Living history

Today I heard gun shots, smelled horse dung, felt the cool dank interior of a stone house, watched lace being sewn, and met Pennsylvanians living on the frontier. It was all in about an hour at the colonial plantation at Ridley Creek, a short drive from Philly. Today was their yearly French and Indian War reenactment, where customed French, British and Indian soldiers skirmish outside a bystander's house. While just past the trees to one side you could see the road, from every other angle you could have been back in the 1760s.


While the reenactors at living history sites like this may not have history degrees, they know the nitty gritty details of daily life in the past far better than I do. These people are truly committed: we even watched the reenactors eating soup, cooked in a pot over a fire in the old house's hearth, in wooden bowls along with chunks of homemade bread. Walking through the house, the smell of damp smoke seemed to seep out of the stone walls. Outside, farm animals wandered freely and there was clanging coming from the blacksmith's barn.

The highlight, of course, was the small battle. I don't know military history very well, but I know that the chaos and confusion, the many shots fired to actually hit somebody, and the women running wailing into the scene were authentic. So what if the French soldiers shouted to each other in English and a British soldier was felled by a fake blow from the wooden end of a rifle? You were there for a few minutes.

Seeing Philly through fresh eyes

I've had many friends visit me on weekend trips since I've moved here, which we've packed with activities matched to the visitor. For one friend, it was a walk to the Italian Market and a drive out to the Morris Arboretum; for another, shopping and barhopping; for all, meetings my friends and going to my favorite gelato place. But my most recent visitor came during the week, in the thick of my teaching and reading schedule, and just wanted to get a feel for what my life here is like.

Which, of course, included gelato and meeting friends. But it also included hanging out in the grad student center, lugging my library books to campus, and wandering around Center City. I was going about my usual routine, but pointing out the little things along the way: the market where I buy produce, the spot in Rittenhouse Square where little kids always play, the prettiest block of Delancey Street, the cute house I love just off Fitler Square. It was a reminder to me of all of the things I like best in the city and in my daily routine.

I was often surprised at the places my friend stopped to take pictures. His pictures choices made me look twice at familiar places; why had I never noticed that beautiful building? Was that the cutest side street to take a picture of?--I knew an even better one. Through his eyes I saw the beauty I had often passed by in hurried walks to campus or to run errands, beauty in the small details we forget to notice. If in travel "one’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things,” I think the guide to the traveler reaps the same benefit.

Teaching the Great Depression during the Great Recession

The timing could not have been better--or harder--to teach the Great Depression than this week. Better, because it was easy for my students to engage with the material and relate to the fear of economic downturn and the confusion of the how to fix it. Harder, because it's hard to talk about that crisis without talking about this one, and I am no expert on the economy. Better and harder still given that the stock market reached a 12 year low and unemployment numbers a 26-year high this week, and Obama delivered an address to Congress explaining how he planned to fix things. I spent a lot of time reading historians' perspectives and learning about the present problems to feel ready to take on this teaching challenge.

There's always disparaging talk among historians about presentism--looking at the past through the lens of today. To a certain extent, it's impossible to avoid: people are most interested in historical topics that strike a chord with events in their own lives. I've always thought historians were too quick to condemn comparisons between past and present; if we don't study history to better understand ourselves and our world, what are we doing?

I approached comparisons between the Great Depression and today's crisis delicately in my teaching. I created a table with stats and other economic factors comparing and contrasting the two crises, which I only shared after asking the students to first explain what caused the Great Depression and then what they understand about today's crisis. Finally we discussed whether it's a fair comparison to make and what's at stake.

The nuance of their answers really impressed me. As several pointed out, today's employment numbers are counted differently from the numbers in the 30s, so it's hard to know just how they compare. Another student asked how you can compare or quantify human suffering. Several worried that if we compared today's crisis with the Depression, people would be so afraid they'd stop spending and worsen things. Others wondered whether looking to the New Deal for solutions was a good idea or a bad one.

