The Intelligentsia Goes to Washington

"You know how Obama always said, 'This is our moment; this is our time?' " Yale law professor Dan Kahan told the Washington Post. "Well, academics and smart people think, 'Hey, when he says this is our time, he's talking about us.' "

As both supporters and naysayers agree, president-elect Obama is bringing a new intellectualism to Washington, a natural aristocracy that would warm Thomas Jefferson's heart. The Post's article notes the staggering numbers of Obama's appointments thus far that went to the nation's top universities. There is some debate, despite the debacle of the leadership of eight years of an unintellectual president and his cronies (most of whom, the Post notes, didn't go to great schools), over whether staffing the administration with the intelligentsia is a great idea. As one libertarian law professor noted, "These degrees confer knowledge but not judgment. Their heads are on grander themes . . . and they'll trip on obstacles on the ground."

As a "leftist academic" in training, I am puzzled by the idea that higher education teaches knowledge rather than judgment. In the humanities, our goal as PhD students is to learn how to think and where to access information, not to memorize all there is to know. We learn to evaluate claims and the best ways to prove an argument. These logical reasoning abilities, which are similar to those taught in law schools, should equip people well to serve in government. As for the idea that academics have their heads in the clouds, it is true that some academics deal with the theoretical rather than the realities on the ground, but these don't tend to be the people that enter public service. Even so, having some visionaries in the mix could help policy makers see the bigger picture and the implications of their decisions--things to which this administration has been obscenely blind.

The question all of this leaves me with, actually, is whether this is my time, too. Legal, economic, and policy scholars are obvious players in politics, but what is the historian's role? This circles back to my perennial question about the usefulness of studying history. Here are a few places I'd like to see historians put to work:

• Department of Education: the analytical skills that history teaches should be better integrated into teaching; studies have shown consistently low levels of historical knowledge among American schoolchildren, leaving them ignorant of where we've been and how this can help guide where we're going
• State Department: the cultural diplomacy efforts coming out of State have been dismal and academic guidance about how to speak to people in different parts of the world is needed; foreign policy makers could also benefit from historical perspective
• Department of the Interior: since this department deals with Native Americans and arbitrates their claims--but has done so quite poorly--more historians are needed here as researchers and advisor
• Supreme Court: in a court where precedent is so important, why not appoint a legal historian (a person with a JD and a PhD) to the bench?
  

The president-elect at independence mall

I was surprised to learn on the evening news last night that president-elect Obama and most of the nation's governors were in Philadelphia yesterday. It appears to have been more gimmick than substance, but the illustrious group met in Congress Hall for an address from Obama. What struck me most when I saw the video of the governors sitting upright on the straight-backed wooden benches was, of all things, the light.

(Photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Times)

Despite the film crews, the room was lit mostly by natural light, just as it would have been when a much earlier band of political leaders met in this room. Accustomed to the fluorescent glare of the senate and house chambers, I suddenly saw these politicians as people, not television stars. They were people who looked slightly ill at ease sharing the stiff seats in a room where the American republic took shape and whose predecessors left them a legacy that is becoming harder and harder to fulfill.

What Obama's Victory Means to Me

"Since the beginning of our American history we have been engaged in change, in a perpetual, peaceful revolution"--FDR

Yesterday was the latest stage in that peaceful revolution. From Jefferson to Jackson to FDR to Reagan, the election of a new president has often ushered in a new era. For me, it is a privilege to be a part of President-elect Obama's revolution. There are moments in history which are only seen as pivotal in retrospect, and other moments that the historical actors know will have resounding importance. The election of Barack Obama is certainly one of the latter moments; the celebrations in the streets around the country and the world attest to that.

I had only a minor role in this peaceful revolution: a few hours here and there volunteering to help get out the vote during the primaries, register new voters, and arranging rides to the polls on election day. The funny thing about this revolution is that the thresh hold for participation seemed to be as simple as believing in Obama. Everybody I heard on their cell phones yesterday--including friends who weren't from the U.S. and couldn't vote here--was announcing, "We did it!"

We. The power of Us. Of the many, rather than the few. Of the hopeful, not the cynical. That is the source of Obama's power and why we expressed collective jubilation in the streets last night. He made us believe that we could make a difference, not just in individual lives but in the way we govern ourselves, the way we discuss politics, the way we conceive of race. That's why his victory is not just his own, or even African-Americans'.

This is only my second time voting for president, and I did not grow up in a time or a place where race or gender were obvious barriers to success. I grew up hearing that "anybody could be president," and it never disturbed me that all of our presidents had been white males. It was only a matter of time, I always felt. Yet I was surprised at the elation I felt yesterday after I pressed the button to vote for our first African-American president. I always knew the day would come, but the reality of it made me so happy I practically skipped down the street as I left the polls. I had voted for a man who might not have even been able to vote, much less run for president, when my parents were growing up.

This victory does not just mean that anybody can become president. It means that even in a country where there is still bigotry and hate, in a world riven by divisions of class and ethnicity and religion, there is space to halt and change paths. Where that path is going to lead we can't be sure. But for the first time I am more than just wishing for a change--I have seen that change and I have been part of it.

In violent revolutions, there is anger; in peaceful revolutions, there is hope. I cried tears of joy last night, and this morning I awoke to a new America.

The Socialist Mystique

I've been puzzled recently by why the crowds at McCain rallies are booing wildly at McCain and Palin's claims that Obama is a socialist who wants to "spread the wealth." Part of my confusion is due to the fact that I have no problem with redistribution of wealth, but I think a larger part is because calling somebody a socialist hasn't been a common political tactic for most of my lifetime. I seriously doubt that most Americans even know what socialism is. In that case, what is the resonance of the term for people a generation older than I, people for whom "socialist" is a bad word?

I initially hypothesized that socialism is just a 21st-century way of accusing Obama of being a communist, and I'm well aware that calling somebody a communist during the Cold War was both a very serious charge and a cynical political tool. To be a communist was--as, if you follow McCain's rhetoric, being a socialist is--to be anti-American. What I hadn't considered was the connection such accusations had to race. As Adam Serwer explains in the American Prospect, "Conservatives, now and in the past, have turned to 'socialism' and 'communism' as shorthand to criticize black activists and political figures since the civil-rights era."

What I am still at a loss to explain is the McCain supporters' horror at the idea of "spreading the wealth." That is (to a limited degree) what taxes and church tithes have done for centuries. Were the Republican party still pro-small government and anti-spending, I could understand opposition to this idea. But can you remember who our last fiscally-conservative, Republican president was? Popular consesus among my historian friends says--Herbert Hoover. Ah, the irony.

