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On the Pleasures of Slow Reading

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Like many prospective historians, I was drawn to history because of my love of reading. As a child I spent countless hours reading at home and at the school library. I remember being enchanted by the Scholastic book fair and thrilled at the notion that I would be given – GIVEN – a book just for attending. As I grew older reading remained a sanctuary. In high school and in college, I always had a long reading list and stack of books beside my bed, which I would often read instead of spending time studying assigned coursework. Longer or more difficult books would hang around. I’d pick them up and get sidetracked only to return to them weeks or months later.

Becoming a historian seemed like the perfect career path to take my love of reading from hobby to profession. This was (obviously) before I knew what being a historian actually entailed. I learned a little bit about archival research in one of my undergraduate courses, but saw it as supplemental to secondary source reading. I also didn’t understand how difficult the path would be – both through graduate school and finding a career as a historian after graduation.

Still, what shook me most in graduate school was its approach to reading. The sheer pace of the exercise was exhausting; books were mutilated (“just read the intro and a review” was the common refrain) into content that needed to be crammed for classes and comprehensives. Graduate school reading was nothing like any reading I had done before. It was a marathon that felt like a sprint.

So, also like many graduate students in the humanities, my love of reading waned. I didn’t read for pleasure very often and when I did it was either for circumstantial (places with no internet) or social (book clubs) reasons. I lost touch with why books had mattered to me.

Choosing not to pursue an academic career was traumatic, but a silver lining has been that my passion for reading has been reignited. No longer taking part in the information-gathering arms race that is graduate school has allowed me to not only read slower, but also pause and reflect on what I’ve read.

It’s wonderful to really live with a book, to let it sit with you and accompany you. This has held true for fiction and non-fiction. I’ve been reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain for about three months, slowly chipping away at it in chunks often to twenty pages. Since it’s in many ways a novel about how time passes,this approach has made me appreciate how Mann structured the novel in a way that flows in the uneven ebbs and flows that subjective time does. It has been similarly rewarding as I’ve read Jill Lepore’s These Truths. Like Mann, Lepore is a pleasure to read and her prose and organization rewards close reading. It’s also refreshing to read a longue durée history from beginning to end and not feel the pressure to skip around or mine for argument.

Obviously, this approach is made possible by the privilege of working routine hours and having a low-stress, low-responsibility home life.At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if I would have learned better –maybe not more, but more deeply – without the pressures to consume as much information as possible. I also wonder if this type of churn disadvantages certain types of students who would benefit from more time to read and reflection each item.

As anyone who has written a dissertation (or any long document) knows well, it takes time to write. So too, to read. Even though there are many days that I yearn for the intellectual engagement and debate of my graduate school years, the solace of slow reading tempers my nostalgia for those days and reminds me of the promises life after graduate school hold for intellectual growth. 

This time of year can be full of holiday- and project-related bustle. Looming end of year deadlines can further heighten an already acute anxiety about not working fast enough. But if you can, resist the urge to rush, take some time to sit down, and read slow. 

The Trouble(s) with Dissertations

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It seems like most of the chatter among American historians has focused on two debates about the dissertation: should graduate students approach dissertation writing with the intention of having it ready for publication upon completion or is dissertation writing somehow different from book writing? AND should universities automatically embargo dissertations – that is prevent digital copies of them from being made available to scholars – or allow access to them immediately upon completion? I have largely remained on the sidelines for both debates for several reasons. I am in the early stages of my dissertation research and do not have much valuable wisdom to provide on either topic. I am not particularly interested in these kinds of debates and would rather argue about historical content instead of the politics of the history profession. But more than anything else, I have stood aside because I think the answer to both questions seems clear: allow the individual graduate student their own approach to writing their dissertation and choice whether – and for how long – they would like to have their university embargo it.

I am approaching my dissertation as a dissertation and not as a book. My dissertation is on the history of American China Studies and how it shaped and was shaped by mid-20th century American politics. While I feel it has the potential to have mainstream appeal, I am not sure that writing a book for a wide audience is the best way to present the significance of my argument or my skills as a historian to my peers. Fundamentally, I see the dissertation as a certification as to one’s qualifications as a historian. Demonstrating these qualifications – ability to use archives, work in foreign languages, articulate a novel and significant argument – does not always make for the most compelling reading even for one’s scholarly peers. Yet, I believe that it is important for my project and for my potential employers to demonstrate these skills, although doing so may mean substantial revisions (including cutting, adding, and rewriting chapters) when the dissertation is transformed into a book. The process make take more time, but I am confident in my dissertation prospectus and believe the final product will be well worth the wait.

Though I am not approaching my dissertation as a book, that does not mean every graduate student should avoid writing their dissertation as a book. At the Society of U.S. History blog, Rachel Shelden has given a litany of reasons why writing her dissertation as a book worked for her. Ultimately, each graduate student and their advisors and mentors must choose their own path. There is no “right” answer.

I feel similarly about embargoing dissertations; each student should be allowed to choose whether or not her dissertation will be embargoed by her university and for how long. Debate over embargoing dissertations was brought to the fore by an American Historical Association statement in June urging universities to embargo all student dissertations. This attracted criticisms from many historians who saw the announcement as a foolhardy commitment to the dying medium of print monographs and doing a disservice to young scholars and the profession as a whole by keeping the innovative work of young scholars out of the hands of their peers. Further arguments for the embargo have been forwarded since the AHA’s initial announcement, most eloquently by former AHA President Bill Cronin. I understand this puts a lot of stress on university administrators and library personnel who have to process these requests. I understand that it is easier to approach embargoing with an all or nothing mentality. But in the end, the dissertation is the intellectual property of the graduate student who researched and wrote it and they should be allowed to restrict or provide access to it as they see fit.