I think--or hope--that I got the point across that we can't make historical comparisons blithely and without consequences. I closed the class by reminding them of what they learned about people who were left out of the New Deal. Who might be left out in relief efforts today? They looked stunned when I told them feminists were worried that Obama's stimulus plans didn't help women. If learning history is opening their eyes about the present, I consider mine a job well done.

A Night at the Palestra

Ever since college, I've been obsessed with college basketball. I had been to a few college games at the University of MD before college and I'd even played on a team for two years when I was around 11 (and absolutely hated it). But when I started sitting--rather, standing--in the student section at my own school, watching our team rise from obscurity to a top 10 team, I got hooked. I loved the feel of the arena when it was full and you could feel the bleachers shake with energy.

When I went to a game at Penn's palestra with my parents recently, I gained a whole new appreciation for the kind of energy an arena can generate. The palestra, a graceful brick arena built in 1927, is the holy grail for college basketball fanatics. It's not just that this place has hosted more games than any other in the NCAA's, or that you can still see the original exposed brick with its hand-painted signs. The key to its popularity is that the palestra is a fantastic place to watch basketball.

Getty Images

I doubted this when we first arrived and hiked up the steep concrete stairs to our seats, near the top of the seats behind the hoop. I wasn't thrilled that I'd be sitting for two hours squeezed between people on a steel bench. But when I sat down, I was shocked to see how close I felt to the court. At almost double the size of my college's arena, the palestra nonetheless seems like an intimate space.

The sense of history at the palestra is palpable, particularly in my case since my grandparents watched games here. Banners from decades past hang from the arched ceiling. There is no jumbo tron, just a simple scoreboard behind each basket. The crowd noise reverberates and the sound of Penn's small pep band filled the arena; no need for music to be piped in through speakers to get the crowd excited. The opposing student sections--Penn was playing St. Joe's, which is using the palestra as its home arena this year--traded taunts via rolls of fabric with handwritten slogans passed over the students' heads like a wave.

Given the atmosphere of this place, it's no surprise that the palestra played a role in making basketball popular in America. The first ever NCAA tournament was held here and Philadelphia's famous Big 5 tournament was played here for decades. New arenas may have more comfortable seats, fancy boxes, and jumbo trons, but the historian in me can't help but feel at home in the palestra.

"Let it be told to the future world..."

The past and the future came together in Obama's inauguration this week. Among the many changes he is making, Obama is setting a very different tone down to the way he uses history. While his predecessor, President Bush, referred most often to history as that field which would vindicate him in the future, Obama is looking to the past to learn its lessons. That turn backward often leads to Philadelphia.

The inaugural weekend began with a train trip from Philadelphia to Washington, echoing the trip Abraham Lincoln made at his inaugural. Obama's new home street is so named because it connects the capitol and the White House, and Pennsylvania is where the Constitution (establishing these branches of government) was written. When he took his oath of office, he read words written in Philadelphia by the founders. Finally, he closed his speech with a rather strange choice of quotes: a writing by Thomas Paine, published in Philadelphia and read to the troops at Trenton during the American Revolution under George Washington's orders.

Paine, a radical revolutionary who is rarely quoted today, wrote a book called The American Crisis in the freezing winter of 1776 to boost the morale of the troops. Opening with the phrase, "These are the times that try men’s souls," Paine continued on with the words Obama quoted:
"Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it]." Just as Obama emphasized the need for all Americans to take action and effect change, Paine continued, "throw not the burden of the day upon Providence, but 'show your faith by your works.'"

I have a hard time imagining that what Obama calls "this winter of our hardship" is as desperate and daunting as the prospect before most American in the winter of 1776. Indeed, Obama's speech today was unusually grave. Will today be the start of a revolution? As I suggested before, I think it will be a peaceful revolution, more centered on how we live and think than how we govern ourselves. I hope it will be told to the future world that we succeeded in creating a new and better era in America.

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.