Rallying together

"I didn't want to have to tell my kids, twenty years from now, that there was this amazing movement that drew thousands of people to rallies across the country--and I never went to one," I told my friend as we were leaving yesterday's rally in West Philadelphia. Obama has been to Philly several times in this campaign, and I've somehow missed the chance to see him every time. Until yesterday.

The rally at 52nd and Locust St was Obama's fourth of the day in Philly, scheduled to begin around 1 p.m. I boarded the bus from Center City at 10:15 to head over and get in line. As it turned out, almost everybody on the bus was going to the same place. When we got off of the bus, we joined a stream of people arriving in a neighborhood that usually doesn't draw visitors. As a blogger for The New Republic described it, the block closed off for the rally "could easily be a Hollywood backlot stand-in for any depressed inner-city strip in the country." The street is lined with awnings advertising fried chicken, pizza, and even "Cousin Danny's Erotic Den."

It took me a while to find the end of the line--by 11 a.m., when I arrived, there were two lines that each stretched over two blocks. For some reason, I didn't mind standing in line for two hours. Even when the whole system disintegrated and throngs just pushed into the area to watch the speech, I wasn't as annoyed as I would usually be at such unfairness. And when, from almost 2 blocks back from the podium, I could only catch a glimpse of the top of Obama's head--and only when I stood on tip-toes on the police barrier--I wasn't that frustrated. And somehow, it didn't matter that I didn't hear much of what Obama said, or that what I did hear was pretty much the same as what I've heard him say dozens of times before on t.v.

Yesterday's rally wasn't, for me at least, about seeing Obama up-close as much as it was about being part of a movement. While some have questioned or even mocked the optimism of Obama's campaign, I can find only hopefulness in a crowd of 20,000 people of widely-varying background coming together in an inner-city neighborhood in the spirit of improving their country. It was the most mixed crowd I've ever been a part of--whether by age, gender, class, or race. As the African-American man standing next to me said, "This is just wonderful. It's like a rainbow."

Irony, doggy style

This was perhaps the most creative "costume" at the dog festival in Rittenhouse Square 2 weeks ago.

Protesting Palin

The one and only Sarah "Barracuda" Palin graced my neighborhood with her presence on Friday night. We heard on local news in the afternoon that she'd be stopping by a local bar for a fundraiser. It just so happened that our weekly department happy hour was at the bar right next door. So, as crowds began to gather outside and there were signs that the motorcade was about to arrive, we abandoned our drinks to join the Obama supporters/Palin haters outside.

How, exactly, do you protest somebody's mere presence? There were a number of clever signs, ranging from "I'm more qualified to be VP than Palin" to "Sarah Palin? Thanks but no thanks!" Others addressed specific issues relating to Palin, from reproductive choice to banned books.

I often wonder about the purpose of protests, especially small ones like this. For me, at least, being there and chanting with the crowd was a way to release the frustration and anger I've felt since Palin was picked at the republican VP nominee. I can only hope we made her uncomfortable enough in the neighborhood to keep her from a return visit.

Ignorance and the American Voter

There are two things I think every voter in America should be at least vaguely knowledgeable about: recent political history and candidate's current policy positions. In both this campaign and the last one I worked on, I wanted to be able to engage with voters who were undecided and make the case for the candidate I was supporting. But as I wrote recently, American politics and the media coverage of it seem to operate on truthiness rather than truth, on instincts rather than facts. It's hard to engage with voters and have a meaningful debate when they are utterly uninformed.

The author of a recent book entitled Just How Stupid Are We? Facing the Truth About the American Voter argues that once television news became more popular than newspapers, "shallowness was inescapable as Americans began judging politicians by how they looked and acted." Voters today are more ignorant than ever on even the basics of our political system. If only 2 in 10 Americans knows how many senators we have, can we really expect them to know the candidates positions on the issues?

Being informed is not just about reading up on policy during the elections, though. A deeper understanding of recent political history is often necessary to really understand candidates' positions. A perfect example is John McCain and the Keating 5, particularly given what's happening with our economy right now.

This amusing video from Blogger Interrupted illustrates my point about lack of both historical and policy knowledge perfectly. Enjoy!

Registering Stories

Yesterday I spent a while at the Obama campaign checking over voter registration forms before the information was entered into the campaign's database. I thought it would be a pretty boring job; all I had to do was review all of the required fields and make sure things were filled in properly. As it turned out, though, sometimes the data told a story.

For instance, a fellow volunteer and I each found a registration form which had the word "human" filled in for race. It's optional to list race, so we have to assume that these forms were filled out by two people registering at the same time who decided to make either a statement or a joke. Then there were the ones with "change of party" checked off at the top and "Democrat" checked off below. Since we're past the primaries, changing party affiliation at this point is most likely a statement of great frustration.

One voter I noticed was born on November 1, 1990. That means he is just making it; if he had been born 5 days later, he would have had to wait another four years to vote for president. Other voters were at the other end of the spectrum; I saw many forms for people born in the 1920s or 1930s who were just registering for the first time. If this is really the first time these people felt compelled to vote, the election is even more monumental than I'd thought before.


P.S.--In retrospect, I realize that the way I was reading these registrations is actually the way social historians read data. Some historians can do really sophisticated analysis from data just like these forms, ranging from immigration forms to census records to account books. It's not the type of history that's ever

The Triumph of Truthiness

A blogger on Daily Kos today stated what's been on my mind a lot lately: "For Republicans, there is no longer any moral taboo whatsoever against lying outright." While lying isn't an exclusively Republican phenomenon, it certainly figures large for the Karl Rove Republicans. The problem seems to be that to Rove and his followers, "truthiness" is more important than facts--and, sadly, the media has played along.

Truthiness, a word coined by Stephen Colbert, was defined by the Macmillian English Dictionary as "the quality of stating facts that you believe or want to be true, rather than stating facts that are known to be true." Wishing something was true doesn't make it so: in Freud's terms, that's what creates an illusion. Illusions derive from and play to our instincts rather than our intellects.

We know all too well from the Republicans' attacks on Obama, evolution, global warming and academia how they feel about intellectualism. Bush, Rove, and his followers represent the triumph of truthiness and instinct at the expense of rational thought. You can't debate an instinct; but when does truth via instinct--truthiness--become lying?

Fortunately, two groups are fighting truthiness with truth. FactCheck.org is a nonpartisan organization that is doing the job the media isn't: revealing the truth behind politicians' claims (this site, too, avoids the term "lying" to use more neutral words like "flubs" or "false claims"). Media Matters investigates conservative "misinformation" spread by the media.