There are some obvious pitfalls to this case-by-case approach. What if a graduate student forgoes embargoing her dissertation and it is never published as a result? What if a young author’s work is preempted while her dissertation is embargoed? Shouldn’t the university have some control over the dissertation seeing as they provided at least some of the financial and material support necessary for its completion? Though these issues may seem significant – and indeed many are – the fundamental point remains that neither the AHA nor the university should be compelling graduate students to either embargo or not embargo their dissertations. The choice should remain their’s and their’s alone. Historians differ in how they want their work to reach their target audience. Some may want their dissertation to be published as a book, others may not want an academic career and therefore do not see the need to revise their dissertation and make it a book. All of these approaches are valid and the university should be compelled to respect all of them, even if they’re inconvenient.

To me, both of these controversies point to the continued employment crisis facing young historians. With their traditional means of ideological dissemination (the print book) and their workspace (the university) contracting, even as the number of graduate students continues to grow, the uncertainty facing young scholars adds urgency to debates that to outsiders may seem like small potatoes. After all, writing dissertations as books and embargoing dissertations are only relevant issues if there continues to be a publishing industry looking to publish those books and universities looking to hire their writers. Despite their seeming insignificance, both debates highlight the one thing the graduate student does control in this unstable professional climate – their own work and ideas. If control over those ideas and their form is taken out of the young scholar’s hands, be it by the university or the AHA, then there is nothing left for the young historian or the future of the profession.

I Defended My Dissertation – What Do I Do Next?

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I defended my dissertation this past December. In the defense’s afterglow, I started to wonder – what’s next? I knew I wanted to turn it into a book, but I had no idea where to start. Should I contact publishers? Start writing a book proposal? My advisor suggested stepping away from the project to gain perspective. Still, I was skeptical. I didn’t have a job and thought the only way to get a job (or even a post-doc) was to have, at the very least, the book under contract.

After taking some time to think through this, I did what any good millennial would do: took to Twitter. I received a staggering number of replies from professors, publishers, and graduate students offering advice or commiserating about the opacity of the publishing process. I am distilling the substance of the discussion into five points, in the hope that in the future they can guide graduate students wrestling with the same questions.

1. Take a break. Writing a monograph-length dissertation is a long and, oftentimes, arduous process. In so doing, it is easy to lose perspective. In my case, I had largely stopped reading books outside my narrow subdiscipline and immersed myself in the project’s archival and primary sources. Most Twitter respondents recommended putting the manuscript aside, focusing on other projects (an article, teaching a class, etc.), and returning to it with fresh eyes after between six months and one year. By then, the hope is that you can bring a new perspective to the project.

2. Read other things. Fresh perspective cannot be attained through idleness, however. When taking a break from the manuscript, respondents’ advised that you delve into books outside your disciplinary niche. Many recommended reading fiction, since its emphasis on narrative and readability are two qualities lacking in many manuscripts. Others recommended reading prize-winning books. These could act as models for a book proposal or provide insight into how to best frame arguments. For Twitter respondents the message was nearly universal: the best writing begins with omnivorous reading.

3. Network. Like any other employment opportunity, finding a publisher for your manuscript is easiest achieved through networking. The best place to find these networking opportunities is at academic conferences. Respondents in the publishing industry shared that they meet many first-time academic authors at conferences. Larger academic conferences (AHA, OAH, MLA, etc.) usually have the greatest number of publishers, but smaller conferences can present greater opportunities to meet and have sustained discussions with publisher representatives. If conferences are too expensive (and for many graduate students they are), rely on your existing social network. Ask your advisor, faculty in your department, or alumni if there is anyone at their publisher you could speak to about your manuscript.

4. Write your dissertation as a book. If you have not yet completed your dissertation or are in the beginning stages of your graduate career, you may want to think about your dissertation as a book. This is a polarizing approach and one that will need to be worked out with your advisor. There are at least two ways of thinking about a dissertation. First, the dissertation-as-certification approach, which sees the dissertation as a document proving your abilities as a scholar. This generally means lengthy forays into historiography, rigorous citation using mostly archival sources, and favoring argument over narrative. Scholars advocating this approach see the dissertation as a showcase for all the skills you have learned as a graduate student and the defense of the project as certification that you belong in company of other professional academic historians. Second, the dissertation-as-book believers argue that since the real disciplinary standard is a publishable manuscript emphasis should be placed on those traits publishers find desirable – narrative, clear argument, and a clear writing style – over skill demonstration. While there is disagreement over which approach is best, writing the dissertation as a book has obvious benefits in the transition from manuscript to published book.

5. Write a different book. The most surprising suggestion I received was not to transform the manuscript into a book at all. Instead, these respondents suggested to think of the book as a totally different project than the dissertation. On the surface this seems ridiculous. I just spent five, six, seven years writing a dissertation and now you’re telling me to scrap it and start over! What a waste of time! Yet, when you think more deeply about divergences in form and audience, thinking about the book as a new project makes more sense (particularly if you took the dissertation-as-certification approach, as I did). One respondent put it particularly succinctly, “You don’t revise your dissertation; you steal from your dissertation while you’re writing your first book.” Thinking about your manuscript as a second project can free you to think more capaciously about your manuscript topic than trying to revise a dissertation project intended for a narrower audience and with more limited objectives.

These five points are heuristics for the manuscript-into-book transformation that I intend to follow over the next six months. I’m sure there will be disagreement and all of these points are subject to debate (and if you have further questions or comments feel free to post below). Thank you to everyone who responded and I hope this short memo will help graduate students feel a little less lost after they defend.

