Whig Hill

Verging

    I am on the verge of finishing up the last little section of content—first draft—of this dissertation (this does not include intro and conclusion chapters). Yet the closer I get, the more confused I am. So I figured I’d turn to you, Internet, to talk this through.

    My problem is this: I’m working on the final diary section, describing the religious experience of CML, a teacher, wife, mother, and Methodist. The chapter’s purpose is to demonstrate the “modernity” of late antebellum religious institutions and religious practice. (In my chapters, I’m juxtaposing traditional surveys of a theme in public with the interior writings of a couple of diarists, on the same theme. Because of these perspectives, the two sections of each chapter don’t always coincide, but a “synergy” does emerge. That’s not happening in this chapter in any obvious way. Yet.)

    So I’ve got to demonstrate that in the larger context of “modernizing” religion, CML exercized contemporary faith practices. Not as easy as it sounds because an easy reading of her diary suggests a very traditional, personal, and stultifying religious life. In writing it out, I have a bunch of pages that go like this:

          *Intro to CML and her immediate context (poor, Methodist, married well, etc.)

         *Description of her conceptualization of human life as a “veil of tears,” beset by temptation and death

        *CML’s methods of dealing with this balance, with prayer and church attendance CML’s equation of utility to God’s will and happiness

        *CML’s (Wesleyan) perfectionist tendencies

        *Her crippling anxiety arising from doubt about her spiritual health

         *How CML understood submission as a source of fortitude; not secular submission to masculine     authority or racial hierarchy, but the submission of the personal ego to the will of God.

        *Narrative of CML’s spiritual struggles during pregnancy as a way of illustrating it all.

    I guess my point in all this is that, contrary to some historiographical descriptions of late antebellum religion as bereft of emotional connection, faith continued to be a vital and tangible part of ordering people’s lives. I had thought I’d contrast CML to Phoebe Palmer, as a way of distinguishing rural southern Wesleyanism to urban northern materialistic perfectionism, but that’s not working out because reading further about Phoebe Palmer has only convinced me that she and CML have more in common than not.

    But this whole argument is kind of limp and vague and I’m not happy with it. Just earlier, I was sketching out some things and came up with a configuration that might work better, but will require rewriting everything. Goes something like this:

    CML is a representation of “modern” religious practice because

1. She operated in a modern Protestant world that prioritized the destruction and recreation of the individual through conversion. Duh, this is kind of a cornerstone of how historians think about western history.

2. CML’s ruminations on self and self-abnegation are complex, and illuminate certain relationships critical to understanding southern history. She obsessed with submission, but not to her husband, or her church, but to God himself. She, and I suspect most like her, simply did not prioritize the gender dynamic of husband and wife—instead, ordered her world around the relationship between herself and God, with no earthly or secular substitution for God (i.e. a husband). (Her husband prayed and went to church, but did not experience conversion; she was the dominant spiritual leader at home.)

3. Because of this relationship, and because of her struggle of sanctification, she equated not just submission and fortitude, but more importantly, secular usefulness and holiness, and made that the primary motivator of her life. To that end, she considered the people and relationships in her life as the fulfillment of a vocation: teaching, Sunday School teaching, Methodist, mother, and wife (much of which will be covered in another chapter.) In this prioritization, she is almost just like Phoebe Palmer, and you can’t get much more “modern” than to be almost just like Phoebe Palmer.

Anyhow, thanks for listening.

CF&H

Interesting time at the Conference on Faith and History at Gordon College last weekend. Interesting for a number of reasons, the first of which is that this is an organization for Christian historians, and I am an unbeliever. I confess that I had been unaware of the sense of alienation that many Conference members have because they work at a secular university—my environment. Tables, turned, I guess.

Tracy McKenzie offered a presidential address that meditated on the life of a Christian historian, and while advocating a new relationship between Christian academics and church members, gave the best critique of the dysfunctional relationship between academy and public I’ve heard in a long time. To be honest, not much new, but he eloquently and powerfully struck at the heart of the problem of language, communication, stance, and audience. (He cited Rosenzweig and Thelen, so you know I thought highly of it.) And here’s what I think…why can’t his critique, based on the platform* of Christianity, be the keynote at the Southern Historical Association meeting?

*I don’t mean to condescend with this word. I know Christianity is not a “platform.”

