Reboots, sf, and history

In response to my last post, which was in part on the latest version of Captain America, Bellebonnesage pointed out that Marvel had played a part in the Civil Rights movement, and in fact, The Howling Commandos were always an interracial unit. Even while watching the film, I did think about the Dirty Dozen, which had a less savory plot device for bringing Jim Brown into the film. I think this is specifically where the current reboot lets us down: there is no explanation. In fact, I think this is one of the joys and problems of reboots in general. Reboots are deliberate erasures of story lines and attempts to take a story along a different timeline in the way that sf has played with for years.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I liked the Star Trek reboot, despite having been a fairly serious Trekkie in my much younger days (Yes, there was a time when I could probably have told you the name of an episode based on a couple of hints, but not the episode number!). The reason why the reboot worked for me was that I was able to assume multiple parallel universes in which things play out differently. Also, I think it needs pointing out that, although the original Star Trek is part of my history, it is set in the future. It's not actually history, and very little of it takes place in our historical past. "City on the Edge of Forever" may play with the time paradox and the effects of one slight alteration, but it's always a 'what if' sort of episode. It's also, incidentally, interesting in that it reinforces the idea of Big Events and stuff that doesn't matter. If Kirk and McCoy save Edith Keeler, Hitler wins: see how one intervention in the timeline can have huge ripple effects? But what about the guy who sees Spock's ears? How does that affect him, and his family? Still, the big picture is clear: we shouldn't alter the past.

One might argue that the current Avengers movies are much like the Star Trek reboot. They are fantastic, they are pop culture, and they are clearly not history. This is one of the reasons that casting Idris Elba as Heimdall worked just fine for me -- the Marvel Aesir aren't gods, they're just guys with better technology who got treated like gods. Not that some people could figure that out. But it is because some people can't figure it out that I think Captain America's producers goofed.

Captain America is a superhero. He's sf -- after all, super-strength imparted through an experimental serum and Stark technology? But he's also set in the historical past. Obviously, not entirely historical, because the Hydra is totally Marvel, and even there, this is a reboot of the organization.* But yes, our past, and our historical past. The Second World War is, with the Civil War, one of the few historical events/periods that modern US audiences (and given what I've seen of the UK A-Level exams, UK audiences) can get a grip on, in the sense that they know something about it. But what they know is often wrong. What they know is often misinformed, and leaves out things like Japanese internment camps, or segregation. So when an audience that doesn't know the history of the comic, or the comic's place in history -- and I think most people who see the films won't, because the numbers of people who learn about comic book characters via tv series and films as opposed to actual comic books (and they'd have to go digging backwards to get all of the original story line, which is only available via huge reprint volumes that cost a fortune) -- when they don't know, they are not likely to think about it. A couple of lines of exposition introducing the Howling Commandos could have made a big difference. In leaving out those lines, the reboot cut itself off from an important part of its own history, and rewrote ours.







*Also, despite the coolness of the Hydra logo, it's not a hydra, it's a skull-headed octopus! Hydra, people, NINE heads. If a villain is going to tell us that two heads grow back where you cut off one, then perhaps there should be multiple heads?

An example of why I am writing this paper

"Allegations that widows took fraudulent vows in order to remain free to lead a life of sexual abandon leave no doubt that the cloistering of widows represented an integral part of the church's effort to enforce monogamy. As this program met with success and the conjugal family emerged as the basic unit of society, the function of sheltering unmarried ladies, formerly assumed by extended families, was taken over by the convents. As in other spheres of life, her too the royal family led the way. Louis the Pious not only sent his notorious sisters to nunneries but also installed his widowed mother-in-law as abbess at Chelles." SF Wemple, Women in Frankish Society, 105