Structural Diversity in the University Ecosystem: Review of Harvey J. Graff’s “Undisciplining Knowledge”

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[Review of Harvey J. Graff. Undisciplining Knowledge: Interdisciplinarity in the Twentieth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015) first appeared at the Society for U.S. Intellectual History, February 14, 2016]

In Undisciplining Knowledge: Interdisciplinarity in the Twentieth Century, Harvey J. Graff takes a problem-based approach to the history of interdisciplinarity across the 20th century American research university. His project spans the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences showing how interdisciplinary efforts have been hindered by problems of definition, integration, and rivalry. Undisciplining Knowledge showcases the potential for a unified history of interdisciplinarity in the 20th century. The broad scope of Graff’s project, however, makes it a microcosm of the very promises and pitfalls of interdisciplinary programs that are the subject of investigation.

Though Undisciplining Knowledge is argumentatively structured around interdisciplinary problems, its chapters are organized around pairs of fields. In chapter four, for example, Graff pairs cognitive science and the new histories (represented by the various “turns” to social, cultural, and women’s and gender histories) to examine two fields whose practical implementation of interdisciplinarity appear irreconcilable. Whereas cognitive science acted like an octopus “reaching out its intelligent arms to encompass many fields” under a single interdiscipline, the new histories acted more like bats which “generally located within disciplines” “are difficult to see” as forming a cohesive interdisciplinary whole (124). While cognitive science and new histories seem to have little in common – the former the swaggering epitome of a new scientific revolution and the latter an orphaned method residing on the disciplinary margins – they are united by a problem: they are everywhere, but are they really anywhere? The comparison of cognitive science and the new histories is Graff at his synthetic best, pulling together seemingly incompatible fields of study and finding their common ground.

Beyond finding the shared roots of diverse interdisciplinary projects, Undisciplining Knowledge argues for a closer examination of the relationship between disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship. In contrast to “the assumptions of many proponents and opponents of interdisciplinarity,” Graff contends that disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity are “inextricably linked” (2). The imagined boundary separating them is permeable and was often crossed. This was particularly true of the early 20th century American research university where the institutional power dividing fields of study was not yet fixed, allowing interdisciplinary studies to transform into disciplines. Graff uses biology and sociology as examples of interdisciplines that were codified into disciplines by the research university. Biology was able to combine aspects of physiology, zoology, and botany to establish itself undisciplining knowledgeas the foundational science of life upon which specialized scientific disciplines were built. Sociology was similarly motivated to become a general science of society. Unlike biology, however, sociology failed to integrate its disciplinary influences. Furthermore, it never captured scientific prestige like biology owing to its ambivalence regarding quantitative versus qualitative research and its association with “subjective” political and social causes (49-51). Integration became a core concept for later interdisciplines like communications, which sought to attain disciplinary status through agglomeration of prior disciplinary influences.

Graff’s enthusiasm for early interdisciplinarity is at variance with its expansion after World War II. While early interdisciplinarity represented the fluidity of intellectual exchange in the nascent research university, postwar interdisciplinarity was little more than a watchword for scientific innovation and a tool for disciplinary critique. Motivated by the success and lavish federal funding given to interdisciplinary “big science” projects during World War II, social scientists and humanists attempted to secure funding and institutional prestige by creating new interdisciplinary fields, which highlighted their scholarship’s scientific features. These new fields included behavioral science, social relations, and operations research. Harvard University’s Department of Social Relations, for example, was an attempt by Talcott Parsons to recast sociology as scientific. Social relations’ failed to develop as an interdiscipline, however, because of “a signal failure to develop common problems, protocols, or practices for research” (99). Social relations not only failed to integrate personnel from outside sociology into its interdisciplinary field, it also did not meaningfully differentiate itself from sociology and was perceived by adjacent social scientific fields as an attempt by Parsons to expand sociology’s – and by extensions his own personal – influence. To Graff, interdisciplinary investigation should be problem-driven, but in the mid- and late 20th century interdisciplinarity transformed into a species of academic “cool hunting” whereby labelling a field as interdisciplinary tagged it as innovative to prospective funders.

While Undisciplining Knowledge provides a wide lens to examine problems of interdisciplinarity across the 20th century American research university, its breadth is a hindrance to the examination of individual fields, a criticism not unlike those made by disciplinary specialists about interdisciplinarity itself. Graff’s work is encumbered by its organization. While the book’s argument is structured around interdisciplinary problems, its chapters are organized chronologically by discipline. This leads to repetition as well as confusion. Problems of definition and integration persist throughout Undisciplining Knowledge, but Graff does not use them to connect the chapters into a narrative whole. The result is narrative fragmentation. Chapters serve as potted comparative histories of disciplines and interdisciplines, instead of telling a comprehensive story of academic interdisciplinarity in the 20th century. Furthermore, Graff, though willing to criticize his characters for failing to distinguish between disciplinarity, interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, and transdisciplinarity, does not define these terms. He, rightly, does not want to impose a singular definition onto diverse stories of interdisciplinarity. It is not clear, however, what Graff means by interdiscplinarity or why fields like cognitive science and materials science fail to achieve authentic interdisciplinarity whereas literacy studies and new histories are successful.

One further criticism concerns Graff’s professional involvement in two of the movements: new histories and literacy studies. Within the new histories movement, Graff highlights the Social Science History Association (SSHA) as “an interdisciplinary organizational infrastructure for the new histories” (169). He highlights three distinctive features of SSHA that made it a productive, interdisciplinary association: 1) a non-disciplinary space not interested in professional advancement, 2) a flexible space for positivist exploration, and 3) “real intellectual diversity” based in a “climate of mutual tolerance” (169-170). As a former SSHA president, Graff admits his biases toward it and recognizes its limits as a scholarly organization, but he fails to interrogate how SSHA was a site for the same positivist explorations that underpinned history’s attempt to achieve scientific recognition. Like the relationship between sociology and social relations, positivist new histories rooted in quantitative research can be interpreted as an attempt to highlight scientific aspects of the historical method to accrue scientific prestige.

