Author: Historiann

Life in these United States: shotgun wedding edition.

/ Historiann / 15 Comments

Seen in Slate‘s “Dear Prudence” column this week:

Q. Guns at a wedding: We hope my brother-in-law will attend our daughter’s wedding, but we fear that he will bring his handgun. He recently commented on social media that he will “never go anywhere without my gun on my person.” The invitations were sent before this comment was made. He has said that he plans to attend the wedding. (The wedding will be out of town, both for us and for my BIL, and is being held at a city park.) Should my husband speak to him? Should we write him a letter expressing our hope that he is present, but that his gun is not welcome? His sister has offered to talk with him as she, too, does not want him to bring a gun. She visited him recently and observed that even when attending his small, rural church he carries his gun at his waist in an unsecured holster. He’s just one of those people who doesn’t want anyone touching his guns. We really don’t want the presence of a gun to spoil our daughter’s wedding!

Who is this nutty uncle?  (Could he possibly be the infamous “Florida Man?”)  PRO TIP:  If you don’t want “anyone touching [your] guns,” keeping them unloaded and locked in a safe is the best way to keep them out of other people’s reach.  Walking around with a sidearm only puts your weapon within reach of other people.

What do you think Prudence will say to these haters of the Second Amendment?  Go back to Mexico Afghanistan Iraq Egypt Saudi Arabia Iran if you don’t like our freedoms!  How dare you try to impose your weak, liberal values on me?  I refuse to be a victim!  This wedding protected by Smith & Wesson! Continue reading →

Payback time.

/ Historiann / 5 Comments

Esther Boardman by Ralph Earl, 1789, Metropolitan Museum of Art, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

My promotion to Professor isn’t official yet, but I’ve already received an invitation to review someone else’s materials for promotion to Professor.

Given all of the extremely nice things I’ve heard that my outside reviewers said about my latest book and career overall, I suppose it’s time to pay it forward.  I thought I’d get at least a year’s grace! I thought I’d have to have changed my faculty profile page, but maybe good news travels nearly as fast as bad news.

(I’m pretty sure that it was one of my referees who sent in my name as a potential reviewer.)

Continue reading →

You cursed brats, look what you’ve done! Or, why does the Wall Street Journal hate America?

/ Historiann / 14 Comments

The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal is at it again this weekend.  Hilariously, the ed board and many of its readers honestly believe that the fate of the republic rests on a few undergraduate students at Berkeley, UCLA, Middlebury and Wellesley Colleges just shutting up.

In a column putatively against the “soft totalitarianism” of “student thuggery against non-leftist viewpoints,” Heather Mac Donald drops the veil of her allegedly principled stand against “campus intolerance” by–wait for it!–complaining that students published articles in campus newspapers and made comments on Facebook that she doesn’t like.

Go ahead:  read that again.   And tell me who is it who’s really the special snowflake here:  the woman with WSJ editorial page real estate, or the writers for college newspapers?  This is a woman who is monitoring and complaining about the Facebook pages of undergraduate students whose politics she dislikes.  No member of the East German Stasi or Cultural Revolutionary could outdo comrade Mac Donald for her dedication to eradicating decadence and ideological impurities among our young people.

Here’s a catalog of MacDonald’s hatred of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution in her own words.  She’s clearly hostile to the expression of any ideas on any college campus anywhere with which she disagrees: Continue reading →

Smell ya later, Philadelphia!

/ Historiann / 7 Comments

Philadelphia, 10th and Spruce Streets, April 15, 2017

I just spent 22 hours in Philadelphia this weekend, and I have to say that I was charmed by its persistent Philly-ness. It still is, and may always be, the Philadelphia that I loved and left nearly 25 years ago.  At the time, I was thrilled to get out, but on my brief visit I was even charmed by some of the nastier details of life in the city.

I’m sure it’s because I no longer have to live there, and because I was on a high from my visit to give a book talk and meet students at Bryn Mawr College, my alma mater, but I was charmed by the somatic and sensory aspects of city life that I recognized instantly.
First, there’s the cigarette smoke on the street–surprisingly, that hasn’t changed in 25 years.  (My hotel room also had a faint trace of cigarette smoke–that was less charming, but I’m kind of a bloodhound when it comes to my powers of smell detection and analysis.)  Even the pee and vomit scents I detected in the daylight hours at many turns inspired nostalgia, probably because those aren’t smells I run into all that often in my life in Colorado. Continue reading →

Neil Gorsuch is a plagiarist.

/ Historiann / 36 Comments

Neil Gorsuch, plagiarist.

I was alerted to this via a Storify that Kevin Gannon posted this morning. Here’s the original Politico article–you be the judge, but I agree with Kevin that it’s “theft and erasure, full stop.”

Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch copied the structure and language used by several authors and failed to cite source material in his book and an academic article, according to documents provided to POLITICO.

The documents show that several passages from the tenth chapter of his 2006 book, “The Future of Assisted Suicide and Euthanasia,” read nearly verbatim to a 1984 article in the Indiana Law Journal. In several other instances in that book and an academic article published in 2000, Gorsuch borrowed from the ideas, quotes and structures of scholarly and legal works without citing them.

The findings come as Republicans are on the brink of changing Senate rules to confirm Gorsuch over the vehement objections of Democrats. The documents could raise questions about the rigor of Gorsuch’s scholarship, which Republicans have portrayed during the confirmation process as unimpeachable.

.       .       .       .       .

However, six experts on academic integrity contacted independently by POLITICO differed in their assessment of what Gorsuch did, ranging from calling it a clear impropriety to mere sloppiness.

