Thursday, December 30, 2004

Hiatus

Sorry for the lack of recent posts. I've been back in the U.S. and it turns out that spending time with Lovely Girlfriend is much more fun than blogging. But I'm hard at work on the Dan Brown post. I'll be back in England on January 7th, at which point I'll be hard at work on some papers, which really means I'll have plenty of procrastinating to do.

Happy New Year.

Thursday, December 16, 2004

Going home

I'm heading back to the U.S. tomorrow. After a nearly three-hour bus ride that covers 70 miles, I'll be flying from Heathrow into Philadelphia, where my lovely girlfriend will be picking me up. I'll spend the next three weeks shuttling between Philadelphia, D.C., and Boston, with a likely trip to New Hampshire for skiing thrown in.

As for blogging, well, there's two things I'm planning to write about. First is that debunking of Dan Brown's Angels and Demons that I promised so long ago. Second is a brief essay on how the perspective of gender has changed the practice of academic history. I've just finished the rough draft of a long-ish paper on the topic that I'm not terribly happy with, so I'm hoping condensing it will help clarify my major points.

Oooh, now that I think about it, expect some (American) football blogging, too. I haven't watched the Eagles in almost three months, and I'm excited to get back into the swing of things. Come to think of it, I don't think I've watched any TV since the election. Surely that's a record for me.

In-flight reading: Mark Mazower's Dark Continent, following the recommendation of two historians with rather different interests.

Sunday, December 12, 2004

Another great duet

I know, I know, I already ended the discussion by saying that Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell singing "Ain't No Mountain High Enough is the best duet ever. But that doesn't mean there aren't other great ones!

The one that's currently tugging at my oh-so-susceptible heartstrings is "Love Hurts" as sung by Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. I mean, the song's great. But the performance absolutely kills me. The instrumentation's spare and understated, so you can hear every sigh. The harmonies are just so aching, as if they're both barely managing to hold back the tears. The best moment comes at 1:11 in, "I'm young/I know..." Their vulnerability comes out most there, and Harris's voice nearly cracks.

The way they slide onto notes makes you doubt whether they're going to be able to hit them or just slide all the way down to the floor and collapse into a sobbing mass.

Or it could be that's just the way it makes me feel.

Tuesday, December 07, 2004

Some thoughts on my historical method

(The disclaimer at the end of my last post still holds.)

A bit of self-reflection on one's work never hurts, so here's a rough outline of how I go about scholarly research and writing, along with some of the rationales for why I do it the way I do. This is largely based on noting what I'm doing right now in preparing to write an essay on how examining gender has altered the practice of history, so this process probably doesn't accurately describe all my research and writing, particularly when it comes to primary sources. But it broadly captures my historical practice.

First, I make a great big list of all the books, articles, essays, primary sources, etc. that could possibly be useful. I typically compile this from bibliographies I already have, looking through library catalogs (Newton, at the moment) and ABC-CLIO, and fiddling around with the Web of Knowledge [subscription required] (here for UK readers; subscription still required).

Once I have my list, I'll start collecting the materials to actually read them. In theory, it'd be wonderful to have every relevant book and journal right on my desk. But as it turns out, having a limited number (say, ten or so) actually stimulates me to get through the books I have with me more quickly so I can go off to the library and get another batch. And I prefer having a hard-copy of journals, rather than reading articles through JSTOR since I tend to get distracted whenever I'm on the internet, though it's typically not a major problem for shorter articles.

Third, I start reading. For the essay I'm doing reading for now, it's not crucial for me to know lots about, say, Ukrainian feminism, so I'll typically only read the introduction and conclusion carefully, skimming the rest (I pay close attention all the way through journal articles, since they're shorter and the argumentation tends to be tighter). When I come upon a passage I think will be useful or that I find interesting, I mark it with a post-it. At this point, I'm inclined to marking anything that strikes me as remotely significant, since the writer's major points might not be clear yet. Better to err on the side of caution.

After I'm done reading the book in question, I'll go back to re-examine the passages I marked. If they still seem significant, I'll copy them, verbatim, into a waiting Word document. My rationale for recording the precise language is two-fold: 1) By copying verbatim, I eliminate the possibility of later placing an author's language into my own work and thinking that I'm paraphrasing. If everything is a quotation, it's easy to know when I'm quoting and when I'm paraphrasing. 2) Language matters. While ideas do exist independent of their expression in language, it's impossible for others to grasp or comprehend them without transmitting them through some language. If I'm going to analyze someone else's thoughts, I'm going to make every effort to analyze their ideas as close to the "original" as I can. Mostly, though, it's the first reason. The second strikes me as an ideological rationalization more than anything else.

A slight digression. By this point, I've created an entry for the book/article in question in EndNote. Footnotes and bibliographies are so much easier when there's software to do all the work. Plus, all the bibliographic information for every source I've used is all in one place. Awfully convenient.