A similar problem is at play in Graff’s analysis of literacy studies. Literacy studies is applauded for being a problem-oriented interdiscipline. Its aims are also practical and applied, interested in “doing” interdisciplinarity instead of just talking it. Graff remains personally invested in literacy studies’ success owing to his work on LiteracyStudies@OSU, an interdisciplinary project aimed at improving information access across fields ranging from civics to health.[1] Graff seems to create a false dichotomy, however, between literacy studies and other applied interdisciplines like material and cognitive science. The problem of cognition, for example, unifies cognitive science and was, at least partially, an organizing principle for the field. A more sympathetic view of scientific interdisciplinarity would make the author appear less biased towards his own projects and more readily account for the proliferation of scientific interdisciplinarity in the late-20th century.
Undisciplining Knowledge is a wonderful book to think with. It brings together a diverse disciplinary historiography through analysis of common problems. A must for historians specializing in the history of the social sciences or of higher education, the book’s breadth demonstrates the broad interest in interdisciplinary experimentation during the 20th century.

It also illustrates the common struggles shared by interdisciplines across the American research university, positing the possibility of shared dialogue across the university about how disciplines and interdisciplines can better function together as part of a harmonious university ecosystem. Even Undisciplining Knowledge’s flaws are interesting. Given that Graff recapitulates many of interdisciplinarity’s problems when writing its history, I wonder if the structural challenges facing interdisciplines (definition, integration, and rivalry) are surmountable? Can rivalries between interdisciplines be transcended? Reaching a rapprochement, if not a solution, to backbiting between fields is essential going forward as scholars struggle against the common foes of financial downsizing, adjunctification, and exogenous questions about the research university’s viability in a world of think tanks and big business. Graff’s book gestures towards a solution rooted in historicizing the current structure of the research university. It remains to be seen, however, whether recognizing the university’s institutional history will be enough to compel scholars working across the university to preserve it in the face of outside threats.

[1] Visit http://literacystudies.osu.edu/ for more on Graff’s project.

Tackling the #Historiannchallenge

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Here’s the Ann Little blog post that inspired this self-interview.

Matthew Linton: The New York Times Book Review Interview.

What books are currently on your nightstand?

Usually, I keep two books I’m currently reading on my nightstand: one fiction and one non-fiction (usually history). I just finished Ian McEwen’s Sweet Tooth, which is a love story set in the atmosphere of the cultural Cold War in Great Britain. It was enjoyable, though not particularly profound. For nonfiction, I’m reading Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. I’m nearly finished and find Piketty’s argument about growing wealth inequality compelling. If you’re looking for this century’s Marx though you best look elsewhere, Piketty is not a particularly radical thinker.

What was the last truly great book you read?

Earlier this year I read David Igler’s The Great Ocean about the history of the Pacific Ocean and was blown away. Igler’s ability to tell a story about imperialism, global trade, epidemiology, and environmental history is incredible. A definite must read, even if you’re not drawn to Pacific history.

Who are the best historians writing today?

Since I’m not a particularly fluid writer, I feel uncomfortable passing judgment on others’ prose. That being said, there are a plethora of historians – and young historians in particular – making important contribution to contemporary historical scholarship. Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, Odd Arne Westad, Sam Moyn, James T. Kloppenberg, Daniel Rodgers, and Harold Isaacs are just a few of the many names that come immediately to mind.

What’s the best book ever written about American history?

This is obviously an impossible question to answer, since it presupposes a universal objective measure of quality for historical scholarship exists (hint: it doesn’t). But since I don’t want to be a total coward, I will reinterpret the question as “what is my favorite book ever written about American history?” Though there are many contenders, I always find myself returning to Richard Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition for inspiration about how to become a better writer and create three-dimensional characters. Hofstadter was one of the first historians whose writing made me want to become a historian, so there is also a sentimental attachment to his work.

Do you have a favorite biography?

Not particularly. I’ve never been a big biography reader. I am relying on a couple of biographies for my dissertation including Robert P. Newman’s Owen Lattimore and the “Loss” of China and John Evans’ John Fairbank and the American Understanding of Modern China. I am thankful for the hard work biographers have put into understanding these characters. These books have saved me hours in the archives.

What are the best military histories?

I don’t read too many military histories, but one I read recently, S.C.M. Paine’s The Wars For Asia, 1911-1949, which consolidates the various wars that embroiled Asia in the early 20th century into a single, unbroken conflict. It’s very well-written and unlike many military histories does not get caught up in the tactical minutiae of war. These strengths make it an ideal introductory text for those unfamiliar with the history of East Asia before the Cold War.

And what are the best books about African American history?

Most of my favorite books about African American history examine their role in shaping US foreign policy. Penny von Eschen’s Satchmo Blows Up the World about jazz ambassadors during the Cold War shows the way jazz musicians like Duke Ellington navigated their roles as disseminators of American liberalism and critics of American racism. Thomas Borstelmann’s The Cold War and the Color Line is another book that effectively shows the interrelationship between US advocacy of democracy abroad and unjust racial policies at home. Finally, Nico Slate’s Colored Cosmopolitanism, which examines the intellectual cross-pollination of the Indian Revolution and Civil Rights Movement, is pioneering in looking African American intellectual history in a global context.

During your many years of teaching, did you find students responded differently to the history books you assigned?

