Having been to more than my share of very sparsely-attended indie rock shows and history conference panels in recent years, the thought has occurred more than once that “mid-career” academic historians have much in common with a lot of the veteran indie musicians I go to see: well-known within a certain dispersed circle of cognoscenti, perhaps even established in certain way, but doing something too particular in its appeal to ever achieve more than the most modest sort of popularity.  Most historians like most bands still have to set up and load their own equipment, and while  it saddens me that we historians don’t usually get to perform in dive bars, the bathrooms in conference hotels are usually cleaner.

Then there is the economics of our respective types of publication. My reminder of the similarities here , admittedly not too recent at this writing, was this very informative post byTim Quirk of Too Much Joy, critiquing his band’s royalty statement.

From Tim Quirk, I learned a new term (new to me) major record labels used to denote those never-hit-it-big back catalog bands that they authorize themselves to ignore and abuse: “unrecouped” bands whose sales, according to major label accounting, never paid back their advance and promotional costs. (According to the statement, Too Much Joy’s account with with Warner Brothers stood at $62.47 in royalties with an an unrecouped  balance of $395,277.18.)  Historians lucky enough to find teaching jobs and get tenure do enjoy some job security that bands who had a couple of songs on alt-rock radio in the early 90s might not, but we will all live in danger of remaining “unrecouped” and thus powerless when it comes to dealing with the publishers  and their self-serving accounting practices.
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Now playing: The Low Anthem – To the Ghosts Who Write History Books

Then we have this recent study, from Open Left, depicting how white men (the only ones eligible to vote in 1860) voted in 2008:

Now, obviously it would be very easy to overdraw an analysis from these two maps.  And indeed, I think Open Left is a bit too Whiggish (despite trying not to be Whiggish) about the links between the expansion of voting rights and the election of Progressive presidential candidates–after all, the expanded electorate has certainly elected its share of conservative Presidents.

But it’s still pretty interesting.

(Message: I am still here, just trying to catch up with other stuff.)

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Now playing: The Broken Family Band – Devil in the Details
via FoxyTunes

For civilians who happen on this post, bundling was a courtship custom where unmarried young men and women slept together, bundled up in blankets on a bed. Lest it seem too sexy,  a board was put in-between the two and the girl could be encased in a stout bag to protect her the virtue. Mom and Dad (and presumably others) often stayed in the room, just like a Tufts roommate.

From a decent-seeming scholarly article on bundling that happens to be available online:

Bundling is probably the best known courtship practice of colonial America, even though very little research on the topic has ever been published. It appears to contradict the otherwise sexually strict mores of the Puritans. It meant that a courting couple would be in bed together, but with their clothes on. With fuel at a premium, it was often difficult to keep a house warm in the evenings. Since this is when a man would be visiting his betrothed in her home, they would bundle in her bed together in order to keep warm. A board might be placed in the middle to keep them separate, or the young lady could be put in a bundling bag or duffel-like chastity bag. The best protection against sin were the parents, who were usually in the same room with them. It may not have been good enough, however, as records indicate that up to one-third of couples engaged in premarital relations in spite of the public penalties, such as being fined and whipped, that often resulted (Ingoldsby 1995).

[Read the rest here.]

Read the whole thing, but I’ll boil his suggestions down to the nuggets:

1. Make the JAH into an exclusively electronic publication
2. Shake up the conference (he prefers discussions and e-discussions to roundtables and traditional panels)
3. Establish an open, moderated blog (sort of like a Metafilter for historians)
4. Reach out to people interested in American history in various local venues
5. Provide database access to historians outside the academy
6. Take a firm hand in wrangling grants.

I agree with point 1, I’m in sympathy with point 2, I’d skeptically welcome 3, I’d be all for 4 if it could be proved feasible, and I agree with 5 and 6 in principle, at least.

I shared Professor Cebula’s post on Facebook, and got various responses.  I’ll let Jeff weigh in himself, but my favorite comment was from another senior scholar: “The rot set in when they changed the name of the journal.  What was wrong with The Mississippi Valley Historical Review?”  (Date of name change: 1964.)

I’m an OAH member, and I feel lucky every time the annual conference is held at a nearby town (I like seeing American historians outside my subfield and hearing a few interesting papers, although they always seem to schedule all the early American history panels to run concurrently), or every time the JAH has articles that interest me.

I’m not so selfish as to demand that the organization feature more early history at the expense of, say, the twentieth century (although the twentieth century would probably win a contest for Most Depressing Century Ever), but I admit that I sometimes regard the organization with something of a shrug.  As long as early American history has its own journals and conferences, I’m prone to feel a bit complacent about what the OAH puts out.  On the other hand, not everyone has the luxury of such specialization (and I myself teach at least through 1877), and it’s good to have an organization that can take a broader view.

Anyway, I’d be intrigued to see the OAH put some of Cebula’s ideas into play.

The item comes from the New Year’s Day, 1794, issue of Greenleaf’s New York Journal, that city’s most important Democratic-Republican paper. It gives an account of the fighting strength of all the Native American peoples that the U.S. government knew anything about at the time. The tribal names do not quite match up with the ones in use today, and it would difficult to assess the accuracy of the numbers, but the proportions are fairly eye-popping. The unnamed officials thought they were facing more than 58,000 Indian warriors at a time when (according to a message from War Secretary Henry Knox), there were less than 4,000 troops in the whole U.S. army!  I guess it is no wonder a frontier military build-up (and Indian war) was the biggest project of Washington’s administration, besides the public finance system that paid for it.