Granted, Wemple is sort of old news these days. But the ghost of this sort of scholarship is alive and well, I think. There's plenty out there that contradicts this interpretation, which rests in part on a feminist reading of the role of the church in the Early Middle Ages and indeed, on a function of monogamy that may or may not have been entirely true at the time. Most importantly, I think, is a more recent idea that we see in, for example, essays in de Jong's Topographies of Power, LeJan's Femmes, pouvoir et societé, and even in Goldberg's biography of Louis the German and Althoff's work on the Ottonians. That those all assume a degree of agency that Wemple doesn't is very important. That only one of them is in English is one of the reasons that I'm writing this stupid paper: despite the fact that more and more Anglophones seem to be reading German these days, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of synthesizing going on, or at least not on a level that is reaching more 'general' audiences. We have reached a point, I think, where we are no longer explicitly arguing against older assumptions (and I am not sure that we ever really did, because that would mean -- shock! horror! -- engaging in women's or even feminist history, which might undermine our standing as real historians who work with charters and stuff). Rather, we are arguing for a much more interesting and nuanced picture of women's roles in early medieval society that is still haunted by unresolved scholarly approaches.


Or maybe not. Stay tuned.

Today's Cool resource

If you hadn't yet seen Regnum Francorum Online

Anecdotal History

I'm working on a paper that is likely to be a few days late in getting to the respondent (REALLY, REALLY sorry about that!). It's ostensibly on what we can see in some charters about step- relations. This has been made more difficult by the fact that I can't find the notebook that had my notes that I used for the abstract. Go me. Anyway, some things occurred to me today that I need to jot down, and here seemed as good a place as any. As I've been working, I've been worrying about whether or not the abstract and the paper will match up at all. Fortunately, whatever I write will still fit within the parameters of the session, so that panic is off.

So anyway, I might not find as much as I'd like on stepmother-stepdaughter relationships. I can stretch that to talk about stepmother-stepson relationships, and in fact I think I need to talk about those if only because most of the high-profile stepmother stories from the Carolingian period are royal and stepmother-stepson. This morning, though, I realized that I can't recall all that many mother-daughter (or mother-son) relationships in my documents. I should mention here that I am using relationships in two ways: the first is the obvious one, evidence of any familial connection; the second is the one that we infer from donations made on behalf of others. It has long been posited, and I think that this is largely correct, that donating property on the behalf of another is to some extent evidence of affection. I think that duty is perhaps also a reason, but really that is unlikely if the person for whom the donation is made is dead. I am also now wondering, though, if donating for a third party is also a way of mediating disputes or securing an uncontested release of property, i.e., "I know that my relatives really want to get their hands on this, and they are going to fight about it when I'm gone. Even though I have made provisions for this in the charter, in that they can pay a whopping sum to the monastery to get the land back, they're a bunch of greedy bastards and I don't really want that to happen. So I'm also going to put their names on it. This will put them in a position where they will really look bad if they try to regain that property."

Maybe. I'm not entirely sure I haven't read bits of that before, but will need to look that up. At any rate, I think that there needs to be some comparison to the charters in which people make donations for their mothers as well.

But anyway, it seems to me that the paper will be better if I contrast the mother vs stepmother cases. Which is probably obvious to most of you, but I tend to forget such things. In fact (and this is something that I have really got to get over) I'm like a magpie when it comes to research, going for the shiny and not thinking about framing it nearly as well as I should. Part of this is that I tend to do research only when I can concentrate on it, which is in the summer. This is really not ideal, and I must figure out how to change that, even if it only means keeping up with reading through the academic year. In years like this one, where I teach nothing medieval at all, it's especially important to make time to do this. If it weren't for blogs, I'd be absolutely lost, and most of you know I've been crap at keeping up this year. Another part may be that I am, apparently, a mental magpie, or Doug, the dog in Up, whose attention is completely taken over by the random appearance of a squirrel. Don't know if I mentioned it, but apparently, I have ADHD (inattentive). Knowing this does make me more conscious of looking for solutions and coping mechanisms, rather than beating myself up over being a magpie, at least.