I have only been teaching for one year. I’m amazed how teaching 18-21 year olds makes me feel like the oldest person in the world.

What kind of reader were you as a child?

When I was a young child I was an active reader. I was addicted to the Goosebumps series and read as many of them as I could get my hands on. My grandmother worked at the local public library and supported my reading habit by buying and recommending me new books. As a teenager my interest in reading waned, I was much more interested in athletics and having fun with friends. Sophomore year of high school I was exposed to continental philosophy through a world history course and started reading Friedrich Nietzsche and, later, Michel Foucault. This changed my entire approach to reading and learning. I began devouring classic philosophy texts as well as great works of fiction. I haven’t stopped since.

If you had to name one book that made you who you are today, what would it be?

I am a composite of the many books I’ve read over my lifetime, but if I had to pick one book it would be G.W.F. Hegel’s The Philosophy of History. I was already interested in philosophy, but Hegel’s work showed me how philosophy and history were bound together. Since then, I’ve always found the best history is built on a strong theoretical foundation and the most successful philosophy remains grounded in historical evidence. Hegel’s work was also some of the first intellectual history I ever read and though it is much different then contemporary intellectual history scholarship, it was crucial in exposing me to the genre.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

Given the instability of the current political situation in the Middle East I would recommend Frederick Logevall’s Choosing War about LBJ’s decision to commit to American involvement in Vietnam. The crucial lesson of Logevall’s book is that offensive war is always a choice for the aggressor and that other options must always be seriously weighed.

You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited?

If we’re limited to literary figures, I’d choose Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Ellison, and Lu Xun. I’d predict substantial disagreement at the party.

What book did you feel as if you were supposed to like, but didn’t? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

I though John Gaddis’ biography of George Kennan was disappointing. It was too long and hagiographic. I also dislike Charles Postel’s The Populist Vision, but probably just because I don’t like the populists. The last book I put down without finishing was Norman Rush’s Mortals. It was very boring and, since I read fiction for enjoyment, I gave up after 400 pages (I blame Andy Seal).

What books are you embarrassed to not have read yet?

So many. I’ve never read any Jane Austen or Herman Melville. I should probably read the Bible all the way through at some point. In terms of history, I have somehow missed out on reading Jackson Lears’ No Place For Grace.

What do you plan to read next?

Up next is Christopher McKnight Nichols’ Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of the Global Age.

Not My Liberalism

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[first appeared on the Society for U.S. Intellectual History Blog, July 5, 2014]

Confusion about liberalism’s definition is ubiquitous in American popular and scholarly discourse. To the conservative Fox News set, liberalism has become a catch-all term for ineffective governance and flimsy morals. During the 2004 Presidential election Republicans had so successfully tarred liberalism that Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry shied away from using the term. In recent years a resurgent left has also been critical of liberalism without properly defining it. Scholarly magazines like Jacobin have often criticized unspecified liberals for embracing capitalism and refusing to take strong ethical stands on poverty and racism. While the left’s criticisms of liberals undoubtedly hold true for some liberals, without an agreed-upon definition of liberalism it’s difficult to determine if sweeping criticisms from the right and left are defensible.
In his rangy synthesis, Liberalism: The Life of An Idea, Edmund Fawcett attempts to provide an authoritative definition of liberalism. By picturing liberalism as a fluid philosophy continually reacting to social, political, and technological problems, Fawcett convincingly demonstrates why liberalism has endured for centuries while evading definition. Liberalism’s very nebulousness explains its success. The expansiveness of the term allows it to accommodate seemingly contradictory values, such as individual freedom and social security, without fragmenting. Fawcett’s descriptive argument about defining liberalism from 1830 until the present is largely successful. His prescriptive attempt to highlight liberalism’s value through careful definition is less successful however. In his attempt to salvage a unitary liberalism, Fawcett recapitulates many of its most grievous sins including the exclusion of non-Western voices, papering over substantive ideological differences between thinkers, and dismissing the troublesome history of political liberals in power.

Fawcett’s definition is chronological and thematic. Chronologically, Fawcett situates liberalism in four separate epochs (1830-1880, 1880-1945, 1945-1989, and after 1989). His liberalism is not a static philosophy. Instead, it’s continually adapting to address the problems of its era whether they be social, technological, or intellectual. To Fawcett, liberalism’s adaptability explains why it has endured despite challenges ranging from economic depression to world war. “The story of liberalism is in a way a coming-of-age tale as liberals learn, or fail to learn, from experience,” Fawcett tells his readers (6). Despite this seeming capitulation to the Whiggish liberal narrative, he is careful to avoid a simple story of continual progress. Examining the efflorescence of human rights thinking after World War II, Fawcett shows how the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights built an intellectual consensus among its diverse body of drafters only to watch that agreement erode once the Declaration was passed on to the UN’s member nations. Critics of human rights feared that the doctrine would be overused or misused to infringe on sovereignty or force reparations on former colonial powers. Human rights doctrine had no suitable response to these critics. In Fawcett’s words, “Intellectual disenchantment with human rights grew with a seeming failure to find stable, publicly available defenses for them against mockers, debunkers, and deniers” (295).

Anchoring Fawcett’s liberal chronology are four persistent themes: conflict, resistance to power, progress, and respect (10). By conflict he means that to liberals “social harmony was not achievable, and to pursue it was foolish” (10). Fawcett’s liberalism is not a utopian philosophy. Instead, it’s pragmatic and looks to find temporary, moderate solutions to assuage, not eliminate, conflict. Second, Fawcett’s liberals are skeptical about power. Power should never be absolute and liberals sought to check or limit power whenever it became concentrated. The third and fourth ideas, progress and respect, are both fundamental and perpetually in conflict. To Fawcett, liberals view “human character and human society as…not static but dynamic” (11). This dynamism possesses promise and peril. People have the ability to improve their lives and communities. At the same time, there is always the threat that progress could be lost, order could be disordered, and liberty could be bound. At the same time, liberals are sensitive to coercive improvement. Individual autonomy should be respected by superior authority. Good liberals should not “obstruct and intrude on people in pursuit of their chosen enterprises or beliefs” (11). Fawcett is sensitive that these four themes are often in conflict. Still, he views “such disputes as family quarrels, not as wars among rival sects” and consistent with the liberal worldview.