I want to live in a country of truth rather than truthiness, of intellect rather than instinct. As this campaign season progresses, I'm increasingly worried that truthiness is winning the battle.

Update: WaPo covers this same topic. The article notes that "Fed up, the Obama campaign broke a taboo on Monday and used the "L-word" of politics to say that the McCain campaign was lying about the Bridge to Nowhere."

Drive-in Delights

When I came across a blog post recently that featured Weber's Famous Root Beer in Pennsauken, New Jersey, I knew it was a place I had to check out. It's a drive-in that serves burgers, milkshakes, and most importantly, root beer floats. Since it's close to where my grandparents live, the three of us stopped there on a sunny afternoon for my very first drive-in experience.

This was not the first time my grandparents had been to a drive-in, so they had an easier time handling their floats than I did. While I love the concept, it is a bit challenging to eat a float filled to the brim while sitting in the car. Drive-ins were really popular in the 1950s and 1960s--A&W Root Beer had over 2,000 of them by the 1960s--so I'm guessing that with experience, you must get more adept at in-car float-eating. Hopefully I'll be working on that skill again in the near future.

Satirizing inspiration

Despite my own tendency to be cynical, I've been alternately surprised, amused, and distressed by the satires of Barack Obama this past week. The only way the media seems able to describe what Obama symbolizes to his enthusiastic (even ecstatic) followers is through satirizing him as the Second Coming. See, for example, this political cartoon or The Daily Show's mock bio. While I think both of these are funny, the comment of one aging white politician to another in the political cartoon is telling--"Ok, this is too much." It's as if the liberal establishment, too, isn't quite sure what to make of the fervor of Obama's followers. These old white men have never drawn the crowds Obama has, and I get the sense that they have never seen it as their role to inspire people or even really to shake things up.

When people are inspired, of course, there's a much greater chance that things will get shaken up. It's a fear of what these inspired crowds might do that I see in David Brook's stinging satire of Obama's acceptance speech. The most scathing line of the column addressed how Brooks sees my generation, which has largely backed Obama:

We meet today to pass the torch to a new generation of Americans, a generation that came of age amidst iced chais and mocha strawberry Frappuccinos®, a generation with a historical memory that doesn’t extend back past Coke Zero.

If my generation could remember what happened in past decades free of fancy caffeinated beverages, Brooks suggests, we might not latch on to Obama. But in fact, any memory of how our nation has changed when spurred by the leadership of inspirational figures does just the opposite.

History remember moments when people have come together in common cause to fight injustices, not through cynical satires, but as turning points. No matter how this election turns out, I hope this movement follows through on the passion of this campaign to effect some desperately-needed change in America.

Fall jitters

I returned to Philadelphia from my summer break today, returning to cooler weather and a stack of mail-ordered books. Tomorrow begins three days of intensive training to be a teaching assistant. It's the first time I've started a school year in which I'll be teaching, not just taking classes. While I may not have to worry about a syllabus or lectures yet, I do have to worry about...well, to be honest, I'm not even sure!

One thing I do wonder about is how I'll relate to my students. I was insulated completely from undergrads in my first year of graduate school, and I'm not sure that was a good thing. I don't know what the typical Penn undergrad is like or what they expect from their classes. I do know that I've made sure they can't see my facebook profile.

Going back to school doesn't have the same feeling in graduate school--no special first day outfit, no nervousness about whether you'll like your teachers, no readjustment to schoolwork after a summer of leisure. This fall, maybe I'll finally start to get a sense of what it feels like from the other side.

Research Trip, Post #4: History Repeats Itself

While I was in Providence doing research, I took a day trip to Newport to tour the Victorian mansions there. When I was younger, I always felt in awe of opulent historic mansions. It felt as if such splendor was a relic of an excessive past.

The reality, though, is that these megamansions are still being built today by the super rich. Mansions that, in a contemporary context, are appalling in their over-the-top expenditures and are objects more of curiosity than of admiration. These mansions, like their Gilded Age predecessors, are monuments to conspicuous consumption. They are structures that force you to wonder whether anybody should ever be able to amass that much money. Who really needs 24-karat gold fixtures in the bathrooms? (Donald Trump, apparently).

Somehow, we seem more apt to remember the less-than-savory ways some of today's megarich have acquired the money to build such houses. Lavish home expenditures are often raised in corruption trials; newspapers reported that Enron exec Ken Lay's mansion cost $7 million, and today's charges against Senator Ted Stevens allege that he took bribes in the form $250,000 of work on his house.

When I toured the Vanderbilts' mansion, The Breakers, I heard all about the marble imported from Italy, the family portraits, the size (65,000 sq. ft. and 70 rooms), and the decorating choices. But I didn't hear much about how the money--$150 million in today's dollars--came into the family. I didn't see the servants quarters or hear about how (poorly) they lived. Because let's be honest: the hard truth takes away from the romance of the house.

Good history is not romantic. It's irresponsible to leave out the realities of these mansions in the tours given to throngs of admiring and uncritical tourists. I don't think tourists would enjoy the houses any less for getting a fuller story; if anything, the realities will sound awfully familiar.

Research Trip, Post #3: Boston's Urban Wilderness

When I mapped the course I'd need to walk to get between two of the places where I was doing research one day--the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Museum of Fine Arts--I saw that my route was going to run along a mysterious patch of green labeled as the "Back Bay Fens." I knew that a fen was a swamp, so I wasn't sure what to expect on my mile-long walk. I was pleasantly surprised by a curving drive along the edge of a slightly-marshy wilderness.


The area wasn't always naturally beautiful. The park was created in 1879 to solve the problem of putrid waters in the area. Frederick Law Olmsted, the famous landscape designer, came up with a plan that flushed out the waters and restore the tidal marsh. The area was still connected to the sea at that time, but that changed in later decades and the fens are now freshwater. Little of Olmsted's original design remains, replaced by sports fields and formal gardens.

Olmsted's vision for the "Emerald Necklace" of parks he developed in Boston was to create

a ground to which people may easily go when the day’s work is done, and where they may stroll for an hour, seeing hearing and feeling nothing of the bustle and jar of the streets, where they shall, in effect, find the city put far away from them...

The appearance of the fens may have changed in the past century, but it remains a retreat. I certainly found it to be a calming walk after a morning of hurried scavaging in the archives.

Research Trip, Post #2: Cornish

My favorite American artist, Thomas Dewing, painted "Spring" on the left with Mt. Ascutney in the background. On the right, you can see the mountain from the loggia of Saint Gaudens's studio. It's possible that Dewing set up his models (who were usually friends in Cornish) in the field here.

