Christopher McKnight Nichols has had a banner month starting with the American Military and Diplomatic History Conference that was held on campus May 7th to celebrate the launch of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Military and Diplomatic History  – a massive two volume reference work he co-edited with David Milne and Timothy Lynch.   CSPAN was on hand to film the event which is slated to air later this month!

The History News Network also ran a great piece on The Limits of American Power by Nichols.

And, as if that was not enough, his prior work, Promise and Peril:  America at the Dawn of a Global Age continues to get international publicity and glowing reviews – this time in the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.  (12:2 Apr. 2013, p. 260-268)

“…Nichols adeptly traces the transformations within isolationist thought
while challenging simplistic characterizations of the policy…”

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“Although California was distant from the battlefields of the Civil War, the state endured its own struggle over freedom that paralleled that of the North and the South.”  

Also big congratulations to Stacey Smith who’s first blog post for the New York Times came out this month exploring Native American involuntary servitude in California during the Civil War era.    Much of this research has grown from her forthcoming book Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction which comes out this August.

You can read her full NYT article here!

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There has also been fantastic press this month for Jake Hamblin‘s new book  “Arming Mother Nature: The Birth of Catastrophic Environmentalism”  as Salon excerpts a chapter!

“Cold War secrets: Melting polar ice cap with nukes, changing the sea level, even LSD weapons were all on the table…”

You can read the Salon excerpt here or get your own copy here!

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A hearty congratulations to Stuart Sarbacker who received the Hundere Publishing Fellowship to assist in the completion of his forthcoming book, Tracing the Path of Yoga, under contract with SUNY Press.   His most recent article “Herbs (ausadhi) as a Means to Spiritual Accomplishments (siddhi) in Patañjali’s Yogasutra” was also published this month in the International Journal of Hindu Studies.

Sarbackers’ popular yoga course was featured in a recent OSU video.

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Mina Carson presented a lecture on Ava Helen Pauling at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland on Thursday, May 9th to a wildly enthusiastic audience.   Her talk Ava Helen Pauling: Wife, Mother, Gadfly, Activist presented research and insights gained writing her biography of Ava Helen that was released on OSU Press this month.

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The Spring 2013 issue of Oregon Humanities magazine featured an article by Courtney Campbell entitled Fearful Beauty:  Embracing Both the Wonder and Terror of Awe.

“In a postmodern world where the gods may be silent and spectacles are packaged and commodified for our consumerist lusts, we do well to follow Einstein’s admonition to not close our eyes to the awe and wonder that pervade our experience.”

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Amy Koehlinger visited Yale University last month as co-organizer and presenter at Historiographical Heresy:  A Conference on the Legacy of Jon Butler.   Dr. Koehlinger presented a paper entitled “Questioning ‘The Catholic Imaginary’: Catholic Exceptionalism in the Historical Imagination”

You can read more about this excellent conference @ the Religion in American History blog under “An Olympics of Intellectual Takedowns.”

Koehlinger was also awarded a Hundere Teaching Fellowship to assist in the development of her new course, “Religion in the American West” to add to the curricular offerings of the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion in the field of religious studies!

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The Socratic Club @ OSU, helmed by Gary Ferngren, continues to bring thought provoking debates to campus.   This month featured a debate asking if the concept of hell and the concept of a loving God are incompatible.

For more information about the Socratic Club @ OSU, visit their website at http://groups.oregonstate.edu/socratic/.

You can watch this and more than 20 of their previous debates online at:
http://www.youtube.com/user/orstsocraticclub

Ferngren’s 2009 book Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity was also extensively quoted this month by ABC Australia in an article entitled “The roots of benevolence: Christian ideals and social benefit.“

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David Luft was recently in Canada to give a presentation at the Glaubenssysteme Belief-Systems Conference at the University of Waterloo.

He spoke on “Resisting Belief-Systems in Austria” and also served as moderator for the Austria & It’s History panel.

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Congratulations go out to Nicole von Germeten who contributed a chapter, “Black Brotherhoods in Mexico City” to the recently released book The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade  Edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt D. Childs, and James Sidbury on University of Pennsylvania Press.