Fawcett fundamentally views liberalism as a “practice of politics” instead of a speculative philosophy (25). His focus on political ‘doers’ leads him to populate Liberalism with a diverse and unexpected selection of characters. There are the expected political totems – Abraham Lincoln, John Stuart Mill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt – but there are also surprise guests including the obscure Franz Schulze-Delitzsch, Republican President Herbert Hoover, and free-market economist Milton Friedman. Ultimately, Fawcett is only able to fuse thought and political practice until World War II. He admits that, “after 1945 the separation of ideas and politics appeared to be complete as each side professionalized itself” (316). Fortunately for Fawcett, this separation was never complete and though more speculative philosophers figure into the post-1945 sections, political practitioners like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher loom large. Fawcett also focuses on political contributions over great books. For example, he dwells at length on Mill’s undistinguished career in Parliament while devoting comparatively little attention to his landmark On Liberty. Though this is a bit frustrating for the intellectual historian, Fawcett’s focus on politics allows him to avoid the more abstract and abstruse aspects of philosophical and economic liberalism and cover greater temporal and geographic ground. This simplicity, when taken with Fawcett’s facility as a writer, also makes Liberalism a useful foundation text for undergraduate courses on liberal ideas or politics.

Liberalism is an admirable attempt to synthesize the diverse strands of liberal thought and practice. Regrettably, Fawcett’s examination of liberalism is flawed by a search for its singular origin. He is interested in defining and delineating liberalism, not ‘liberalisms’. Fawcett’s justification for singularity is twofold. First, he’s concerned that once liberalism is divided it’s susceptible to infinite fracture. Second, he’s concerned about questions of authenticity in a fractured liberal environment. To Fawcett, multiple liberalisms beg the question about which is the authentic or true liberalism. At best debates about authentic liberalism “risks turning an indispensible label into an unnecessary puzzle”, at worst it could lead to a “hunt for nonbelievers” and a violation of liberalism’s fundamental commitment to toleration (25-26).

In fact, Fawcett fails to avoid his second pitfall because of his search for a unified liberalism. By looking for a singular origin, he recapitulates liberalism’s tendency to exclude dissenting minority voices. His story of liberalism is limited to a white, Euro-American worldview. The first, and only, prominent female character in the book is Margaret Thatcher and (aside from all the political problems of having Thatcher as your only female voice) she is not introduced until page 379. Fawcett’s non-Euro-American representatives are George Orwell and Albert Camus who, despite being born in European colonies, were thoroughly enmeshed in and responsive to European ideas and politics. As Erez Manela and other have shown, liberalism was a potent global idea by the dawn of the 20th century.[1] Fawcett’s liberalism fails to take into account liberalism’s globalism and fails to mention non-Western thinkers who were essential to its expansion. Fawcett’s liberalism is capacious enough to include the likes of Michael Oakshott and John-Paul Sartre, why not Lu Xun, Sun Yat-sen, and Jawrahal Nehru?

Fawcett’s exclusion of non-Western contributors to liberal thought and practice is particularly troubling because he bristles at and dismisses the harm caused by Western liberal imperialism. He buys into the canard of the liberal civilizing mission. To Fawcett, liberal empire’s good intentions make imperial practice’s violence and folly justifiable, if not justified. After briefly conceding that there was no ideological conflict between liberalism and empire, he stumbles into defending liberal colonial domination as “not all rapine, domination, and unequal exchange” (198). Liberal empire brought “progress and modernity” to areas lacking technological innovation and egalitarian values (198). Furthermore, Fawcett’s liberal empires were not seen as hated conquerors by colonized peoples. In fact, “liberal benefits of modernity were often sought for and welcomed by colonized peoples” (199). Obviously, there were excesses. He admits “that in raising up backward peoples and showering them with the boons of modernity, the governments of liberal civilizations had them killed at the same time by the tens of thousands” (204).

The very capaciousness of Fawcett’s liberalism also presents problems. While some of his characters like German legal theorist Carl Schmitt act as foils for his liberal protagonists, Fawcett willingness to include intellectuals and politicians who are rarely understood as liberal and who did not view themselves as such is puzzling. He often accuses his characters of denying their own liberalism. “Friendly critics suspected MacIntyre was, in effect, a closet liberal”, “Sartre was more liberal than he cared to admit”, and “Oakeshott’s liberal quietism was apt for a ship in calm seas” (353, 336, 321). Strangely, Fawcett does not question his liberal exemplar’s bona fides.

He also omits prominent liberals who could disrupt his definition. There is no John F. Kennedy to upset his liberal characteristic of resistance to power. His omission of Kennedy also makes the relationship between liberalism and conservatism unidirectional. Conservatives like Hoover and Reagan may be closet liberals or have liberal aims. Fawcett’s liberals are not susceptible to conservatism’s allure however. Kennedy’s (or even Obama’s) technocratic liberal militarism could serve as a useful corrective to this imbalance. Just as under the proper conditions conservatives have embraced a narrative of progress, liberals have justified reaction and maintenance of the status quo when under threat.