What does this have to do with anecdotal history? Well, it also occurred to me this morning that I seem to be stuck in a pattern of finding cool anecdotes to write about. They are the sorts of things that fit in well with my teaching and service load, as well as my tendency to follow the shiny. I don't think they lack value, either. In fact, I think that anecdotes are what make what we do accessible to non-historians and help to demonstrate one of the real values of studying history: historians look at people, and try to understand people and why they did what they did -- and to me, this sort of inquiry is immediately valuable and transferable to how we approach our own world.

Having said that, I also want to make a concerted effort to make my anecdotes more meaningful to other historians, to add more to the larger conversation. In the meantime, I suppose I can continue honing my skills at asking awkward questions. :-)

Cool teaching tools!

Hi all --

So at present I am buried under a pile of really poor essays. Really poor. So poor that I will have to write a post about why differential teaching and learning is good, but that it's very hard to draw some lines: where, for example, is the tipping point between making the good students better and making the failing students passable?

In the meantime, I am occasionally thinking about resources for a re-vamped historical research course. In some ways, I fear for this course. The intention is supposedly to teach students to write a research paper, so that we don't have to teach that as part of the upper-division courses where research papers are now mandatory. There are some who want to teach historiography proper, and something called 'an appreciation for the art of history' in there. If that means teaching big questions in the field and the arguments historians present, I can't see it. After all, I could teach such things, but they would make no sense to students who have never taken a medieval content class. I could teach the history of history-writing, but you know? I just don't think it's as important as actually learning by doing. At some point, we need to know that there is a tradition of historical writing out there, and that ideas of history change from Thucydides to Ranke to Bloch (and I don't have any idea about Americanist historiography). But I'd much rather teach that as part of my content classes than as part of a methods class: "here is a big question for medieval historians -- 'is there such a thing as feudalism/the feudal system?' and here are the major arguments and the people who are making them." In a lower-division methods class, if I'm teaching a paper with an annotated bibliography and/or lit review, then I can set the stage with the idea that historians don't agree and that approaches change over time. How this will all work out when it's a rotating course is going to be interesting.

Anyway, here are some fantastic tools that I think I will be using for teaching methods and in my survey classes, especially:

First, Sharon Howard has posted a tutorial for integrating zotero at the Old Bailey online. How cool is that? the tutorial goes beyond using that site, too! I've been trying to get students to use something like zotero, because they are crap at keeping their bibliographies up to date...

Then there is Wall Wisher, which I found through one of the links on the Old Bailey page. I'm thinking of using that for having students prep class discussions. That, and maybe have them use it for structuring essays and studying together.

There are other cool things linked, too -- I especially like the group assignments in zotero.

NaBloPoMo 25 -- dinner and big cats

NaBloPoMo 25 -- dinner and big cats

So I am at a friend's/adopted sister's for Thanksgiving. Me, her, and her husband. And the cats. One is rather large .. 27 lbs and about 3 feet long, not including his tail. The other is also not small, but only in a normal not-small-cat kind of way. He's also very orange. We've been talking about life, and teaching, and departmental politics. One of the nice things is that both of them are modernists who sometimes do American history. So they can offer sensible opinions of what normal methodology is for people in their fields. This has been really helpful, both in validating my feelings that all of the people in my department don't mean the same thing when we use the same words (for example, in my world, document analysis almost always requires a close reading of the text, as well as demonstrating an understanding of the context; in theirs, it's far more about context, and close readings are optional at best). It's also been very helpful for my understanding where some of my Americanist colleagues are coming from. Apparently, when Americanists go to conferences, they don't really quiz each other on the use of evidence the way medievalists often do. For me, this is a little weird. I mean, if I went to a panel on Merovingian bishops, I'd expect to hear references to Gregory or maybe Venantius, or... you get the idea. There's a general sort of corpus of narrative history that most of us are at least vaguely familiar with, and we examine the use of those sources as much as anything else, I think. But apparently, this isn't true in all subfields. This explains a lot to me about some of my department's dynamics. It also means I need to re-think some of the ways I teach the methods course, so that the students working with the Americanists will have a better idea of what they need to do on their theses...

