Friday, June 12, 2009

Coming of age in the 2000's

Now that exams are over, I cannot bear to think about history for a while. So I've been shifting my reading to mindless pleasure reading and the similarly-mindless Style section of the Washington Post. A recent article critiquing the new genre of coming-of-age movies featuring 20- and 30-somethings caught my eye. The author is apparently not of this age group and wonders why Generation X and Y are convinced that they "are singularly incompetent and unprepared for life, more so than their parents or grandparents or any other humans in the history of adult preparedness." She seems to think the answer is in some kind of feedback loop of movies, self-help books, and narcissism.

In movies and in life, Gen X and Y are listless, rootless, searching for meaning and failing at being adults. Why, if only we knew that what adulthood is really about is (as the author tells us) "fumbling through each day the best one could and remembering to schedule dentist appointments"!

If only that banal vision of adulthood was even available to our generation. Many of us would love to schedule dentist appointments if we had dental insurance. And fumbling the best you can, for our parents, was done from the security of a job and a house. The "quarterlife crisis" the author mocks is not some sort of media creation, but a result of the fact that to be a middle class young adult in America takes a hell of a lot more work, time, education and money than it used to.

On top of that, society fostered in Gen Y the idea that our generation could Change Things. When you have second graders sent on neighborhood clean-ups and learning about how to save the rain forest, can you blame them for growing up to yearn for something more than a desk job? Sadly, particularly during a recession, our economy just doesn't have that many entry to mid-level jobs available for young people who want to make a difference.

So, having been raised to seek both change and middle class comforts, we can sympathize with those angst-ridden, adulthood-delaying movie characters like Lainy in Reality Bites, who had thought she "was really gonna be something by the age of 23." Getting to where we've been told we should be going can hardly follow the smooth path of college, job, marriage, house, kids that many Americans could in the post-war period.

Maybe that's not such a bad thing, either. Maybe we can find, out of the angst of coming of age in this changed world, a meaning for adulthood that is more fulfilling and productive than simply "fumbling." Oh yeah, and a way to pay for those dentist visits.

Tuesday, June 2, 2009

The PhD rite of passage

In the strange world of academia, there is a period of time when the PhD student sequesters him or herself for several months with the ritual objects referred to as academic literature. She may reduce her social activities, change her eating, drinking, and sleeping patterns, and show signs of acute stress. This period of intensive studying and social isolation is the first step in the Comprehensive Exams rite of passage, a step commonly referred to as separation or segregation.

During the second step of the rite, the liminal phase, the PhD student enters a room with her advisers for a couple of hours for her exams. During this stage, as anthropologist Victor Turner characterizes it, "liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremony." Thus the student is neither in coursework nor in the dissertation phase while in the room; her fate is still to be decided. The "decision" is preordained; the student who enters the ritual will almost always be passed. The tension is created by the ritual, rather than the reality.

The liminal phase climaxes with the end of examination, when the advisers ask the student to leave the room and await her fate. After perhaps 3-5 minutes, the student is asked to reenter the room and congratulated for her success. The student is now ready to be re-integrated into the graduate student community as an ABD--a term mysterious to those outside of the academic culture, but highly significant to those within it.

The student begins re-integration, the final stage of the ritual, by consuming alcohol and snacks with other students down the hall from the examination room. The process continues with more alcohol and likely inebriation in the evening. From this point on, the ABD student will no longer take courses and has attained the status necessary to teach at the collegiate level.

I write this having completed the ritual yesterday, and I can only excuse the arch anthropological tone by having read far too many books in the past four months.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

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.

Sunday, April 5, 2009

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.

Thursday, February 26, 2009

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.

Monday, February 2, 2009

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.

Tuesday, January 20, 2009

"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.