On the first weekend of my research trip, I had a chance to do some sightseeing in New Hampshire. I've been wanting to visit Cornish, N.H. for years now. I first discovered that there had once been an artist colony there when I did a research paper in 2004 on Maxfield Parrish. Parrish was an illustrator and painter who studied here in Philadelphia and later spent his summers with a group of artists in Cornish. That group was led by a sculptor named Augustus Saint Gaudens and also included a group of artists whose work I got to know well when I worked at the Smithsonian--Thomas Dewing, Frank Benson, Kenyon Cox, Paul Manship, Willard Metcalf, and Daniel Chester French, to name just some of the artists. There work was part of the "American Renaissance" and incorporated classical influences.

The artists living in Cornish often gathered at Saint Gaudens' house and gardens. That's where a friend and I visited--it's the only one of the artists' houses open to the public--on the first weekend of my research trip to New England. These artists put on a masque, a performance similar to a play, in a field behind Saint Gaudens house in June 1905. I discovered that the classical structure that served as the setting for the masque is still there.




More pics are up at my Flickr stream.

Research Trip, Post #1: A business trip?

Wandering into an archive you've never been to is kind of like starting a new job. You don't know your way around, how things are done, or what the institutional culture is like. And you have about 20 minutes to figure that all out so that you can get started calling up objects you need to look at. Sometimes, finding out exactly what it is you want to see is the hardest part. With the millions of papers, books, diaries, journals, sketchbooks, and more that are stored in archives, finding the useful pieces can be a tiring search.

Fortunately, between doing Internet searches in advance and getting advice from librarians, I was able to get what I needed quickly. And while I was working 9 to 5 at my computer in a quiet room, it was much more satisfying than going to a conventional workplace. My favorite parts of working were always the times when I got to do research, so this exactly what I went back to school to do. I was touching paper people in the nineteenth century had touched, reading what they had written, discovering nuggets that were useful for my project.

My second day doing research, a single piece of paper stopped me cold and reminded me that while I might be enjoying myself, I was looking at real people and sometimes harsh truths. Sandwiched between some personal letters, I found the bill of sale for a slave. I'm sure there are thousands of these, but I had never held one in my hands before. What I found most chilling was the line that said that this man would be the buyer's property "forever." That's not something you'd normally need to emphasize when you sell something, but this was the sale of a person.

I felt vaguely queasy the rest of the day after that find. No matter how much you read about history, holding a tiny piece of it in your own hands will always bring it home. Was going to the archives a business or a pleasure trip? A bit of both--plus a reality check.

A simple pleasure

The past several weeks, I've been enjoying one of those little childhood pleasures I'd almost forgotten about: stepping with a loud "crunch" on sycamore bark scattered on the streets. There was only one sycamore tree in my neighborhood growing up, but I always loved walking passed it and crunching over the latest bark that the tree had shed. The sound and feel are satisfying in the same way popping bubblewrap is. I'd look down as I walked, changing the cadence of my step and carefully placing my foot over the bark with a slow heel to toe movement for a crinkling crunch or else a giant stomp for a quick pop of sound.

My neighborhood here in Philly actually has quite a few sycamore trees, so I've found myself occasionally swerving from my path to step on a piece of crunchy bark. It occurred to me today that I had no idea 1) what kinds of trees these were, and 2) why they shed bark at all. Through the wonders of the Internet I discovered that sycamores are common in Philadelphia and New York. Apparently their bark is very thin and peels off to allow the tree to grow, but beyond that, the "exfoliating bark" is a mystery.

In a way, that's satisfying. Childhood pleasures, even enjoyed as adults, are always more fun when they have some mystery in them.

The rule of history

Decisions like Thursday's Supreme Court ruling on DC's gun law reminded me why I'm glad I went into history and not law. The decision is largely based on history and parsing the language of the Second Amendment to understand the original meaning. What did "bear arms" mean in the 18th century? An amicus (friend of the Court) brief from linguists was submitted with one suggestion. The justices looked at state constitutions, Quaker beliefs, debates in the House of Lords, Thomas Jefferson's writings, and 19th century court cases. Justice Scalia accuses Justice Stevens of "flatly misreading the historical record." It all sounds a lot like an historical monograph.

So why be glad to be an historian rather than a judge? Because when I wind together historical contexts and do a close analysis of quotes, the end to my argument is an intellectual one. History is messy, and there are always multiple ways of combining the evidence to come to a particular conclusion. There is no one right answer, no claim that I hand down as absolute Truth. But when judges make historical arguments, they are recreating the law of the land from one of many possible histories.

Back to the gun control case: this is a legal question, not an historical one. As Justice Breyer notes in his dissent, examining DC's law with traditional legal instruments (such as "rational basis" or "strict scrutiny") might lead the Court to different answers. Certainly it's fascinating to look at the historical context and what the founders intended, but the founders also intended to bar non-whites and women from voting and to perpetuate slavery. The 21st century is a very different place from the 18th, which is why we go by the rule of law rather than the rule of history.

More reading...

• A good survey of historical research on the 2nd amendment
• A liberal columnist's view in support of the decision
• The NY Times' condemnation of the decision
• Amicus briefs, including those by academics on both sides of the case
  

Miniature wonders in a garden railway

I recently drove out to the Morris Arboretum with my grandparents on a beautiful weekend to see the flowers. I'd read that there would be a miniature railway, but I had no idea how elaborate it would be. This is apparently a yearly creation, and the theme for this year was "Architectural Wonders of the World." Mixed in with the famous buildings were historical landmarks from the Philadelphia area, such as several Boathouse Row boathouses and the Powel House. Below you can see the recreation of Bartram House, which I wrote about visiting this fall.All of the buildings were creatively constructed with natural materials, which gave the whole railway the look of some sort of fairy town. Adding to that effect were the world wonders scattered around the garden. My grandparents had visited most of the places and it was a chance for them to reminisce about their travels. I, on the other hand, have plenty of traveling yet to do.

Check out more pics of the railway and gardens on my Flickr stream.

If you can't take the heat...