ETA: It's interesting that my friend described my approach to what I think of as documents or sources as more akin to a literary approach to texts: very old-fashioned; something that might have been acceptable 40 years ago, but would never be published today. In fact, she intimated, it was like the approach of lit people, where everything is reduced to a text, and context occasionally is missed out. For my part, I said I thought that the other approach was clearly good for synthesis and focusing on context, but the actual primary source evidence seemed to be getting short shrift. In some ways, it seems to me that it's the difference between starting with the primary sources and working outward and starting with a question and the scholarship in working inward. There should be a conversation between the two, obviously, and I doubt I will ever be convinced that the old-fashioned approach is therefore less worthy (in part because I will still always have the attitude of someone who is expected to have more tools in her toolbox to start with, but is also big enough to allow for more tools). But it is probably good to get the perspective of someone else, because this really plays into ideas of academic rigor and assessment.

Cross-listing courses and Interdisciplinarity, part 1

Cross-listing Courses and Interdisciplinarity, part 1

This is actually one of those few times where I'm posting about something of particular relevance to something happening at SLAC, even though I'm sure that y'all have all dealt with such things before. One of the reasons I'm posting is because I told a colleague I would, and would share with hir the comments that are left. So zie is sworn to silence about this blog. And cannot share it with anybody else. Otherwise, I might not be able to continue blogging, if a ton of my colleagues start reading this. And that would be a shame, since I'm up to judge the Cliopatria Awards this year. Dunno which category yet, but watch this space for more on that.


Anyhoo ... cross-listing. Last week, a colleague asked me whether zie could cross-list a course as a history course. As department chair, it's my call. This ended up opening up a few cans of worms, not the least of which is a conversation about interdisciplinarity. One of the other cans was how different my own ideas about cross-listing seem to conflict with what seems to have been the norm at SLAC. The feeling I've got from speaking to more senior colleagues is that cross-listing has often been treated as a sort of unofficial barter system based on the way FTEs have been counted: a faculty member wants to teach a course in a special topic, but the course won't make unless it's cross-listed with another department, because students don't have a lot of electives to spare. So the course gets cross-listed, the faculty member gets to teach the cool class because there are enough students, and the department that allows the cross-listing gets credit for additional FTEs that accrue into the departmental total.

To be honest, I've never seen anything like this before, but then, most of my teaching experience is at state schools. My response to the request was in line with what I've seen done elsewhere -- I asked for a syllabus and typical assignments, and said that, in order for a course to be listed in my discipline, it needed to clearly address and fulfill my department's outcomes and assess them in ways consistent with what my departmental colleagues and I have agreed are acceptable for courses at that level, and are consistent with what we actually do. My initial rationale for this was pretty basic -- our accreditors require that we show that we do the things we say we do, so if a course is listed as history, it has to do those things, and I have to be able to work the assessment data into my annual assessment report, which means comparing apples to apples. Period.


There are other ramifications that have come to light here that I want to talk about, because they touch on things like gatekeeping, interdisciplinarity, and our own definitions of our fields. And my own personal pet peeve, which I sort of worry plays into it: the idea that anybody can teach history. But before I go there, I'd like to put out a call for input especially on how your campus goes about cross-listing courses. If you could comment below, I'd really appreciate it. I checked with the institution where I taught for the longest time pre-SLAC, and it was even more complicated than I remembered. First, a faculty member would approach the cross-listing department or program with a syllabus in hand. That syllabus would have to reflect the outcomes of the cross-listing department and assessments for those outcomes. Next, once verbal agreement was reached, the faculty member would fill out a course proposal form and get sign-off from both department chairs and the dean. Then, the proposal would go through the regular curriculum committee process, which could take up to several months, and the course would be approved for the next academic year.

Now, one problem with this particular approach at SLAC is that, if in a case like mine, it's a special topics course being cross-listed as a special topics course, then that would mean that all courses taught in both departments under the special topics numbers would be forever linked. That's just a bad idea. But we have a rule that we can't add new courses permanently until they've been taught twice successfully as special topics. Be that as it may, my own impression is that most institutions handle cross-listing more as former college does. Or am I wrong? How does it work at your place?