Why do I feel like Bill Maher?
New Rule: When trying to make a point about American interaction with Native Americans you CANNOT use Disney cartoons as a legitimate source in which to cite "historical facts." University students across America.....beware....you have been warned. Oh yeah, and when the Sons of Liberty threw the shipload of tea into Boston Harbor.....no, it did not turn the harbor into a "big pot o' tea."
I'm a pilgrim but I have no holy place as my destination.
My pilgrimage is wandering these streets with the company of my own isolation.
I'm a postmodern pilgrim; I'll sign no Mayflower Compact,
my holy sites are the pub, Jerusalem, Thunder Road, and Mecca,
and my iTunes religion is debated among sacred prophets drinking Stella.
But I don't like those prophets anymore.
So I jumped in my chariot; running from the lumpenproletariat.
My biggest fear was that I was really one of them.
But who can tell the difference between reality and simulcra?
A summer's day like winter; the cold burns my soul like the snow burns my skin.
Every night is like the streets of old Jerusalem: ancient, winding, endless streets,
I lost my vision in the very midst of the Holy Land.
I was born to run but I never found thunder road,
just another conjured myth celebrated by iPod prophets.
The Holy Grail for which only lost souls would search,
and I was really one of them.
But I'm no Sir Gawain; this pilgrim grows tired,
and the Green Knight's head has been permanently severed.
Who can tell the difference between simulcra and reality?
And do we need a holy grail to preserve our sanity?
Yea tho' I walk through the streets of the lonely,
I will feel no evil, for you are not with me,
the silence, the solace, the surreal, they comfort me.
There is no Jerusalem and there is no Mecca.
The pilgrim has finally come home.
I lecture at a rural southern school and sometimes my experiences should be videotaped and presented on the surreal life t.v. show. It is unbelievable what some of the students at this very conservative school come up with. Last week I lectured on Reconstruction and the "Romance of Reunion." Historian Eric Foner criticizes Ken Burns and his civil war documentary because it does not consider the legacy of reconstruction or racial justice. I spent a whole hour and 15 minutes discussing Foner and Burns and concluded that the south "won" the peace because after Reconstruction southern and northern whites "reunified" at the expense of racial justice and black civil rights. As evidence: the southern states elected ex-confederate/neo-democrat politicians to congress who actively worked to oppress freedmen. Georgia, for example, elected Alexander Stephens....the vp of the csa. One of my students asked why this was a problem? He further commented that if the federal government refused to recognize the senator from georgia, then the federal government would be trampling on democracy for refusing to accept the democratically elected representative. When I pointed out that the people of georgia trampled on democracy by refusing to allow blacks the right to vote, the grumbling began.
Today I was lecturing on W.E.B. DuBois and The Souls of Black Folk. I was pointing out the criticism that DuBois had made in regards to Booker T. Washington's materialism thesis and the compromise in his famous Atlanta speech of 1906 in which Washington exchanged access to the marketplace at the expense of pursuing civil rights, political rights, and education for black youths. DuBois claimed that a Talented Tenth of liberal arts trained blacks should train themselves to lead a progressive gradual march to civil rights because materialism in and of itself simply did not work. A student commented that DuBois was wrong because "every economist in the world" knows that a vertical economy (capitalism) will integrate lower class people into an expanding middle class. When I pointed out that DuBois claimed that this could not happen because the economic capitalist system was dominated by whites and the whites had made laws that prohibted black upward socio-economic mobility, the student resorted to slander. He called DuBois a "Communist and a Fascist who supported Hitler, anti-semitism, and the Holocaust in Germany." My jaw dropped. I responded, firstly communists and fascists are two different things. I continued to say that DuBois never supported anti-semitism or the holocaust or fascism. The student claimed that he had documents to prove DuBois was anti-semitic....he failed to produce them. Anyway it turns out that DuBois had made two sterotypical remarks toward two jewish individuals earlier in his career but condemned anti-semitic behavior consistently throughout his career. He used Jewish intellectualism found in the Zionist movement to craft a pan-African ideology and he chastized nazi germany for its treatment of the Jews. He even commemorated the warsaw ghetto uprising and compared the struggle of the Jewish people to the struggle of African Americans in the United States. When I reminded the student that any vertical economic system...particularly capitalism.....always places someone at the bottom....and in the United States those at the bottom have been African Americans while whites created laws to keep them there throughout the centuries, the student finally ceased his onslaught of DuBois. I never even got to present to the students that both DuBois and Washington's models completely failed. DuBois became so disillusioned with the failure of progressivism and civil rights that he became a communist and moved to Ghana where he died in 1963.