Apparently the electrical system at my apartment building couldn't. I can't fathom why, but it took them all week to fix it. This means the building had to pay for all of the residents to stay in hotels. Which, in my case, meant a four-star hotel nearby that is probably one of the fancier places I've ever stayed. It's a French hotel and the lobby is full of people speaking French. Some other unique features:
-a piece of modern art over the bed with its own light
-a bathroom as big as the bedroom in my last apartment with separate shower and tub
-42" flat-screen television
-feather bed with what I'm guessing are at least 500 thread count sheets
-bottle of Evian delivered every evening

I was wondering if Philly had ever had any similar hotels in the past, and I found two contenders. First is the La Pierre, which was only 2 blocks from here and opened in 1853. As for hosting foreign guests, it sounds like they went to the United States Hotel in the middle of the 19th century. Any earlier than that century and no matter who you were, you were probably sleeping in a tavern; as the chapter on hotels in a late-19th century book on Philadelphia history notes, "In olden times, such a thing as the modern hotel, with its fashionably-dressed and all-important clerk, its vast smoking-room, carpeted parlors, gilt mouldings, and other luxurious appointments, was unknown." In this heat, I'd give up all the fanciness just for the air conditioning.

On ice cream and intellect

I have a minor obsession with ice cream. Growing up, I ate mint chocolate chip ice cream at home every night and I still keep about 4 cartons of ice cream in my freezer at all times. I've discovered the wonders of Philadelphia's ice cream parlors and gelaterias, particularly Franklin Fountain, Scoop DeVille, and Capogiro. Little did I know that my ice cream eating habit was offensive.

I was surprised to learn, from Bush's bioethics advisor Leon R. Kass, that eating ice cream cones is wrong because of more than just the high fat and sugar content. I am in fact committing an etiquette faux pas whenever I consume an ice cream cone. According to Kass, "licking an ice cream cone" is the worst of many "uncivilized forms of eating" because it is "a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive."

Lest you think Kass is some undereducated lunatic, it's important to note that this guy has an M.D. from Chicago and a Ph.D. from Harvard. This proves some long-standing assumptions of mine: a) Getting a Ph.D. does not require logical reasoning abilities, b) Being well-educated does not make you smart, and c) If you meet somebody who dislikes ice cream, steer clear.

****
For your amusement...some more quotes from Kass. He hates feminists even more than ice cream lickers!

Rittenhouse Square Surprises

I spend a lot of time in Rittenhouse Square, and I'm constantly amazed at the strange things that pop up there. It's unlike any other urban space I've ever been to; the closest approximation I've seen is DC's Dupont Circle. In both places there are musicians, chess players, break dancers, and sunbathers. But Morris dancers? Mummers? Star Wars characters?

The Star Wars characters showed up months ago, part of some sort of promotion for the Franklin Institute's exhibition on the movies. I was rather surprised to come across Darth Vader on my way to pick up lunch.

This photo from the group's website shows a wedding party in the same spot I saw them perform. They apparently don't wear their fish masks for these events, but they do in the parade.

A few weeks ago, the mummers appeared. Mummers are a Philadelphia institution, parading through the city on New Year's Day since 1901. Apparently they also perform the rest of the year at special events. The costumes are elaborate--the group of mummers I saw leading a wedding party into Rittenhouse Square were dressed as fish, with flounces of scales in bright colors covering them from head to toe. They appear to have been the string band (which is Mummer terminology for brass band) Aqua. Aqua started in 1920 and has never missed a year in the parade.

I'd heard of mummers before, but the Morris dancers I saw this weekend were new to me. This folk dance actually started in England soon after mumming (which really just means performing in disguise) in the 15th century. The dancers combine rhythmic stepping with wielding sticks that they cross like swords or tap on the ground to the tune of music. The outfits look more like what I'd imagine Austrian or Swiss folk dancers might wear. Several local groups gathered at Rittenhouse Square to perform for the afternoon to start off their summer tours and a ring of onlookers gathered. Here's a video of what the dancing looks like.

As the weather finally gets warmer, I'm looking forward to seeing who else shows up in the square this summer!

Heading to Headhouse Square

The Library of Congress's undated file photo of the Headhouse

I had read a blog post about how great the Headhouse Square farmer's market was and I decided to check it out today. I had walked through the square for the first time earlier this week on my way to dinner at one of the country's top vegan restaurants, Horizons (which I really enjoyed--I need to figure out how to make pan-seared tofu!). After having brunch on South Street today, I walked all the way down to Society Hall to the market. Once I got to around 7th, it felt like walking through a beach town--a visual overload of signs, lots of cheap clothing shops, and a variety of delicious junk food options.

Then, suddenly, South Street opens up at 2nd st into Headhouse Square. Located a block from the Delaware River, the market there opened in 1745 to supplement the existing market on Market Street. "Headhouse" refers to the firehouse structure at one end of the market which was built in 1804. In the late eighteenth century, supposedly Dolley Madison and Martha Washington shopped here.

The market finally reopened there last summer, and it's one of the best I've seen--and I've checked out my fair share of markets. There's still cobblestone on the street and it does feel a bit like going back in time. Let's hope there was fudge as good as what I bought yesterday when the founding mothers went shopping there!

(Cleverly) Collapsing Categories

When I told a friend that I was writing a paper on WASP culture, she told me I had to check out the website "Stuff White People Like." I wasn't sure what to expect when I went to the site; how on earth do you lump an entire race together and discover common interests? Well, it turns out that by "white," the site really means middle to upper class, liberal whites. Since I fall into that category, maybe that's why I find it so funny. Number 81 on the list, Graduate School, really hit home:

Being in graduate school satisfies many white requirements for happiness. They can believe they are helping the world, complain that the government/university doesn’t support them enough, claim they are poor, feel as though are getting smarter, act superior to other people, enjoy perpetual three day weekends, and sleep in every day of the week!

Presumably the "hardworking white Americans" that Hillary Clinton recently said were supporting her wouldn't see themselves on this site. Funny as the site is, I think it reflects a tendency in America to talk about class by talking about race. The Newshour had a great discussion about the media's treatment of race during the presidential campaign; the commentators all agreed that the media was vastly oversimplifying some complicated categories.

We hear a lot more about the black/white divide in this election than old/young, urban/rural, or even class divides. And when we talk about people in the lower income brackets, they are the "working class," a term which connotes whites. But Stuff White People Like tries to understand how its audience views this class in the post Knowing what's best for poor people:

Deep down, white people believe if given money and education that all poor people would be EXACTLY like them. In fact, the only reason that poor people make the choices they do is because they have not been given the means to make the right choices and care about the right things.

Is this attitude that much better than a Republican girl's comment on this post that "we don’t want to give away our hard-earned money and/or inherited money to the unemployed population who are too lazy to work or too stupid to quit having kids they can’t afford"? There's obviously a class divide here on both sides of the aisle, and I hope we don't have to wait for a Rev. Wright to start discussing it.