Well, I attended to give a paper, and I don’t have to explain what a Methodist class meeting is to this crowd, so that’s nice. All kidding aside, I think the paper went well, and the commentator gave good advice during his comments and after. Sadly, no time for audience Q&A, but that might be just as well, because none other than Mark Noll was in the session. You know I had a stroke when he walked into the room.

A couple of observations from a first-timer. Church history is a separate field of history, like, say, Southern history, or Civil War history, or “social” history—it has its own historiography, its own questions, its own discourses, its own methods—and I am as unfamiliar with all of them as I am with the Aztec history I taught in class today. Basically, I don’t think I’ll ever even reach adequate status on knowing the Protestant Reformation. And church history is extremely intellectual. This conference gave me a mental workout like I haven’t had in a while. Those intellectuals make us social historians feel like dilettantes.

 Anyhow, the best part was catching up with some acquaintances, including Baby Professor, and making new friends, like George Greg Jones, both of whom gave great papers.    

a game

I’m playing this game today called “bounce between the cashier’s office, registrar’s office, and financial aid office and see who you can piss off the most.” It’s close, but I think they’re winning.

So, to shore up my mental levees against the rising tide of tasks, I’ve got to sit down here and lay out the things I need to do.

1. Work on conference paper. It needs tightening all around, but writing this conclusion requires me to clarify (situate in the literature) all my references and allusions to middle class values. Need to review some classic literature, read some relatively newer stuff, and write it all out. The knock-on effect of this articulation is that it will have to be incorporated back into chapter 2 (whence this paper comes), and will be key to the introduction that I am trying to conceptualize and write.

2. Work on the “mission to the slaves” section of chapter 1. I’ve been catching up on old and new stuff there, too. I don’t have to reinvent the wheel on this topic, but it will be about four pages and will go something like this—“mission to the slaves” is part of the larger denominational institutionializing trend this chapter covers—explore the adaptations that the Concord Presbytery made to Jones’ and Capers’ efforts—and conclude that there is not much evidence if, or how, ordinary people participated in this missionary program, but the denominations did vigorously adopt and promulgate the ethic of Christian slaveholding in Piedmont, North Carolina.

3. I’m scheduled for two classes at the Community College starting in late September—they call it a “mini-mester:” World History I and II. They’re hybrid classes, so half face-to-face and half online. Subject and format are entirely new to me, so I’m not only working on figuring out Moodle 2 and online teaching and assessment in general, but working on syllabi, and reading the textbooks so I can work out a calendar and, um, learn the first thing about World history. Not sure how many students are in these classes (but the rooms look like they hold no more than thirty) or what type they are (I got used to night class students, but they seem to have their own quirks and personalities different from daytime students…from what I remember), so I’m feeling a little bit blind.

4. Work on introduction. Dr. Advisor is getting anxious for me to have this down on paper, and while it is behind the first three things in priority, it is burning a hole in my mental space. I’ve been drafting some things up, but it has a long way to go.

5. A whole raft of incidental stuff that I’m either forgetting, or just not telling you about.

Now I just got to keep eating Big Lots pasta, and fend off the bill collectors for a little while longer.

Quotes of the week

(I think this is a goals post for the entire upcoming semester.)

Kenneth Startup wrote the following, in this, and it is the best:

It may be useful to add that the Southern clergy’s defense of slavery, however energetic and strident, was never the center or ground of Southern evangelicalism; actually evangelism, the saving of souls, was the ground and center of Southern evangelicalism. And a more complex worldview grew out of this single redemptive aspiration, a worldview far larger than the plantation ethos.

This is neat, to me, because historians have tended to view religion as a rhetorical adjunct to various discourses over racial and gendered power. Not that those discourses did not exist, and not that evangelicals did not rely on their understanding of biblical order to support white and masculine power; they did, and they did. Anyhow, I like the re-prioritization of religious experience, but it does not mean that I see religious experience as somehow pure or exclusive. In fact, I like Startup’s description of how economic sin fit into “a worldview far larger,” and think that the conclusion to my dissertation will be to offer a version of how cultural sin fit into the same evangelical frame.

