tips on “Teaching a People’s History of the Abolition Movement.”
From Executed Today describes a melodrama from the early Republic in “1786; Elizabeth Wilson, Her Reprieve too Late.”
The Virtual Dime Museum: Adventures in Old New York describes a boardinghouse keeper’s work as a fortune teller in “Mother Shipton in New York.”
Northwest History provides a commentary on the recent case of historical fraud involving a document by President Lincoln in “Historian Forges Past, Perhaps Permanently.”
The latest gossip from Boston 1775 ponders, “General Washington’s welcome to his new headquarters?”
Fellow #twitterstorian Katrina Gulliver’s provides an insightful and entertaining “True account of a visit to Williamsburg, VA”
Finally, we have a nomination for an entire blog of the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Richard Paris Clark, Jr. entitled A Vietnam War Clerk’s Diary.
via The Ms. Education of Shelby Knox. Those of you who teach WGSS courses are no doubt familiar with the 2005 film, “The Education of Shelby Knox,” which highlights “the need for comprehensive sex education, gay rights, and youth activism.” Knox now has a blog, and has an account on Twitter, where she does a series of “this day in women’s history” tweets, marked with the #wmnhist tag. Every morning she combs “through pages and pages of HIStory to find the couple of morsels pertaining to women that wind up on my Twitter feed.” Knox finds that after a year of searching that “the “women” in that phrase are most often white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied, and Western. Just as women have been mostly left out of the broad discourse we call “history,” women of color, indigenous, queer, trans, disabled and non-Western women (and women living within all the intersection thereof) have been further marginalized, mostly left out of or tossed in as an afterthought in feminist attempts to add women to existing history.” So, she’s decided to launch the Radical Women’s History Project. “What that means is that every day this year, starting on January 1st, 2011, I’m scouring the internet and books and any other source I can find to chronicle the lives and the accomplishments of the world’s women, explicitly centering women of color, indigenous, queer, trans, disabled, and non-Western women, and I’m posting them here for whomever would like to use them.”
This is an excellent endeavor, but before she reinvents the wheel, I encourage her to consult the wealth of resources produced by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, women’s history bloggers (including those like me who blog about a variety of things, and the intersections between them), metasites like Discovering Women’s History Online, and of course that “so twentieth century” technology, the H-Women listserv where the vast majority of women’s historians still get information and connect on the Internet. Then of course, there are numerous non-digital (aka “dead tree”) sources — books (including the textbook I use for my survey course), scholarly articles in women’s history journals, women’s history archives, etc.
So, help me help educate Ms. Knox — suggest some links and sources that I’ve missed and/or endorse the ones I’ve already mentioned.
As you can see from the graphic at left, the annual Blog for Choice Day was yesterday. Since today is the actual 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I figured, better late than not at all! This year’s question, Given the anti-choice gains in the states and Congress, are you concerned about choice in 2011?
I don’t have much to add to other bloggers’ answer other than echo the overall consensus, Yes, I’m very concerned!
My worries extend beyond the choice of abortion — access to birth control also appears threatened, not so much by new laws, but more so because of economics. The Republican majority in the House will not be able to revoke the health care law, at least not while President Obama is in the White House and the Democratic party still controls the Senate. Yet, the existing health care law isn’t really adequate when it comes to contraceptive coverage. Also, while many reproductive rights activists rightly celebrated making emergency contraception available over-the-counter (OTC), this might actually make things worse for some women because OTC products are not covered by private insurance plans or Medicaid. Thus, while the rise of what pharmacy historicans call “OTCness” over the past two decades has weakened the boundary between patients and the health care professionals, it has done nothing to address the economic inequalities in the United States that continue to pose an insurmountable barrier to those without the means to pay for the products of this self-care revolution.