Philly Transit in a Perfect World

When I first moved to Philly, I wrote a post complaining of the ridiculously bad public transit here. Ever since, I've been thinking about places I wish had their own subway stops. Seeing this map of the possible future of the DC metro spurred me to create my own map of my dream subway system for Center City (click on the link to the larger map so you can click on each line and read the blurbs).




View Larger Map

This is obviously quite unscientific--I have no idea where the real demand is. I am certain, however, that it's not on either of the existing lines. The buses have to pick up the slack and, based on how crowded they are at off hours, I don't even want to know how bad they are at rush hour. Since the lines already meet at Broad and Market, I figured it would make sense for the other lines to interest there to make transfers easier.

This dream map also would make it a lot easier for tourists to get around by connecting the Independence Mall area to the art museum. And it might seem silly to have a line so close to the Market st. line, but Walnut is really where things are happening in both West Philly and Center City. An express bus, at the very least, would be a huge help.

A few other highlights: that tourist-friendly red line would go to the Italian Market and end up at the big box stores, including the Super Fresh and Target. Frankly, I think getting a DC metro stop in Georgetown, pipe dream as that has always been, is a whole lot more likely than any of these changes happening in Philly.

The Dream Research Job

I've always wondered how The Daily Show always managed to dig up such great clips, often showing political figures contradicting themselves. Who figured out that Cheney, who now says the polls on the public's views on Iraq don't matter, cited public opinion polls 3 years ago to support the war? It turns out that digging up these clips is a full-time job at the show.

The Washington Post profiled the show's researcher, Adam Chodikoff, in today's paper. One of the show's writers commented that Chodikoff "spots patterns, trends, the forces of history." Chodikoff just comes into work in the morning and starts pouring through news stories to pick out interesting bits. Sounds kind of like what I do...except the final product of his research is a whole lot funnier than mine.

Pennsylvania Holds a Primary

After working on the Kerry campaign, I swore I wouldn't work on another campaign again. Well, it's the next campaign cycle and I've already broken that promise to myself. Despite the e-mails piling up asking me to volunteer for Obama the past two months, I waited until yesterday to help out. So for this election day, at least, I didn't feel the emotional charge that builds up from investing so much of your time in a campaign.

What I did get to feel, though, was this amazing connection (in grad school speak, an "imagined community," perhaps?) with everybody I saw on the street who was also wearing Obama pins or shirts. Philly was overwhelmingly behind Obama, so everywhere I walked there were people behind the same cause I was fighting for. I didn't talk to most of these people; it was mostly just a smile of acknowledgement that passed between us.

Campaign headquarters in Philly the past two days were full of supporters from up and down the mid-Atlantic. People seem to have just driven in to Philly and come straight to the headquarters to see what they could do. I helped one of these people, a woman who had taken the day off of work in D.C., to navigate around Center City and drive elderly people to the polls. I also went door to door earlier in the day, which I must admit, I wouldn't offer to do again.

Even though Obama didn't win today--and really, I don't think anybody expected he would in PA--the day felt like a success for me in other ways. First, with all of the research I've done on politics in Early America, I appreciate the chance to see the process firsthand. Second, I felt in these past two days that, for the first time since I moved here, I actually live in Philly and that I'm part of a community here--one even larger than the campaign. That feeling was well worth losing my voice and getting behind on schoolwork.

Cooking like it's 1950

On Saturday, I shopped for food and cooked dinner in a way that probably resembles how my women shopped and cooked in the 1950s and long before. I walked to Reading Terminal Market and went from shop to shop to buy fresh ingredients. I picked up pasta, freshly cut to the width I requested, spices at the spice shop, fresh cheese at the cheese shop, and produce at the produce shop. On the way home, I stopped at a bakery to get a loaf of bread. This all took a lot longer than a typical grocery shopping trip--close to two hours--but then, it was an outing in itself. I stopped to gawk at the chocolate shop, grabbed a water ice to eat on my walk home, then sat in Rittenhouse Square for a bit.

I cooked without the t.v. on, using the ingredients I'd purchased earlier in the day. Somehow, as I was chopping vegetables, sauteing garlic, and sipping a drink, I felt a sense of relaxation slip over me. Something about how closely you have to attend to details--whether the garlic has gotten brown enough yet in the saute pan, or if the parsley is chopped finely enough--makes me feel the way I feel when I meditate. It occurred to me that cooking for women in past generations was a lot more work than it is now, and they had a lot more people to feed, but I wonder whether they might yet feel this sense of peace from the task.

Power in the Passive Voice

A number of random topics that had been swirling through my mind lately--the economic recession, Foucault, how power works, and good writing--came together when I read a post by Barbara Ehrenriech at the TPM Cafe blog. Ehrenreich is a writer made famous by her book Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. In this recent post on the recession, she wrote:

We say, “There’s something wrong with the economy,” rather than, “I’m getting screwed by the oil companies, the banks, and my employer.” Things get mystified and depersonalized. We say there’s a “recession,” as if were some sort of bad weather, rather than pointing our fingers at the people who brought it down on us and who are, for the most part, profiting still. Maybe, instead of talking about “the economy” and “the recession” we should be talking about the ongoing looting and concerted attack on our standard of living --which will likely end only when there’s nothing left to squeeze out of us.

This isn’t just semantics. If there’s something wrong with “the economy,” we call in the economists, we think about intervention by the Fed, and things on that level. But if someone is actually attacking us, we’re more likely to focus on how we can start working for change right now, with whatever tools are at hand.

Suddenly a couple of things clicked for me. I've been taking a class called "Culture, Power, Identities" in which we've been discussing how to define power and how it works. One author we read--and who I've read in almost every graduate seminar I have ever taken--is the late French theorist Michel Foucault. One of the many irritating things about Foucault, for me, is that he defines power in the passive voice. Power is imposed upon people, is embedded in society; people are constantly being surveyed and defined. But where, as another theorist has put it, is the doer behind the deed? For Foucault, "power relations are rooted deep in the social nexus, not reconstituted 'above' society as a supplementary structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of."

This is the sort of power relation Ehrenreich is talking about when she describes how we talk about being in a recession or the economy being bad. There is no doer behind the deed. But what Ehrenreich gets--and maybe Foucault didn't--was that there are people to blame. Particular people and corporations do have power over our aspects of our lives.

Just one example: Gas prices didn't just happen to explode to over $3/gallon because of lurking forces; the oil companies decide what to charge to maximize their profit. With millions of Americans having trouble affording gas and other commodities which cost more because of the high price of gas, Exxon's CEO roped in a $21.7 million dollar pay package this year and the company's profits hit record levels.