But, whatever. I’ve got to work on the next chapter (which is actually the first chapter) to get there. As always, I find that Beth Schweiger has already done it:

The social and cultural context of Southern religious life changed enormously over the course of the nineteenth century, but it did so in the context of Southerners’ abiding ambivalence about change. In the South, as in the nation as a whole, Protestants embraced some modern ideas and forms even as they rejected others. Many Southern Protestants displayed apprehension about liberal theology that bore no relation to their embrace of modern bureaucratic methods. The assumptions and structures of both white and black institutional Protestantism in the nineteenth-century South were distinctly modern. … They evangelized the nineteenth century South through organization, printing presses, strategic planning, and settled institutions, rather than through the revival preaching long hailed by historians. [Italics mine]

That’s basically fifty percent of my first chapter, right there. I sat down yesterday and sketched an outline of this “post-revival” religious atmosphere in North Carolina by taking on the establishment of Sunday Schools, colleges, foreign and domestic mission societies, parsonages and buildings, the “mission to the slaves,” and the promulgation of regular “extended meeting” services in place of revivals. After that, I hope to explore a cultural sensibility that all this institution-building cultivated—“liberality”—or, the prescription to be civic- and morality-minded, and generous with one’s money and time. This, I think, is quite different from the planter ethos that encouraged a gregarious and beneficent public persona based on paternalistic obligation, but on a…well…more egalitarian and less power-obsessed evangelical virtue.

I’ve got the material on the institution building, but I have just now started to think about this liberality business. Obviously, it needs development.

But that’s just the beginning. I aim to show that all this refinement hasn’t—by the late antebellum—dampened the evangelical spirit at all for ordinary lay people. (In historiography, this is the inevitable consequence of church growth.) Then it gets real fun, because I can get back to Caroline, and introduce a new character in this dissertation…a Presbyterian!

 

Turns out that last post was the 500th post. Huh.

So I haven’t posted lately because all I’ve been doing is working on this discipline stuff, and there is only so many ways I can talk about it here before it gets tedious.

Today I turned in a first draft of the second version of the second chapter. The analysis and argument are kind of weak underdeveloped, I think, but I’ve got it going in the right direction. At least, I think all the material works together; unlike in the first version I had earlier this year.

I’ll be getting back to this chapter because, well, it still needs lots of work, and because it got picked up for a small conference in October, so I need to turn it into a paper. But I’ve got some free time as Dr. Advisor reads it. My to-do list includes

1. Sketch out the next chapter

2. Work on my teaching portfolio

3. Read something interesting

4. Apply for jobs

But I’ll probably end up

1. Walking the dog a lot

2. Watching a bunch of shows on DVD.

Speaking of shows… on the advice of a friend, I watched two seasons of Justified. A few things kind of infuriated me, including the fact that one does not ordinarily find that many Doc Martens, Chuck Taylors, and other hipster affectations on, um, our rural white brothers and sisters. The religious style portrayed by one evangelical enthusiast was…annoying. Even worse, they portray Lexington and Harlan County as right next to each other. And all the outdoor scenes are clearly southern California back lots. I’m a sucker for the southern Appalachians scenery, so this did not work. I only mention this to say that I kind of liked the show. That religious guy is actually one of the most intriguing characters I’ve seen on normal television in a while.

Now, I also started watching Hell on Wheels, mainly because my students seemed to take a liking to it, and I want to keep up with popular history-making. I’m only two episodes in, and it just sucks. Not because of the gawd-awful history, but just because it’s so historically lazy it makes the entire thing tedious and uninteresting. I’m going to give it a few more episodes to see if it catches on, but right now I’m thinking that if you want some post war western shambalistic bad history that is nonetheless so good it rises above its historical shortcomings, then you can’t go wrong with Deadwood.

I’ll probably spend the rest of the evening watching Al Swearengen clips on Youtube.

 

Need help with this case

In 1848 James Stephenson slandered the character of Miranda Sharpe. The Iredell Circuit took up the case at the behest of Miranda’s brother Abner (a licensed preacher and Sunday School superintendant on the circuit). A committee decided the following:

“Viz. In as much as the report was in circulation unfavourable to the character of Miranda Sharpe, And Jas. F. Stephenson having been interrogated with regard to said report in our Judgement related it as favourable (or more so) as the former report. We therefore acquit the said James F. Stephenson of said charges.”

I am not entirely clear why they acquitted him, but two things come to mind—

1. Stephenson was not guilty because what he said about Miranda was true, or

2. Stephenson was not guilty because what he said about Miranda was not nearly as bad as what someone else had said about her.