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Now playing: The Whigs – Give ‘Em All A Big Fat Lip

Chesterfield Hummer dealership fights declining sales with guns

Like many of his competitors, Hummer dealer Jim Lynch is fighting for survival.

Unlike the rest of them, Lynch reached for a gun. Lots of them, actually.

Faced with declining sales and an uncertain future, his Chesterfield dealership has expanded in a direction that’s drawing national attention. It’s what happens when you replace some of those pricey Hummers with dozens of Glocks, Sig Sauers, Colts, Berettas and Brownings.

For Lynch, those guns are the solution to a problem that’s been hounding him for months.

“We’ve got a beautiful building with a big mortgage,” Lynch said. “The Hummers weren’t going to cover it.”

In the good old days — way back in 2005 — Lynch’s dealership could sell 70 Hummers during a strong month. But high gas prices, a sour economy and the auto industry’s ongoing struggles have wreaked havoc. These days, he’s happy to watch 10 of the gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles leave the lot. But the money he pockets selling guns makes up for the profit on about 15 Hummers.

But why guns? Why not flowers? Or lawn mowers? Or jewelry?

That’s easy. The people who like Hummers also tend to like guns.

The story goes on rather matter-of-factly from there, with the dealer, his customers, and even a Marketing professor from Philadelphia treating guns-n-Hummers as the most natural thing in the world, which I suppose it is, at least in this part of it.

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Now playing: Jon Auer – Six Feet Under
via FoxyTunes

Sorry I saw this late. I love “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” dearly, and hearing the Band’s searing, lumpy original version after growing up with the dopey, slick Joan Baez sing-along on AM radio was a formative musical experience for me: it just illustrated the difference between original popular art and dumbed-down music industry pablum. (Also, the correct lyrics actually told a story that made sense.)

That said, Robbie Robertson’s lyrics for that song and several of the others on “The Band” and “Stage Fright” partook of a fairly naive infatuation with Confederate/white southern Americana that was common in the counter culture and its offshoots circa 1969 (and after). Whilst heading back to nature and making laid-back country-rock, they loved them their doomed outlaws and rebels back in those days, and with less historical insight than we might like, the hippie songwriters and screenwriters tended to think they identified with the poor Confederate soldier, especially if he turned “social bandit” after the war. Even in the dark, revisionist westerns they turned out, the good guys were almost always ex-Confederates, just like John Wayne and Randolph Scott had always been. Blue uniforms were only seen sacking Indian villages and southern farms.

I would say it is to Robbie Robertson’s credit that, unlike a number of left-wing historians of that day, he wrote his elegiac ballad about Confederate cannon fodder rather than, say, a revanchist thug like Jesse James.

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Now playing: The Band – Rockin’ Chair
via FoxyTunes

During his recent trip to Ghana, President Obama did not discuss the brutal history of the Atlantic slave trade that began in Ghana, and only mentioned the word slavery once during his speech. Instead, the President spoke in general terms about “oppression” and “evil.” In fact, in the opening sentence that he delivered standing outside the haunting Elmina Castle, Obama likened his trip to Ghana to his visit to a concentration camp in Germany.  For decades, historians have been trying to dissuade the American public from comparing the slave trade to the Holocaust, which often leads to explosive debates on which group suffered more, and to the imminent question: would the President standing on the grounds of a former concentration camp evoke the history of slavery?

By discussing the history of the slave trade in Ghana as part of larger history of “evil” and “cruelty,” the President missed the opportunity to educate the American public (and the world for that matter) about the actual history of the slave trade: the 2 million slaves who died en route to the Americas and the millions more who suffered in the crowded, disease-ridden, dark bowels of the slave ships. He also gave up the chance to discuss the effects of the international slave trade: the destruction of African cultural traditions, languages, and religious practices by New World slaveholders; the pain felt by African families torn apart by the hands of Dutch, Spanish, and English traders and merchants; the greedy profits gained by European nations and the burgeoning colonies in the Americas; and even the transformation of West African economies; political structures; and military strategies.

Throughout his speech in front the 15^th century slave castle, Obama only mentioned the word slavery once and when he did invoke it, he made enormous historical leaps. He reflected on the 19^th century abolitionist movement when whites and blacks fought together to end slavery. While white and black people did eventually work together in the early to mid-nineteenth century to terminate slavery, one cannot ignore that on the ground where the President made such a comment, whites and blacks worked together during the 15^th, 16^th, 17^th and 18^th centuries to send Africans into chattel slavery in the New World. While Obama more than likely made this remark in order to illuminate a moment of interracial solidarity with the hope of improving race relations, he forfeited the opportunity for Americans to actually reflect on the horrors of the slave trade—a cultural memory that most black people acknowledge but one that most non-black Americans know little about. A more informed reflection on the actual history of the slave trade could do more to improve race relations than cherry picking a moment in history that happened after the international slave trade ended and did not even lead to the abolition of slavery. President Obama ought to know that it was not just abolitionists who ended slavery, but enslaved people themselves. Southern blacks dismantled the institution of slavery by fleeing from plantations across the Confederacy and joining the Union Army, contributing mightily to the North’s victory in the Civil War and the collapse of the slaveocracy.

Jim Downs is a history professor at Connecticut College, focusing on African-American history and 19th century U.S. History. His books include Taking Back the Academy and Why We Write. His articles have appeared in History Today, the Chicago Tribune, The Southern Historian, Prologue, History News Network, and Reviews in American History, among other places.

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Now playing: Robyn Hitchcock And The Egyptians – The President
via FoxyTunes