Fawcett’s Liberalism mirrors the promise and peril of its intellectual namesake. It’s an ambitious synthesis and tackles an important problem. Fawcett’s delineation of liberalism as fluid and historically contingent provides a useful way of thinking about it as an ideology. Liberalism’s fluidity also partially explains why it has evaded definition for so long. Still, Liberalism shares its namesake’s flaws. Its principle protagonists are white men who speak in universals about ethics and good government while presuming that non-male, non-white, and non-western people will share their values. Its focus on political practice tacitly accepts liberal naturalism, denying that liberalism is a manmade ideology. Its capaciousness and toleration of dissent (at least among white men) make me question liberals’ depth of feeling about their values. I appreciate Fawcett’s genealogy of liberalism, but as someone who has sometimes defined himself as a liberal I found myself constantly thinking as I read his book, “I hope Fawcett’s liberalism isn’t my liberalism.”

[1] Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

Towards A Hi-Tech University?: Recapping THATCamp New England 2014

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As I wandered over to Boston University to my first THATCamp I wondered if I had made a terrible mistake. I was two hours late and had somehow mislabeled both the date and location of the event in my calendar. I’m also by no means a technology guru. Sure, I can deftly navigate social media and get excited about Apple’s software announcements, but I don’t know how to program or repair computers. I had heard a great deal about the positives of THATCamp over the years from fellow Brandeis graduate students – and technology hucksters – Lincoln Mullin and Shane Landrum. Yet, when I looked at the schedule chock full of unfamiliar acronyms (D3.JS anyone?) and struggled to get online access through Boston University’s guest network, I thought it would be a long couple of days.

Upon meeting the other participants in THATCamp however, my concerns were almost immediately dispelled. Everyone was welcoming and friendly. They were genuinely interested in my research – however technologically unsophisticated – and displayed a wide range of technological proficiency. THATCamp’s openness is not only due to its participants character, but also the “unconference” format. Unlike formal conferences, which rely on calls for papers to form a schedule of panels, THATCamp organizes its schedule the day of the conference. Individuals with expertise in a certain area or with a certain tool are encouraged to lead workshops, but everyone is free to contribute workshops or discussions on topics of interest or concern. I think this format encourages innovation and contributions by younger scholars. There were workshops and discussions led by undergraduates. There were workshops on new digital humanities tools like Omeka and D3.JS led by non-experts on the technology. While this sometimes resulted in a blind-leading-the-blind dynamic, it also fostered a community feel and encouraged cooperative problem solving.

THATCamp was also heartening because it facilitated frank conversation about problems of accessibility and employment. I was surprised to find many of the difficulties and frustrations I had about archive accessibility were shared by archivists and librarians. I quickly realized my surprise resulted from an unfamiliarity with prevailing wisdom outside my own field. I had simply never discussed copyright and permissions with the library sciences community. I hope conversations begun at THATCamp between historians, librarians, and archivists will continue as more collections are digitized. Employment was another topic on everyone’s mind. At a lively discussion session on MOOCs, concerns about online courses’ impact on an already depressed academic job market were openly debated. It became evident that different types of schools (private universities, tuition-dependent colleges, and large state universities) were interested in MOOCs for different reasons. Whereas private universities largely promoted MOOCs as a public relations tool to provide a platform to showcase their most prestigious faculty, large public institutions viewed MOOCs as a way of increasing the student body without having to provide costly boarding, eating, and learning facilities. No consensus emerged about MOOCs impact on academic jobs, though few saw a large-scale MOOC increase as a boon to the academic job market.

More than anything else, I saw at THATCamp an antidote to the rationalization of the university. I witnessed first hand interdisciplinarity’s benefits and saw how different academic perspectives – united by a common interest in technology – could come together to form a cohesive university community. I also saw how my training as a historian blinded me to solutions to certain problems. I have long been frustrated by the slow pace of archive digitization. I assumed that the slow pace was due to copyright restrictions combined with concerns about the long-term viability of corporeal archives in a digital world. Instead, by talking with archivists I learned that manpower and metadata are the two major hindrances to archive digitization. Scanning and properly tagging documents takes time and sloppy tagging could leave documents untraceable or make them uncitable. Similarly, digital humanists wholehearted embrace of technology and large digital projects forced me to reflect (yet again) on historians’ fusty obsession with monograph dissertations and book publishing in a world of big data and data visualization. Book publishing is a contracting industry. Furthermore, technology presents historians with so many other research and publishing mediums. Some universities have begun to allow digital stand-ins for dissertation chapters, but not many.

In all, THATCamp New England was a thrilling and eye-opening experience. Not only did I meet a bunch of fantastic people and learn about some cool tech, but I think I also glimpsed a possible future path for the university. The university – and the humanities in particular – have often been entranced by nostalgia for a better time when their model was paramount and scholars operated in a kind of bubble protected by iron gates and tenured positions. We don’t live in that world anymore. Our model is no longer innovative or desirable. That does not mean we have to give in to economic adjunctification and popular irrelevance however. Using a model cribbed from the tech industry emphasizing openness, collaboration, and leveraging in-demand skills, the humanities can not only be salvaged but can thrive. We just have to be willing to take the leap.

The ‘Lost Promise’ of Colored Solidarity

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Review of Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India by Nico Slate

[first appeared on the Society for U.S. Intellectual History Blog, March 7, 2014]

In Spring 1941, a colored woman boarded the “whites only” car of a segregated train in the American South. Crossing the Louisiana border, she was asked by the ticket collector to move to a colored car or else she “will regret it” (1) She refused and the ticket collector left to get the engineer. When he returned however, he did not ask her to move. He had learned something new. “You are an Asian” he sneered before skulking out of the car (1). He would “not bother her” for the rest of the trip (1).