You may remember Dr. Cañizares-Esguerra from earlier this year as he gave the 2013 Carson Lecture “Silencing the Past: On Imperious Historical Categories.”   His lecture is still one of the top three viewed videos on our YouTube channel.

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Ph.D. candidate Linda M. Richards, has done us proud again:  her article on uranium mining on Navajo land, entitled “On Poisoned Ground,” is the cover story in the latest issue of the magazine Chemical Heritage which is published by the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF) in Philadelphia.  They’ve also put images from her article on the front page of both the hard copy magazine and their website.  If you are not familiar with the CHF, it is a major center of research in the history of chemistry (including the health and environmental dimensions).

Work like Linda’s is helping to make our School not only a center of excellence in history of science, but also in environmental, peace, and social justice issues.   This is a bumper academic year for Linda, who also recently published a refereed journal article about Linus Pauling’s “fallout suits” in the journal Peace and Change.  (Volume 38, Issue 1, pages 56–82, January 2013)

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Hannah Mahoney interned in the OSU Multicultural Archives and organized an archival document set related to a really distinctive church founded by Caribbean immigrants in Portland in 1911. The Church (St. Philip the Deacon) recently donated its records to OSU Archives.

A big congratulations to History senior Hannah Mahoney was awarded the OSU Library Undergraduate Research Award in the humanities for 2013, for her paper “A Global Affair: Understanding 1960s Geopolitics through the New York World’s Fair”

http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/awards/undergrad-research/previous-recipients

Hannah was also featured in a recent
OSU Spotlight where she said,

“I didn’t choose Oregon State for history, but I probably am getting the better history degree I would have gotten anywhere else,” she says. “All the professors are great. They really love where they are and what they’re doing.”

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OSU History (91′) alumnus Robert Self (now Professor of History at Brown University) returned to Oregon to speak at 3:30 pm on Thursday, May 9 at the University of Oregon (375 McKenzie Hall).

Dr. Self is a prominent scholar of twentieth century US history.  His first (award-winning) book, American Babylon, explored racial politics in Oakland, California in the postwar era.   He will be speaking about his new book, All in the Family, which has already received significant attention.

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The Salem Statesman Journal ran a great article on OSU alumnus and former faculty member Willi Unsoeld.   “A graduate of Oregon State University, Willi Unsoeld later served on the faculty of the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Oregon State before taking a leave of absence to join the Peace Corps and embarking upon his historic trek (as part of the first American expedition to climb Everest).   It was a quest that would cost Unsoeld nine of his toes from frostbite, but cement his reputation as one of the country’s greatest climbers and give birth to a legacy of adventure-seeking that today still thrives at Oregon State University.”

You can read the full article here!

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Congratulations go out to Dr. Elizabeth Stillwagon Swan, the Horning Fellow in History and Philosophy of Science for 2010-2011, who has been appointed assistant professor of philosophy at Mercyhurst University in Erie, PA.

Dr. Swan taught science writing for the OSU Gradate Program in History and Philosophy of Science during her year at OSU’s Center for Humanities. At Mercyhurst professor Swan will be teaching courses in philosophy of mind and philosophy of science, and plans to collaborate with colleagues in the university’s programs in forensic science and intelligence studies. Her most recent book is Origins of Mind (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013).

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And, finally…

Please join me in a School wide heartfelt congratulations to Heather and Caleb Stinger who welcomed their first baby, Taryn, this month.

We wish them the best of luck in the future and look forward to Heather’s return in June!

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Upcoming Events

Teddy Roosevelt’s Oregon Roadshow
May 16, 2013 @ 6:30 pm
Benton County Historical Museum; Philomath,OR
(click here to learn more!)

(For those that saw Horning Visiting Scholar Robert Fox’s talks last week…,  this may be of interest!)
Human Curiosities: People on Display at the 1905 Lewis and Clark Exposition
Lunchtime Lecture with Emily J. Trafford, Ph.D. candidate, University of Liverpool
Friday, May 17 at 12 PM
Oregon Historical Society Madison Room (Free with museum admission)

Organizers of the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Oregon, chose to include displays of live humans, a practice that was common at the time but about which there are many questions today. Historian Emily J. Trafford will be working to answer those questions during four weeks of intense research into collections held by OHS, work supported by the Society’s Donald J. Sterling Research Fellowship. Join her for an illustrated update on what she has discovered in our archive and what she thinks it all means.   (Learn more here!)