We try not to write in the passive voice because we need our readers to know who the actors are. We should do the same when we think about the country's economic problems. We may not be able to "radically efface" those in power, but hopefully we can at least bring them down to size.

HBO Does John Adams

I can never decide whether to cringe or rejoice when I hear that there is going to be a television show or movie focusing on early America. I enjoy getting the sense of being there through the set and costume, but unfortunately, those are often the most accurate parts. HBO's mini-series John Adams is a bit better than most Hollywood attempts at history, but it falls into the usual trap of oversimplifying events and glorifying the main character.

Let's face it, John Adams wasn't easy to like in his own time; he referred to himself as obnoxious. But since HBO is basing the show on David McCollough's adoring bio of Adams, we have to like Adams at the expense of the other players. Worst perhaps in Jefferson--not surprising--who came off in Part 2 as a background player who just happened to write the Declaration of Independence because Adams told him to do it. The debates over declaring independence take up an entire 1 1/2 hour segment, but as another history blog notes, the common people and Thomas Paine's Common Sense are both left out.

The fun of the show, for me, is seeing the world of the late 18th century. They've shown Boston, Braintree (where the Adams' farm was located), Philadelphia, and Paris so far. I saw the episode set in Paris a few days before I saw the Fragonard room at the Frick Museum (you can actually tour it online), and I was struck by how the art and the salon world in France both have the same color palette and joie de vivre. It's hard to picture John Adams in a rococo world, but I'll give HBO credit for a clever scene depicting just that.

For more on the series' inaccuracies, check out this HNN piece or browse through the journals of the Continental Congress.

Responses to Obama's speech on race

As promised, here are some responses to Obama's speech. Even those who continue to disagree with Obama's association with Wright concluded that the speech was one of the most important in the past 50 years. I think it's unfortunate that the controversy over Wright is interfering with people's ability to engage the real discussion about race Obama tried to begin: most of the t.v. news reports are so stuck on controversy that they can't move on to conversation.

Here are a few links to check out:

One historian offers a history of a tradition of sometimes inflammatory African American criticism of America through Christianity

The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson has the inside scoop

Jon Stewart's take and an attempt at dialogue with Senior Black Correspondent Larry Wilmore

NY Times' Nicholas Kristoff: "What’s happening, I think, is that the Obama campaign has led many white Americans to listen in for the first time to some of the black conversation — and they are thunderstruck."

"A part of our union that we have yet to perfect"

Driven by controversy swirling around his former pastor, Barack Obama made a major speech today about race in America. Speaking across the street from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, he didn't venerate the men who formed the nation, as many speaking in such a setting would. He spoke of the constitution as a document "ultimately unfinished" and "stained by this nation's original sin of slavery."

It was a striking beginning to a speech that was the most frank, open, and intelligent discussion of race I have ever seen by a politician. Certainly, there was some political pandering in the speech. But he acknowledged what so many politicians fail to: complexity.

Here's the transcript. The video is available there, or with slightly better quality on Youtube: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4.

I'll post again when the press and historians react in the next few days.

Visit with an eccentric millionaire

If you were a gentleman in the early 20th century who inherited a fortune, what would you do? Perhaps build a castle out of hand-mixed concrete and hand-painted tiles? Or create a museum about early American tools? These were the rather bizarre ways Henry Mercer of Bucks County, PA chose to spend his money and free time.


A few friends and I drove out to Doylestown to see Mercer's house and museum. We were absolutely overwhelmed by how quirky this guy must have been. He started a tileworks and collected tiles from around the world, many of which he built into the walls of the concrete castle he designed and built. There were cuneiform tablets from ancient Iraq embedded into one concrete column and Chinese ceiling tiles from centuries ago overhanging a stairway. There were no hallways, just one strange little room leading to the next.

Along with tiles, Mercer was also obsessed with tools. He had a broad definition of what a "tool" was and had a whole taxonomy of classifying tools. The museum, with 6 stories winding around a massive central atrium, is organized around this system. There are tools for butter churning, tools of transportation--hence the boats and carriages suspended from the rafters--tools for heating, and tools for punishment, to name a few. That last category included a room which you enter only to find yourself underneath a gallows.


In some ways, it's a curator's dream--a collection already organized and catalogued. Mercer kept meticulous records of each of his objects, even (unfortunately) writing the number he assigned the object on the object itself. But more than a museum, the place feels like an attic full of treasures.

Notes on a scandal

With the latest sex scandal--NY Governor Eliot Spitzer's involvement in a prostitution ring--I think I have reached political sex scandal fatigue. Not that such scandals are undeserving of exposition and attention, but I couldn't help but wonder why they seemed to happen so often. I found some possible answers to my question in a NY Times article which historicizes the trend and looks to a variety of scholars for explanations. Here are the possible answers the article presents:
-male politicians become the alpha male and thus think they have a right to sleep with whomever they'd like
-this happened all the time before and we just didn't hear about it as much
-politicians feel entitled, which makes them ignore the consequences of what they do
-politicians are risk takers who think nothing can bring them down
-politicians are thrill-seekers
and my personal favorite
-sex and power both express "this huge energy these people have"

Notice that none of these explanations have anything to do with things changing in our society--these scandals have always gone on. There's such a lengthy history of them that my alma mater George Washington University offered a seminar on the topic, and you have to scroll to get through Wikipedia's list of them (which is pretty incomplete, at least for the early years).

The most acrimonious one in early America was probably the Eaton Affair, in which Washington high society was thrown into tumult over the appointment of a cabinet minister whose wife, Peggy Eaton, was alleged to have been sexually improper. A strange post-script--at nearly 60, Peggy married a 21-year-old painter who then ran off with her money--and her grand-daughter. Let's hope Gov. Spitzer has a better fate.

Bye Bye WaWa

My roommate received a call at 11 last night that there was a crowd gathering outside our local WaWa to protest its closing. Curious, we walked over and found people holding signs and roaming the empty aisles of the store. As employees were taking down signs, people were excitedly grabbing them as souvenirs. It was not really, then, an angry protest--it was more like a going away party for an old friend who was leaving too soon.

Snow day

We've finally had our first snow day in Philadelphia...this little guy seems to have a snowball stuck to his tail!

Happy birthday, George Washington!

Coincidentally, George Washington's birthday is falling only about a week after I've been reading through some of his papers for my own research. The picture I'm forming of him, from the bits I've read, is of a very formal, reserved person who seems to have spent a large chunk of his time in Philadelphia drinking tea.