The woman in question was Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, an Indian social reformer and friend of Mohandas Gandhi. Kamaladevi’s refusal to cooperate with the apparatus of Southern segregation was a single episode in a larger solidarity between Indians and African Americans dating back to the late 19th century. African Americans like W.E.B. Du Bois were vocal advocates of Indian independence. Similarly, Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru called for an end to racial discrimination against African Americans. In his remarkable book, Colored Cosmopolitanism, Nico Slate traces the history of this solidarity, its roots in race and anti-imperialism, and its limits in the tumultuous middle decades of the 20th century. While Slate’s narrative demonstrates the possibility of long-term transnational solidarities, the enduring lesson of Colored Cosmopolitanism is the difficulty of preserving transnational cooperation in a world of nations and national interests.

At the core of Slate’s book is the concept of colored cosmopolitanism. He defines colored cosmopolitans as those who “fought for the freedom of the ‘colored world,’ even while calling into question the meanings of both color and freedom” (2). Slate’s story is one of radical contingency. As the case of Kamaladevi demonstrates, race could be a powerful rallying point to combat oppression even while it was an ideology that was used to buttress oppression in the United States and India. A shared colored identity could bring together disparate figures like Mohandas Gandhi and George Washington Carver just as it could divide northern and southern Indians – the former of which sometimes claimed whiteness on the grounds of distant Aryan ancestry.  Slate also emphasizes the fluidity of race. Colored identity was not fixed and, as the ambiguous legal position of Indians as a race in the United States attests, subject to pressures from within and without. Domestic anti-immigrant sentiment could lead to Indians being classed with Asians even as Cold War international pressure compelled the United States government to discourage discrimination against Indian diplomats and cultural envoys, particularly in the South.

Slate calls Colored Cosmopolitanism an “interactional history” where “people, ideas, and political pressure flow between regions of the world” (3).  Focusing his history on moments of cooperation between Indians and African Americans allows Slate to have a wider temporal framework. The book’s focus on moments of close cooperation is compounded by Slate’s commitment to intellectual history. Most chapters focus on a particular exchange of ideas between Indians and African Americans; for example, the chapter “Soul Force” focuses on Gandhi’s philosophy of satyagraha –  nonviolent civil disobedience – and its reception in the United States by intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes.

Despite Slate’s protestations to the contrary, Colored Cosmopolitanism is a book about relations between Indian and African American elites. The most prominent figures in the book – Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Mohandas Gandhi, Jawaharlal and Pandit Nehru, and Martin Luther King, Jr. – are also some of the best known figures from the Indian independence and Civil Rights movements. Slate does make an effort to include non-elite voices by including letters to Indian and African American newspapers commenting on Indian-African American cooperation. These letters provide some of the most fascinating glimpses into the extent colored solidarity penetrated the communities Gandhi and King represented. A letter in The Chicago Defender paints Gandhi as a 20th century Moses, leading the Indians out of British colonial slavery (111). Non-elites were also some of the most vocal critics Slate presents of colored solidarity. A letter from an Indian American named K. Romola proclaimed “his distaste for ‘the black ones’” and expressed hope that “if we [India] become free in the course of ten or twenty years we are after a slice of Africa, too” (88). These examples of non-elite voices notwithstanding, the bulk of Colored Cosmopolitanism presents a narrative of solidarity between intellectual and cultural elites apart from the grassroots organizing that was central to the successes of both the Indian independence movement and the Civil Rights Movement.

Like several other recent books about the Civil Rights Movement including Risa Goluboff’sThe Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2007) and Nancy MacLean’s Freedom is Not Enough(2006), Slate’s Colored Cosmopolitanism is ultimately a story of missed opportunities. The solidarity that existed between Indian and African American elites leading up to Indian Independence in 1947 could not overcome the pull of national interests in the bipolar political climate of the Cold War. Figures like Nehru who had been outspoken advocates of African American equality were compelled by a combination of generous American aid and external threats to mute their criticisms of American domestic issues. The Asian-African Conference held in Bandung, Indonesia in April 1955 was the clearest expression of the breakdown of colored solidarity. Though many prominent African Americans attended the conference, it was primarily “a meeting of nations, in which a unified opposition to imperialism and racism was complicated by international politics and Cold War diplomacy” (198). Meanwhile, some African American leaders avoided attending the conference because of its “pink tinge” and the presence of some prominent Communist representatives, most notably Chinese master diplomat Zhou Enlai (199).

Furthermore, the book’s final chapter largely discredits the connection between the methods of nonviolent resistance employed by King during the Civil Rights Movement and Gandhi’s during the Quit India push. Slate argues King’s ability to create the persona of a “black Gandhi” whose tactics had a proven track record in India and who was an unthreatening character to potential white allies was the most important legacy of colored cosmopolitanism for the Civil Rights Movement (204). Slate lament’s King’s decision to limit Gandhi’s satyagraha “to a narrow conception of nonviolence” which splintered the Civil Rights Movement along cosmopolitan (King) and nationalist (Black Panthers) lines. Had King been more willing to appropriate the radical elements of Gandhi’s legacy – notably his antiracism and anti-imperialism – a unified civil rights movement could have taken place, possibly with greater success.

Colored Cosmopolitanism is a thoughtful, important book that puts questions of race and imperialism into an international intellectual history framework. Few books have approached questions of the transnational transmission of ideas between the United States and Asia with Slate’s sensitivity and grace. His restraint is also impressive. Even while extolling its merits, Slate is willing to acknowledge the limits and shortcomings of colored solidarity as a transnational philosophy in a world of nations. Hopefully, Colored Cosmopolitanism will serve as a model for historians looking to explore how American and Asian ideas have interacted and influenced one another.

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