The History Students Association Undergraduate Research Conference
Saturday, May 18, 2013 10:30 AM – 5:00 PM
Valley Library, Willamette East & West Room
(Please consider attending and lending your support to our young researchers!)

A Brief History of Extraterrestrial Communication
Tuesday, May 21, 4:00 PM-5:00 PM
Milam Hall, Room  319A

The CLA “Scholarship and Creativity Fair”
Thursday, May 30, 5:00 PM -8:00 PM
Reser Stadium, Club Level

The 1st annual SHPR “No-Ice-Cream” Social and Awards Presentation
Thursday, June 06, 2:00 PM -4:00 PM
Memorial Union, Journey Room

Commencement 2013
Saturday, June 15, 2013 12:00 PM

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Upcoming Opportunities

Be a Mentor!

WHAT IS PROJECT SOCIAL JUSTICE?

Project Social Justice (PSJ) is a nine-month mentoring program for individuals interested in becoming effective social change agents.  The vision of the program is to develop diverse leaders dedicated to creating a welcoming and inclusive society.  Participants will be expected to attend activities, meet independently, engage in authentic conversations, and provide reflections throughout the experience.  Mentees will create a culminating personal growth and social justice project.  It is our hope that mentors and mentees will build meaningful relationships with one another and within the cohort of participants.  The program begins during the Fall 2013 term and ends Spring 2014.  Undergraduate and graduate students can apply to be a mentee.  Staff, professional faculty, and teaching faculty can apply to be a mentor.  

The full program description can be found here.

While this is a free program for enrolled students and campus faculty and staff, spaces are limited.  To apply click here.

Application deadline is Thursday, May 23, 2013.

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Aloha and E Komo Mai!

2014 Hawaii University International Conferences
On Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences
January 4-6, 2014

Ala Moana Hotel
Honolulu, HI

Call for Papers/ Proposal /Abstracts/Submissions
Submission Deadline: July 31, 2013

Visit our website | Submit via online form | Contact Us

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The Last Word

“I’m not interested in preserving the status quo;
I want to overthrow it.”

Niccolo Machiavelli (b. May 1469)

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The anatomists from the Paris Academy of Sciences set out for Versailles with many tools and crates in the dark early morning of Wednesday, 22 January 1681.   When they reached the château, the dead elephant had already been hauled up onto a platform, “a kind of theatre,” as Fontenelle described it, ready for dissection.

The African elephant had been a gift from the King of Portugal thirteen years before, and had survived many Parisian winters before finally succumbing the previous day.  Four years old when she travelled from the Congo to Paris, she was therefore 17 at her death.  She was not the only elephant in Paris; a young Asian elephant had been on show when she arrived at Versailles.  But by the time of her death she was certainly the best known.  In the summer, her many visitors could see her in an open pen; in winter, they could view her through the glass of her heated chamber.  Artists came to draw her.  She ate 24 pounds of bread and twelve pints of wine each day, supplemented by two buckets of “potage” or sometimes cooked rice.  During her summer promenades through Versailles she pulled up grass with her trunk and ate it.  Generally very gentle, she knocked to the ground an artist who teased her; another she soaked with water from her trunk.  Her trunk was a marvel: she could untie knots with it, and one night opened the door of her enclosure without waking her keeper and wandered around the menagerie.

Elephants had a properly royal history in France: the Caliph Harun al-Rashid had sent Charlemagne an elephant named Abul-Abbas, and Henri IV sent an elephant he owned as a gift to Queen Elizabeth in 1591.  During the reign of Louis XIII, an elephant made a progress through France.  An elephant figured prominently in the fourth of five paintings in Charles LeBrun’s series The Triumphs of Alexander.  The painting, Triumphal Entry into Babylon, completed around 1670, depicts an African elephant like the one at Versailles rather than, as the subject might have demanded, an Asian one.  The series was much copied in tapestries and engravings. 