Today’s post concludes my reflections on the AHA 2011 meeting. As a point of departure, I’ll start with Dan Cohen’s annual report/rant on the dearth of digital sessions at the meeting:
“Evidently we historians will just keep on doing what we’re doing how we’re doing it until it seems truly anachronistic. Just one of the main AHA panels, out of nearly three hundred, covers digital matters; perhaps another will touch on digital methods. By my count there are another six digital sessions overall, but these other sessions are put on by affiliate societies or were added by the program committee during lunches or other break times (that is, there were almost no digital panels proposed by historians attending the meeting). Incredibly, there are actually fewer digital sessions at the 2011 annual meeting than in prior years. Because clearly this digital thing is a flash in the pan.”
I agree wholeheartedly with Dan — we are way behind our colleagues in literature on this account. Nevertheless, I did get something out of the sessions I attended.
First, I’ll mention one that Dan neglected to list — Documenting Social History: The Story of Three Archives. (this turned out to be a story of two archives because the U.S. Navy Seabee Museum would not provide travel funds for Lara Godbille to attend the meeting!) To be fair, the term digital history wasn’t in the session title, but Wendy Chmielewski‘s paper was titled “Digitizing Women’s History.” Poor Wendy — the Marriott forgot to provide a computer and projector for her presentation! Also, there was no wireless in the hotel’s sessions rooms (just in the lobby and second floor) so no live tweeting for me. Much of what I heard from her talk was familiar to me — she listed a variety of online sources for women’s history, including Archive Grid, Discovering Women’s History Online, the Genesis project that is a megasite for collections on women’s history in the United Kingdom, and the section on women’s history in the Library of Congress’ American Memory collection. The most surprising observation she made was that guide to women’s history collections compiled by Andrea Hinding in the late 1970s is still the most comprehensive source for archival and manuscript collections. [I find this difficult to believe now that Worldcat includes archival material].
The talk by Ellen Shea from the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, although not specifically on digital sources, did mention their Blogs: Capturing Women’s Voices project. The mission of this project is “to capture the voices of women whose points of view might not be found elsewhere, as well as to document the use of blogs and other forms of web publishing by American women in the early 21st century, the Schlesinger Library has selected and archived a sample of approximately 20 blogs. These blogs illuminate the lives of African-American and Latina women, lesbians, and women grappling with health and reproductive issues, and typically reflect their engagement with politics, their personal lives and philosophies, and their work lives.”
The library also has archived blogs by organizations whose collections are housed at the library, including the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective.
All of these blogs are searchable. The library is also experimenting with data mining to make these collections more useful to scholars.
[while we’re on the subject of women’s blogs — I have to give a plug for the roundtable “Women Gone Wild,” starring Tenured Radical, Historiann, Jennifer Ho, May Friedman, Marilee Lindemann and Rachel Leow, in the Winter 2011 issue of the Journal of Women’s History. It might have featured yours truly had I gotten my act together in time, but alas, was too busy working on other stuff to get a proposal submitted.]
As to sources that were not born digital, the enormous cost of digitization is still a barrier — Shea said that the Schlesinger doesn’t even have a budget line for these projects. Both presenters concluded that the main result of digitization revolution will not be more archival material online: rather, special collections and archives of the traditional kind (i.e. paper, books, and other stuff that needs to be examined in person) will be what makes libraries of the future distinctive.
The future of libraries was also the main issue addressed in the session on Critical issues in Bibliography and Libraries in the Digital Age. I’m really glad I attended this instead of the session on Google ngrams (which was not in the room indicated in the digital addendum to the conference program — did anyone out there ever find it?) because I got a lot out of it. Matthew Shaw’s presentation centered around the “Growing Knowledge” exhibit at the British Library, which shows the way that the digital revolution is changing historical research, among other things. His main point was that the traditional role of libraries — to organize and catalog information, establish relationships among sources, etc. — are at the center of the so-called digital revolution. He used the metaphor of a library as “an airport for books or a convention center of the mind.” Libraries will be responsible for preservation of digital materials, but more importantly, creating ways for researchers to find, filter, assess, and assemble relevant information from these sources.