How do you read this? What am I missing?

I AM following my dreams...

Being unemployed sure does take up a lot of my time. I haven’t posted in a while because I thought I’d give y’all a break from my increasingly esoteric ramblings about religious discipline. But that’s what I’m working on. Honestly, I need to find some new historical stories.

Only thing that’s happened lately is that I went to the SCHW meeting. Saw some good stuff. Met some good people. ProfSparklePony serenaded the grad students at lunch. I actually gave a comment on a panel (again, I’m the mayor of being the guy standing around doing nothing when someone, anyone, is needed.) That had me nerved out, but I think it went well. I made a complex joke, but no one laughed. Probably because said joke had no punchline and made little sense.

I did see a panel on…. religious discipline in the Civil War era. That gave me some things to think about, obvs.

Otherwise, nothing going on here, except, of course, the things I’m not telling you about.

Succumbing to too much pig meat and ambien here

Scene 1

Me: You see, Mark Smith’s work on sensual history is important because it approaches human decision making that happens at a non-rational level. Many cultural decisions are made, quite literally, in the guts.

My friend: ?

 

Scene 2

Historian at conference: So… you are dealing with the people that Heryman talked about?

Me: Not really, more like the people McCurry talked about.

Historian at conference: Ohhh, I see. [These are actually the same people.]

 

Maybe its because I’m in the dissertation stage, but I can’t even talk about history without invoking the scholarly apparatus. It is useful talking to other historians, because, you know, shorthand, but forget about talking history with normal people. That’s a problem I have, not a problem that normal people have. (I envy normal people.)

That’s a shame because I like explaining things. I liked explaining things when in museums and it turns out that’s what I like about teaching. I don’t just like explaining how things in history happened, but how history itself works, and that’s my problem.

Today, Yoni Appelbaum explained that one advantage to popular historical writing on the internet is the opportunity to expose historical methods to a broad public. He referred to the ability to link directly to primary source material on Google Books and repositories. He, obviously, has the chops to make it happen.

I, on the other hand, would like to spend all day explaining how and why of historical methods, too, but I end up getting hung up in the apparatus and never get around to telling historical stories.* Too bad because I think that a key forum for engagement between weirdos like me and normal people is this whole long-form/e-short/b**essay thing that Appelbaum and Dan Cohen are talking about (and some people are doing.) I've just got to disentangle my voice, for starters.

Ok, here’s are a few stories. The most interesting monument on the troubled South Carolina statehouse grounds is the Mexican War monument. I wasn’t expecting how cool that is. Columbia—at least parts—is nicer than I had ever dared imagined. I ate two plates of barbecue and chicken at the Palmetto Pig (not including the bowl of banana pudding), but should have stopped at one. I had the mustard sauce, and liked it.The hash on rice? No, not so much. And I've only see two palmetto bugs so far.

*In the standard public history grad-school exercise regarding the infamous Enola Gay exhibit —the solution I came up with was an exhibit element that discussed how the curators developed their particular approach. It’s a theme with me, I guess.

**A name so universally reviled, I can’t even type it. But it’s the excellent Dan Cohen proposal.

evals

The CC evaluations are in. They're done voluntarily, online, so only about six students actually filled it out. (I'll offer credit next time. Then they'll all do it.) Here are all of the qualitative responses. I'm happy, because one or two of them got it, and one of them has a sense of humor.

What are the strengths of this instructor?

Communicates well

Explains and elaborates on facts and events very well, so there is no misunderstanding.

HE is very good on interactive disscussion, and has helped not to be quiet in class

Instead of giving memorized tests in this class, Mr. Graham asked us to read the information and we had full discussions each week on the material. In my opinion, this method allows for a greater understanding of the information than merely memorizing facts and then forgetting them. He has instilled greater concepts in this course, which I feel has a better, lasting impact. He also asked us to write 2 papers in this class. I think this is a good practice because there are too many students that need much improvement in this area.

The format of the class allows students to relate the material current events and keeps students engaged in the class.

What are the areas for improvement for this instructor?

A particular student tended to dominate the class, not to a serious extent but, enough to be annoying.