Such a wondrous and enormous beast as the Versailles animal (eight and a half feet long, seven and a half high) held great interest for Claude Perrault and the Academy.  Few previous dissections of elephants had been made, and much about the anatomy and even the external morphology of the elephant was unknown.  Perrault and the Compagnie carefully examined and measured the elephant’s exterior, even scrutinizing her skin through a microscope.  It took over twenty pages in the printed description (only published in 1733) before the anatomist Duverney made the first cut.   He proceeded slowly and methodically, removing individual organs and parts, including the trunk, to be transported to the Academy for further examination.  Perrault took detailed notes and Philippe de La Hire sketched.  They discovered that the elephant, which had been thought to be male, was in fact female.  At some point in the proceedings, when Duverney was literally immersed in the beast, King Louis made an appearance and demanded to know where the anatomist was; presumably he knew Duverney as one of the tutors of the Dauphin.  In Fontenelle’s words, Duverney “rose from the flank of the animal, where he had been, so to speak, engulfed” and greeted his king.

Even with winter weather, the parts of the elephant would soon have begun to deteriorate, and the Compagnie met the following Sunday and Monday as well as on their regular Wednesday meeting to witness Duverney’s dissection of the head and other parts, accompanied by Perrault’s explanation.  Dissection of the trunk extended into the middle of February.  The reading of Duverney’s memoire of the dissection and Perrault’s account of the exterior occupied several more weeks.  The Compagnie was still talking about the elephant the following summer, and she featured prominently in the Academy’s annual report to Colbert.  A year later, the Compagnie met at the King’s Garden to look at the elephant’s skeleton, which had been assembled there.  The skeleton’s interest lay mainly in its enormous size and the fortuitous structure of the elephant’s defenses that made her such a deadly foe, and that made her gentleness at Versailles all the more remarkable.

Congratulations go out to Jim Blumenthal
who was the focus of a feature story
entitled ‘Hemisphere to Hemisphere’
for the College of Liberal Arts.

“When Jim Blumenthal finished his degree at the University of San Diego in 1989, he took off on a backpacking trip through Asia. He had no idea, at the time, that in ten years he would receive his Ph.D. in Asian religions, or that by the end of twenty he would have personal relationships with world leaders of modern Buddhism, the Dalai Lama included. For Blumenthal, an associate professor of philosophy at Oregon State, the trip was a process of self—and global—exploration:…”

You can read his full feature here.

Jim will also be presenting “Buddhist Thought: The Basics” to the
Religious Studies Group on Tuesday April 2nd at 4pm in Milam  301.

When asked what he would like on his pizza, he replied:
“Make me one with everything…”

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Speaking of the Religious Studies Group, they were featured this month in a front page story in the Barometer in a story entitled “A Close Look at Religions” by Dakotah Splichalova.

“With an inclusive philosophy, the Religious Studies Club focuses on investigating scholarly issues and creating a collegiate community committed to interreligious values and study.”

During March, the group met on 3/6 to discuss perennial philosophy and again on 3/15 to discuss the process of Papal Conclave and the impact of the selection of Pope Francis to the Catholic Church.   The Religious Studies Group is advised by Amy Koehlinger, Paul Kopperman, and David Arnold (pictured left above).

Click here to read the full Barometer article.

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The Horning Endowment for the Humanities held the Digital Humanities Symposium earlier this month exploring the impact of contemporary technological advances on scholarship and research in the humanities disciplines.   The event featured Rob Iliffe (director of the Newton Project / Sussex), Anita Guerrini (OSU), Patrick McCray (UC Santa Barbara), Dan Rosenberg (UO) and James Capshew (Indiana).

You can watch Anita Guerrini’s presentation
“Google Books, the n-gram, and Culturomics” below:

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Phronesis: A Laboratory for Engaged Ethics is a new SHPR project directed by a team of Philosophy faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students and will be launching its first major experiment in the spring quarter. In concert with the College Hill High School alternative education program in Corvallis, the Phronesis team is running an on-campus class for at-risk youth focused on research and writing skills through the application and test of working ethical hypotheses. The topics in the class will be selected by the students, and framed by peace and social justice narratives such as LGBT rights, discrimination in education, criminal justice issues affecting individuals with developmental disabilities, and the role of social media. The narratives are geared toward helping students to recognize and work to ameliorate social inequalities in their communities. Combining journaling, investigative research, social experiments, and community projects, the students’ work in the class will culminate in the production of individual research portfolios that test the ethical hypotheses they’ve developed against the evidence of their own experience.