“Each of the individual incidents constitutes a violation of academic ethics. I’ve never seen a college plagiarism code that this would not be in violation of,” said Rebecca Moore Howard, a Syracuse University professor who has written extensively on the issue.

Elizabeth Berenguer, an associate professor of law at Campbell Law School, said that under legal or academic standards Gorsuch’s similarities to the Indiana Law Journal would be investigated “as a potential violation of our plagiarism policy. It’s similar enough to the original work.”

“I would apply an academic writing standard,” said Berenguer, who teaches plagiarism and legal writing. “Even if it were a legal opinion, it would be plagiarism under either.”

Wait–what’s this about “under legal or academic standards?”   Continue reading →

Filibuster this.

/ Historiann / 8 Comments

mushroomcloudTo all of the very worried Democrats and Republicans fretting and rubbing their hands about the possible end of the filibuster: who cares?

The filibuster is a patently anti-democratic parliamentary tactic that should never have existed. The senate is anti-democratic enough to begin with that we don’t need to include all of these bullcrap measures that are about as timely and as fashionable as spittoons and antimacassars.

To liberals on fainting couches: have you reviewed the history of the filibuster? To conservatives huffing and puffing like the Big, Bad Wolf: go ahead and blow the senate down. You won! You get your pick for the Supreme Court!  That’s how it works!  That’s about all you’re going to get out President Human Stain, so enjoy your new Associate Justice of the Supreme Court–those Trumpstains probably won’t come out of your Federalist Society lab experiment, but I’m sure you’ll live happily with the shame. Continue reading →

Happy birthday Esther Wheelwright, with remembrances of other American ladies on this date in history.

/ Historiann / 5 Comments

Esther Wheelwright, c.1763 (oil on canvas), 55.7×45.5 cm; © Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

It’s Esther Wheelwright’s 321st birthday! She was born March 31, 1696 (Old Style).*  Since Esther has been dead for 237 years, I was thrilled to accept a birthday present on her behalf in the form of a rave review of my book, The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright, at the Christian Century!  (H/t to friend and blog reader Susan for passing it along.)  In “Women Who Do Things,” Margaret Bendroth, the executive director of the Congregational Library and author of The Last Puritans:  Mainline Protestants and the Power of the Past (among many other titles), gets my book exactly right.  Check out her lede, which is just perfect:

An offhand remark can change everything. I still remember a graduate school professor’s consternation at the idea of “women’s history.” “They don’t do anything,” he protested. The comment passed without notice in a room full of male professors and students, but it took up permanent residence in my head. I was hooked, not just by his attitude problem but by the nagging reality that in the categories this well-regarded historian recognized—wars and politics and all that—he was right.

Writing women into history isn’t easy. It’s one thing to add an occasional sidebar in a textbook or praise a heroine whose brave exception proves the rule, but that doesn’t change the overall story line. The narrative still belongs to men who “do things,” driving the engines of change by waging wars and winning elections.

I am so touched that readers and reviewers really get where I’m coming from, and are moved to share their own stories of alienation and feelings of displacement in graduate school.  The discipline of history isn’t just heedless or careless about women and women’s history–it’s actively engaged in denial and erasure. Continue reading →

Oh, FFS! Security theater harassment of U.S. families.

/ Historiann / 4 Comments

LOLsobs for political blogger and trained historian Joshua Micah Marshall, whose eight year-old son was pulled aside for extra scrutiny at Kennedy airport last night in New York:

Someone either from the airport or perhaps the TSA (I think not actually CBP [Customs & Border Patrol]) kept asking/insisting* repeatedly suggesting that the rest of the family go sit in some separate waiting area while Daniel waited in the line alone. This got me, I confess, somewhat belligerent. We all waited together, obviously.

When we finally got to the CBP officer, the fact that Daniel is eight seemed to put a pretty quick end to the whole thing. Daniel answered a few questions, was asked to sign his passport and we were off.

Recent events have made me increasingly see the CBP as something along the lines of a rogue federal agency. I have a very negative sense of the whole organization. That said, the guy we dealt when we finally got through the line with was friendly, professional and pretty chill.

We learned in a subsequent line that Daniel’s is a “common name” and what had happened was that some law enforcement or intelligence agency had put a hold on someone by that name. (I’m wiilling to believe “Daniel Marshall” is a common name; “Daniel Eytan Marshall” I’m not so sure.) And that’s how we ended up in that situation. Will this happen again if we have to return to the US from overseas? Depends. Depends on what? How long the hold is in place.

It’s nice to know the system isn’t advanced enough to cross check for age.

WTF?

Continue reading →

Alert the Media: Spring & summer book talk dates!

/ Historiann / 1 Comment

Yale University Press. 2016

For your convenience, here’s a list of my spring and early summer North American book tour stops. I hope to meet more of you in person, finally!  Most of these events are free and all are open to the public:

Thursday March 30–tomorrow night!–I’ll be at the Longmont Public Library to give a talk about The Many Captivities of Esther Wheelwright at 7 p.m.

Thursday April 13 I’ll be at Bryn Mawr College to give a talk about the book.  Stay tuned for more details as they arrive–as you might imagine, this trip will be a sentimental favorite, as it’s my own college and therefore a special honor to be asked to return as a guest.

Thursday April 27, I’m one of five invited authors to participate in a book reading at the opening reception of the Western Association of Women Historians in San Diego, California.  The Strawberries and Champagne Book Launch runs from 7-9 p.m. at the Town & Country Resort and Convention Center.

Saturday May 6, I’m doing a book talk at the Morrin Center in Québec.

And finally, on Wednesday June 28 at 6 p.m., I’m going to present my book talk at the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston.  Come early for cocktails and snacks at 5:30, and stay to get your book signed afterwards!