Fifth (provided I'm counting accurately), I go through the notes I've written, looking for major points and themes that emerge. In an ideal world, I wouldn't have any preconceived notions of what I was looking for at this stage. This is never the case, but I try my best to let my framework emerge from the sources rather than imposing an already existing synthesis on my notes. We all have all useful myths. I'll note these major ideas in a separate Word document, along with any supporting quotations.

Sixth, I organize these ideas into an order that makes sense and "goes somewhere."

Finally, I write.

I've, rather deliberately, described these last two steps rather concisely. Not because I don't think they're important or that historians should downplay them, but rather that this is where the "art" of history comes in, and, at the moment, I don't have much in the way of fully-formed ideas about how to go about them.

On one hand, this process probably seems awfully systematic and old-fashioned. Time-consuming, objective, dry sifting of the sources for important information that is then carefully assembled into a coherent narrative or explanation of the past. But on the other hand, I'm struck by just how impressionistic the whole endeavor is. There's no guarantee that I'll catch all the salient points of a given book in my initial reading, nor can I confidently claim that the themes that emerge from my notes are the ones that are "really" there (whatever that might mean). Then there's the question of organizing these ideas and expressing them on my own that I too briefly touched upon above. My own preconceptions and ideas undoubtedly color my selection of what counts as significant or relevant.

That said, I firmly believe that my papers and essays are more than simply "filling in the blanks" of an analysis I've already conceived of. As stated above, I try my best to take my sources seriously and objectively, all the while recognizing that I'm never quite going to succeed. Most importantly, if there's not evidence to back up my central analysis, I do my best to recognize and accept that that analysis is wrong.

So there you have it. It's far from perfect, but it works for me. I'm sure other historians have their own procedures that are far more efficient... I'd be happy to hear about them.

On conservatism (in the conservative sense)

Oh, wandering around the blogosphere. What a wonderful thing.

Ralph Luker linked to Becky of The Valkyrie of Discarded Thought, whose leaving grad school. One of the commenters on her latest post, "Mobius Strip", had this to say:

[...] being conservative isn't about being an a**hole. Conservatives are not against trying to accomodate people. Conservatives, rather, are against using the force of the state to force other people to be accomodating.


Now, I'm not a conservative, so I'm not in a position to make any strong claims about what it means to be conservative. But to my ears, "Mobius Strip" seems to be outlining the libertarian position. There are certainly brands of conservatism that concern themselves with limiting state power, but when it comes to reluctance to "accomodating" people who don't fit existing norms, it seems that we're dealing with social/cultural conservatism.

Conservatives, if we take the word literally, are hesitant to embrace change. Now, I might be mistaken in adopting such a literal reading, but point out a conservative and most likely we're looking at someone who pines away for the good old days or, at the very least, thinks things are pretty good as they stand now and shouldn't be changed.

Much of this sentiment is built on a Burkean trust that our predecessors have, largely, gotten it right. As I've written before, I'm sympathetic to those who would tend to believe what others have had to say. But trusting older judgments works only when they fit with our impressions; when they don't seem quite right, we re-examine the validity older analyses. I have no major problems with conservatism that relies on "conventional wisdom" provided that wisdom still appears to hold today. But this doesn't seem to be the conservatism that "Mobius Strip" is describing.

It's possible that I'm simply privileging Burkean conservatism here because it allows me to dismiss "Mobius Strip"'s version of conservatism as nothing more than dress-ed up libertarianism. But defining conservatism as opposition to "using the force of the state to force other people to be accomodating" begs a whole load of questions. What does "accomodating" mean here: Paying taxes? Recognizing the hardships of others? Do conservatives simply believe that the state shouldn't expect anything from its citizens; if so, conservatism is nothing more than libertarianism. There's nothing wrong with that, but let's be up front about our terminology.

On a less serious note, I've had a fair amount of mulled wine tonight, so it's possible that none of this makes sense. God bless college-subsidized Christmas dinners...

Saturday, December 04, 2004

More rowing photos

Further pictures from this week's race have been posted at the Christ's Boat Club website.

Friday, December 03, 2004

Update

Blogging could be light in the next few weeks as I try to get at least two of the three essays I need to write over break done before I head back to the U.S. for a few weeks. Or I could be blogging regularly, both as a means of floating some preliminary ideas into words and to break up the long hours of reading and note-taking.

Pictures from Fairbairn Cup

As promised, some pictures from yesterday's rowing. All photos are courtesy Rebecca Haw.



The Christ's novice VIII for Fairbairns.





Marshalling on the bank before the race.





A bit of a rest before the start.





Me in the cox's seat, all decked out for the race.



I'll post links to further pictures as they become available.

Thursday, December 02, 2004

Fairbairn Cup

Earlier today, the Christ's novice women (coxed by me) rowed to 25th place (out of 61) at this year's Fairbairn Cup on the River Cam. Full results can be found here.

Not our best effort, but a mistake-free one. It felt as if we had some left in the tank at the end of the race, so we could have pushed more at some point. We'd never raced this distance before, so it was a bit of a guessing game to gauge the effort throughout. Everyone seemed fairly pleased with the result.

I'll post some pictures (and links to more) tomorrow.