He self admits that he can have a difficult time focusing his thoughts and stating a clear question that he wants an answer to. His thought process comes through in the way he communicates. This leads to my only real feedback. It would be great if he could reduce the number of times he uses the word "um". It interrupts his flow of thought and also interrupts the flow of conversation, making him and the topic harder to understand and focus on. I counted once for curiosity purposes and the word "um" was spoken 17 times in about 8 minutes. It's just something that would make him even more effective if he reduced the use. He knows his history incredibly well and is a great teacher.

None

What are the strengths of this course?

He knows his history incredibly well and is a great teacher. I also really like the format of the class. No short term memorizing of facts, but in depth conversations of large topics and big picture points. These things stick with a person better than short term memorizing. He also really encourages the class to speak up and be a part of the topic. I think that builds confidence for students too. Helped increase my retention even more.

This class fills a space missing in the knowledge base of the average college student.

What are the areas for improvement for this course?

None

Coverage versus sort-of-uncoverage

Unexpected experiment this last semester. I had two classes on the same topic (Am. Hist. II) at two different schools. I used two different textbooks and attempted two different approaches to teaching this survey.

At the Community College (CC), I used The American Journey, and they read one or two chapters per week. I guess you might call this “coverage,” meaning that we strove to get a comprehensive picture of historical events between 1865 and now. In class, I used directed discussions to reinforce what they had read. (I also used weekly online quizzes to compel them to actually read. And that worked.) I’m not certain how the students felt about the actual textbook, but I like it. The chapters obviously reflect the latest historigraphical trends, are engagingly written, and—happily—emphasize those things in American history that I like to teach. (For instance—the continuity and, ahem, evolution, of the conservative sensibility from before Scopes and beyond. The model of conflating the “60s” and “70s” as one giant headache—the stagnation of the New Deal coalition—is refreshing, and makes a perfect foil for understanding the Reagan Revolution.) The problem here is that after a quick discussion of the main points, that was pretty much it. Class over. (CC class, once a week after everyone comes from a full time job, is not the place to assign extra reading or keep them in class once we’ve got past the primary intellectual struggle.)

This is all real nice and ordinary, but compare it to my Four Year College (FYC) class. For them, I assigned the Major Problems book, plus a raft of articles from J-Stor. For those who don’t know, the Major Problems books are not comprehensive historical narratives, but chronologically arranged considerations of a “major question” about time periods in the American past. The chapters contain about a dozen primary sources, and two historical essays that (ideally) argue opposing points. I wasn’t really practicing the “uncoverage” model of survey teaching, but using the MP book eschews a comprehensive narrative in favor of analytical focus on discrete parts of the story.

And that was the problem. For most of the FYC students, this was the first, and probably only, history class they would take. And most of them were not liberal arts majors. (This is about the only thing they shared with the CC students.) So, they were completely unprepared to jump into deep analytical discussions of turning points in American History. They largely didn’t know American History. In museums, we might say that they were not afforded an opportunity to become oriented to their surroundings. And this became a major stumbling block in the first half of the semester as I pressed them to consider aspects of industrialization or immigrant life while they had absolutely no concept of what it even meant to be in the 1880s. No safety net of a popular song or style, no life raft of recognizable president or event, no toe-hold on a defining characteristic of an age. (Demonstrating in a small way that historical thinking truly is an unnatural act.)

I became frustrated as the discussions foundered and the students obviously didn’t know what to do. (I’m going to discuss this particular problem in another post.) I wanted desperately to chuck the MP book* and just give them The American Journey book because that would provide a large framework for understanding where we were and what is going on. Orientation is good, but this felt like a backwards step in the pedagogy of history. We solved this by cutting back on analytical discussion and introducing “coverage lectures,” wherein I devoted lots of class time to…well…traditional lecturing, in an attempt to provide students a starting point. I think this worked, as the analytical discussion of the MP essays and documents became shorter, but far more rewarding (particularly as they blended with my lectures.)

*If Ed Blum is reading this…don’t worry, I didn’t, and I’ll use this book again.

Point is, I felt like the comprehensive narrative reading and approach conveyed best the important points in American history that students need to know. But teaching surveys is decidedly headed away from this approach. I eventually reached a point at the FYC where I felt comfortable with using the MP book, but that happened because I devoted more time to preparing for class, and didn’t get a thing done on my dissertation.

The other point is this: FUTURE EMPLOYERS—I am flexible, always learning and experimenting, and always turning to SOTL to improve my classes. This is a thing you want in a department member.