What the hell? Where do these kids get these ideas? How the hell can you be a Communist Fascist? I am guessing that the student has been indoctrinated by the economics department at this school which is infamously ultra-conservative (and word on the street is that much of the faculty are also closet racists). This would explain where this student got his ideas. It was beyond belief and really quite distressing. Is this an example of how the academic world is moving away from criticism and in the direction of farce? Students are not only using the Patriot Act to legitimize internment camps for Japanese-Americans they now are using economic theory to impose an economic prison on those at the bottom of the vertical scale? I am sure that this university is anything but representative of the larger population but these ideas based on hyperbolic fiction presented as fact is becomeing way to common.
I am creating a new assignment this semester. It is a sort of annotated bibliography but done with photos. My students must find photos of historical interest (really, it could be almost anything)....cemeteries, architecture, family immigration photos, even scanned images from newspapers, books, etc. They then have to talk about each photo and place each in an historical context using scholarly texts (JSTOR articles and books from the library). They must "annotate" each photo with its historical context using a minimum of 200 words. They must also use proper citation style. They will load 10 photos to a flickr group that I have established. I will then grade each student's 10 photos. I am grading on historical context, artistry, and technical aspects (tags, geotags, etc). Each student will also be allowed to post their single best photo in a second top 20 group. The best 20 photographs will get 20 extra credit points.
This will take some time to grade I'm afraid. But it will be interesting grading. I think the students will like it, but I have no idea if they actually will. The idea of this project is to make history relevant to each individual student by getting them to place their personal and family photos into historical context through scholarly research. I am trying to come up with an assignment that would require them to start a blog but I don't know if that would be as interesting. For the photo history group, I am very interested to see how it turns out. Details to follow later this semester.
I developed a lecture last year for my survey history classes and it has proven to be effective every time so far. It consists of a lecture and discussion of Industrialization. This can be used in a class size ranging 4-50 students and takes about an hour to do. It can be used in either a world history, u.s. history, labor history, cultural history, or urban history class. The goal is to get the students to realize the abuses of industrialization in the free market/laissez-faire capitalist world system.
Task number one is a brief lecture on pre-industrialization society and a description of guilds and guild halls. We discuss the social and economic status of skilled journeymen and apprentices. Then I have the class simulate the guild hall experience. I ask for a volunteer (someone artistic) to draw a automobile on the board. The drawing must be detailed and of high quality. Then I ask the class to take out a piece of paper and duplicate the drawing. The volunteer artist acts as the master craftsman and goes around the class evaluating the work of the journeymen and apprentices. If the student does not duplicate perfectly the drawing of the car, the master craftsman crumples the paper and asks the student to start again. Once everyone completes the drawing, we count how many we made. Then we discuss the simulated experience. The class should articulate the social liberty of the guild hall, the eased pressure of performance, and the high quality/high cost of their products.
Then I lecture briefly about the factory system and the pre-Fordist assembley line. How this transformed the social dynamic of the workplace and how the factory system successfully de-skilled labor. Then I talk about Fordism and Taylorism and how this de-humanized labor. After this, we simulate the factory system under the guise of fordism and taylorism. I take rows of students and form them into assembly lines. I draw a crude car on the board and they set about producing drawn cars as fast as possible. I act as foreman and I try to keep everybody quiet and I try to speed the assembly line up as best I can. Then I take my digital camera and photograph each assembly line. Afterwards we count how many cars we produced. Of course the quantity has dramatically increased but the quality has signficantly decreased. I then project the photos onto the screen and we evaluate how, through taylorist ideas, each assembly line could improve their movements to maximise efficiency on the line. The class should articulate that social oppression, the intense pressure to perform, the low wages and low cost of mass production. I then lecture on the early abuses of the factory system.....child labor, union busting, low wages, etc. The whole purpose of this is to get the students to realize how much social chaos industrialization caused, particularly among the working classes. It is amazing how many students become supporters of unionization and liberal regulation of the economy after they experience this exercise. It seems to work very well so far.