Dominique Daniel and Steven Wise both addressed issues of digital literacy and the critical role that librarians/information specialists play in teaching “Generation Y” how to use both digital and analog sources properly (amen to that!) The key point I got from both presentations: historians recognize a need for information literacy but are doing little to address it. Librarians, on the other hand, are doing all sorts of great things with media literacy but are not necessarily addressing the issues particular to the discipline of history (unless, like Wise, they are both librarians and history instructors). There needs to be more collaboration between historians and librarians around issues of media literacy — this goes beyond just showing students how to use databases and other e-resources and tools.
I’m not really sure what the answer is to getting more historians involved in digital history. Speaking only for myself, the main reason I got into it was so I could introduce graduate students in public history to various tools and methods that are revolutionizing their field. I do some stuff on information literacy in the historical methods class. Oh yeah, and the self-promotion on this blog and on Twitter has brought me in contact with scholars I might not have met otherwise. Yet, I’m far from a master of this subject and find it difficult to find time to keep up with everything that’s happening. I would guess that I’m not alone here. Thoughts?
I’m finally getting around to writing part 2 of my AHA report. The first women’s history session I attended was
Now, I’ve never read this novel but I have read Jennifer Scanlon’s biography of Helen Gurley Brown, Bad Girls Go Everywhere, so was especially interested in hearing her paper. So, I’m going to limit my comments to her paper because I don’t feel qualified to comment on the others. Scanlon’s main point is that both Peyton Place and Sex and the Single Girl show how women were able to move outside the 1950s feminine ideal (and by 1950s, she means “long 1950s” — i.e. including the early 1960s depicted in Mad Men). She uses both books in a course on bad girls in the 1950s. She and other panelists found that many women from the 1950s identified with the central characters of these books because they didn’t feel they fit the mold of 1950s femininity. These books were also popular because they show female sexual agency and women entering the world of men. Scanlon concluded that we need to rethink where feminism came from, include the voices of working, non-college educated women like Gurley Brown in challenging the feminine mystique. Scanlon is looking for examples of films that “tamed” the bad girls of the 1950s. I throw this out there for film historians/studies folks to give her some ideas.
Another session I found extremely useful was
I offered to blog about this to keep the dialogue going (and of course gave everyone the wrong URL). Here are some major talking points:
Ana Rosas discussed how she incorporates her activism into the classrooom. She also warned of the dangers of universalizing women’s experiences.
Sara Scalenghe described the challenges of teaching about women in the Middle East and how she has to overcome her students’ Islamaphobia and the assumption that things are wonderful for women in the modern U.S.
Mary Kelley says she begins her classes by throwing out statistics that indicate in a concrete way the progress that has been made for women since the 1960s (she uses Gail Collins’ book When Everything Changed as a point of departure), and also describes what remains to be done. She hopes to motivate students to be activists to continue work on behalf of women’s rights.
Katherine Hijar described the challenges of teaching her conservative, evangelical students and how she attempts to correct the misappropriation of history by Sarah Palin and other far right political figures. She identified three discursive trends:
1. a belligerent model of civic engagement (NB: this was the same day as the Arizona shootings/assassination attempt on Rep. Gabriel Giffords — I didn’t find this out until later in the day).
2. history means histories of great men, usually political and military leaders
3. the ongoing political instability may make extreme points of view appealing to Americans looking for certainty — and feeds much of the racist, sexist, and classist ideology circulating in contemporary American society.
She argued that Palin’s rise represents these trends as well as the “political mobilization of ignorance.” She presents a model of conservative Christian feminism that is appealing to women and non-threatening to men. Her book, America by Heart, employs a selective and often inaccurate history of frontier women to support her “Momma grizzly” trope. Nevertheless, Hijar tries to recognize that her students are find their way in the world. She attempts to find ways to enlighten them in ways that are non-confrontational, something she finds especially important given that there are few media models for engaging in civil debate.
The comments also reiterated the need to confront the “easy” narratives of women’s history, that basically say that things used to “suck” for women and now things are “great.”
That’s my take on the panel. I’ll invite others to comment and/or revise.