But Wonkette, in its usual snarky way, has put together a funny bio post on Washington. The post summarizes what we know of Washington, identifying him as the guy "who led the terrorist insurrection against the Tory Empire and eventually seized control of the United States just as modern-day terrorists hope to win the presidency in November." It goes on to list a number of random facts, most interestingly that he didn't free his slaves upon his death--they would only be free when Martha died. Apparently she ended up living in fear of being killed by them.

I felt a bit embarrassed that I had no idea that this was the case, whereas somebody at Wonkette did, so I did a bit of digging. It turns out that there is a lengthy passage in Washington's will that explains his reasoning and leaves detailed instructions on the treatment of his slaves. It seems that he didn't want to free his slaves until Martha's death because his slaves were intermarried with hers, and freeing only his would "excite the most painful sensations."

A visit to the opera

Last night I went to see my first opera, Cyrano. The Philadelphia Opera Company is putting on an original adaptation of the famous French play, based on the life of a Frenchman named Cyrano de Bergerac. I apparently can't escape my historical work, because as it turned out, the program had an entire section on a topic I've read a bit about recently--French salon culture. The heroine, Roxane, represents the literate and intellectual women of the salons who expected men to woo them with eloquent writing and wit. My favorite scene was when her lover is trying to win her over and declares several times, "I love you!" to which she responds "Oh! without a doubt!--and then?..."

These lines, of course, were all sung in French and in the curious trilling of opera. I must admit, I've avoided opera in the past because I'm not a fan of the singing style, and I haven't been won over yet. But there is something amusing about seeing mundane conversation sung melodramatically by people in fantastic costumes. And the price couldn't be beat--$5 for ampitheatre seats, from which I could almost touch the beautiful ceiling of the oldest grand opera building in the country.

A Rhetorical Question

Audacity: n., boldness; fearless daring. This is what Barack Obama invoked in the title of his most recent book, The Audacity of Hope. He acknowledges here that his message of hope is not one that people will accept readily; it takes a sort of determination to go against the tedium of politics to accept his rhetoric, the title suggests. Some people I've talked to would agree--and they just don't feel quite daring enough.

The question to me is not just why they can't summon the audacity, but why we should need it in the first place. I'm not by any means a naive idealist; I'm probably more cynical than most people about politics and the failures of our government. But when a leader takes hold of the zeitgeist of the time and speaks in a way that is compelling, intelligent, even emotionally stirring, this seems to me to be exactly what we ought to embrace.

This, in great part, is what we admire about our greatest leaders, from George Washington to Martin Luther King, Jr. Let me be clear: I am not comparing his leadership abilities (as yet untested) with these leaders', but his rhetoric resonates with the sounds of his predecessors. He has harnessed MLK's intonation, and he speaks of unity, the urgency of action, and the future in ways that great leaders have in the past. Here, for instance, is a bit of Jefferson's first inaugural address:

"Let us, then, fellow-citizens, unite with one heart and one mind. Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things."

and FDR's third inaugural in 1941:
"In the face of great perils never before encountered, our strong purpose is to protect and to perpetuate the integrity of democracy. For this we muster the spirit of America, and the faith of America. We do not retreat. We are not content to stand still. As Americans, we go forward, in the service of our country, by the will of God."

and MLK's I Have a Dream speech:
"We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy...

We cannot walk alone. And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back."

How, then, are these words of Obama's so very different?
"We are the hope of the future; the answer to the cynics who tell us our house must stand divided; that we cannot come together; that we cannot remake this world as it should be.

Because we know what we have seen and what we believe - that what began as a whisper has now swelled to a chorus that cannot be ignored; that will not be deterred; that will ring out across this land as a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest - Yes. We. Can."

If we know these men made great leaders, that they acted according to the boldness of their words, than why do we assume Obama is all rhetoric? It's a rhetorical question--but one very much on my mind this election.

Age through the ages

Jane Austen's Bennet girls go husband-hunting to avoid becoming old maids

On the eve of my 25th birthday, I was thinking about what a woman my age would have been doing in the past--because she certainly wouldn't have been single and working on her PhD even 50 years ago. So, to put it in perspective:

Ancient Greece: Girls were married between 12 and 14. Under that plan, I'd probably have an 11-year-old child by now and I wouldn't be able to leave the house much--women were confined to the house.
Medieval Europe: By age 25, a girl could have been married for anywhere from 7 to 15 years already. If she could even read, it was unusual, and she probably signed her name with an X.
Jane Austen's England: By now, at least being educated is seen as a good thing for a woman, although your education was long over by 25. Given that Jane Bennett in Pride and Prejudice was 22 and considered at the edge of being an old maid, it didn't look good for a single 25-year-old--she'd be a financial burden on her parents and seen as a spinster.
My grandmother's time: By 25, my grandmother was married and had given birth to my aunt and my dad. She didn't get to go to college, and she kept busy taking care of the kids while my grandfather went to work and college on the GI bill.

So, where does that leave me? Clearly, with a very different life at 25 than women who came before me, but what I really can't fathom is having children already. Most 25-year-olds I know--male or female--are more interested in making a life for themselves and finding their passions than in starting a family. Does having time to find our passions make us happier? Or would we be happier married and settled, expectations laid out for us? Let's just say I think I make a better student than a housewife or mother at this stage.

Election time means history is up for grabs

That, at least, seems to be particularly true this year. From the comparisons between Romney's religion speech and JFK's, the controversy over MLK, Jr., brewing between Clinton and Obama, and Obama's Reagan reference, (ill-conceived) history as been at the center of some contentious debates. As historian Sean Wilentz wrote in a recent column, "In war, truth is the first casualty--but in politics, it appears that the first victim is history."

Can we really judge candidates by their invocations of the past? A group of NH newspapers which endorsed Hillary Clinton noted that her list of favorite presidents (later corrected to note that it was a list of presidential portraits she'd hand in the White House) "demonstrates how she thinks." Even worse is when historical references are deceptive or just plain wrong. Republican posturing with evangelicals often means invoking the religious faith of the founding fathers, ignoring the obvious deism and desire for separation of church and state among the founders. As one columnist notes in comparing how Romney and JFK used religious history, "Jack Kennedy had an eye for history; Romney has only a tin ear."

So what are historians looking for in a candidate this primary season? If the online endorsement of Obama by a lengthy list of history professors is any indication, they're looking for the attributes of greatness they've seen in presidents in our history who have changed "the mood of the nation." They cite Lincoln, FDR, and JFK. No founders there, but then their hopes that Obama will improve our role in the world and expand government programs wouldn't really have been on the early presidents' agendas.

Circumstances change, times change, and sometimes the examples of the past are more or less productive than others. We can't expect politicians to use history selflessly, but let's hope they can learn to use it wisely.