For those of you who are eager to read the thoughts of yours truly on a daily basis, I’ve created the Knitting Clio daily, using a new digital toy I just discovered. Now you don’t need to wait for me to think up something to blog about, nor do you need to follow me on Twitter. Yes, I’m truly that big a geek on the cutting edge of digital technology. Enjoy!
I’m back from the annual meeting American Historical Association and am going to split my reporting into several parts. I’ll start with the main reason I attended, which was to represent the Disability History Association at the Open Forum on Disability and Tribute to the work of Paul Longmore on Friday afternoon. When I first arrived at the session, the room had a bunch of press people taking pictures of the Task force on disability members and frantically moving around equipment. I thought, wow, this must mean that disability history has arrived. Awesome!
Wrong: the press were left over from the previous roundtable on Beverly Gage’s book, The Day Wallstreet Exploded, and the frenzy was to get the sound equipment and cables out of the way so that Michael Rembis could navigate his wheelchair to the table at the front of the room. Hopefully the pictures the press folks took will appear somewhere along with a report on the Task force, and not just be presented to them as souvenirs!
Seriously, what better way to illustrate Michael’s personal accounts of how degrading, exhausting, and humiliating it is to continually have to ask for accommodations so that he can do what others take for granted. For example, Michael couldn’t reach any of the public computers set up in the Hynes convention center because they were on tables too high for him to reach. I didn’t ask him what he thought about the conference venue — presumable having the various session locations connected by the Prudential center shopping mall was better than trying to navigate the snowy streets of Boston.
The overall results of the Task force’s survey indicate a major disconnect between what chairs/administrators report (i.e. most cases involving disability are resolved satisfactorily), and reports from persons with disabilities, who state that its up to them to make requests and continually badger their HR departments and other powers that be to get those requests honored. Those who are adjuncts or untenured are reluctant to ask or if they do fear making too many waves by persisting in getting these requests fulfilled. Michael summed this up by persuasively observing that the notion of “reasonable accommodation” perpetuates the stigmatized, medicalized, individualized model of disability that those of us in disability history have been fighting to eliminate. Right on! I’ll wait until the full report comes out before I comment on this further.
Other issues that were discussed included a mentorship program matching graduate students/junior faculty with senior faculty with disabilities; ongoing efforts to get AHA to validate disability history as a legitimate field of study; and how to recruits panels and papers on disability history for the next AHA meeting in 2012. I made a plug for folks to join DHA (somewhat awkwardly because I didn’t have the forethought to bring promotional materials with me.)
The tribute to the late Paul Longmore was incredibly moving — I will try to get a PDF of the testimonials that were read. He will be sorely missed.
Speaking of stigma– it disgusts me how quickly even liberal bloggers are using ableist words like “nutcase” and “whacko” to describe the man who shot Congresswoman Giffords and others at a public event in Arizona yesterday. [even more moderate terms like “these people” are demoralizing because they peg persons with mental illness as socially deviant “others” ] According to vaughanbell at Mind Hacks.”
I suspect we’re going to hear a great deal more about the issue in the coming weeks, and not all of it positive or well-informed.
This article looks at some of the relevant scientific evidence and some of the misconceptions that invariably arise when such tragic circumstances make headlines.
Shortly after Jared Lee Loughner had been identified as the alleged shooter of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, online sleuths turned up pages of rambling text and videos he had created. A wave of amateur diagnoses soon followed, most of which concluded that Loughner was not so much a political extremist as a man suffering from “paranoid schizophrenia.”
For many, the investigation will stop there. No need to explore personal motives, out-of-control grievances or distorted political anger. The mere mention of mental illness is explanation enough. This presumed link between psychiatric disorders and violence has become so entrenched in the public consciousness that the entire weight of the medical evidence is unable to shift it. Severe mental illness, on its own, is not an explanation for violence, but don’t expect to hear that from the media in the coming weeks.”
Here’s a Link to the longer Slate article ‘Crazy Talk’.
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