The project is supervised by Drs. Sharyn Clough and Stephanie Jenkins, and the class itself will be taught by Matt Gaddis, as part of his practicum requirements for the Applied Ethics MA program, along with Sean Creighton who recently defended an Applied Ethics MA thesis that discussed State standards for high school science curricula. Philosophy major Sione Filimoehala is the teaching assistant for the class. Ashley Eveleth, a community volunteer, rounds out the team.

Check out the Phronesis website for more exciting details!

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Colorado State University recently created a new web resource – “100 Views of Climate Change” – which prominently features both a wonderful short video presentation by Kathleen Dean Moore entitled Climate Change: A Moral Crisis and another great review of Moral Ground:  Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril!

Kathy also participated in the March event (sponsored by the Spring Creeks Project for Ideas, Nature, and the Written Word) “Thinking About Animals Thinking” where she read a lovely essay from her book Wild Comfort entitled “The Possum in the Plum Tree.”

You can watch her presentation below

Other speakers at this event included Michael Nelson, Virginia Morell, Bill Ripple, Dave Mellinger.   You can watch all of their videos on our YouTube Channel!

OSU press will be re-releasing Moore’s award winning book Holdfast this month.

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While we are talking about animals and Spring Creeks, we should mention the amazing event with Virgina Morell that happened last month.    Morell’s presentation, Animal Wise, was an insightful and inspirational look into minds and emotions of animals.

We had so many people attend this event, from school children to seniors, that we had to move the event from C&E hall and into Austin Auditorium to accommodate the crowd!

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Lights, Camera, Nichols!    C-SPAN was recently on campus filming Christopher McKnight Nichols’ class on US foreign relations for their show American History TV.

Watch for his episode to air sometime in June!

Nichols was also just featured by the College of Liberal Arts in a cover piece entitled “Fitting-In.”   This article highlighted Nichols success and popularity as a professor at OSU, his latest work, the “Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History,” and the American Military and Diplomatic History Conference which he is hosting on May 7th.

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Nichols isn’t the only faculty involved with a current Oxford reference publication…,

Allen Thompson is also currently co-editing the
Oxford Handbook of Environmental Ethics, with
Stephen Gardiner at University of Washington.

Allen also recently became the
Treasurer of the International Society
for Environmental Ethics.

Congratulations Allen!

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What does it mean to “Be Orange?”
What does it mean to “Be Good?”

In this new project, led by Stephanie Jenkins, philosophy students have worked to explore these questions and have blogged their work.

Visit http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/begood/ to read their results (which clearly show why we have some of the best students anywhere)!

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The Horning Endowment for the Humanities also sponsored a lunch bunch talk in March with Nicole Archambeau entitled “Reconsidering the Health Care Provider: Lessons from Medieval Miracle Accounts.“

Nicole’s interesting presentation has become the most popular
video on our YouTube Channel for the month!

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Big congratulations go out to Stacey Smith who was just awarded an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship!!  The fellowship provides a stipend to travel to the Huntington Library in San Marino, Calif. where she will conduct research for her next book project, “An Empire for Freedom: Transcontinental Abolitionism and the Black Civil Rights Struggle in the Pacific West.”

This month, we also got a first look at the cover for her current book, “Freedom’s Frontier:  California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction” which is due out on UNC Press in August.

Finally, Smith has been invited to submit a paper and give a talk on the Thirteenth Amendment in the American West at a special conference called “The World that the Civil War Made,” which will take place at the Richards Center for the Civil War Era at Pennsylvania State University on June 21, – 23, 2013.   The essays by participants will eventually be published in an edited collection for University of North Carolina Press in 2015.

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We also got our first look this month at the cover for Nicole von Germeten‘s upcoming book “Violent Delights, Violent Ends: Sex, Race, & Honor in Colonial Cartagena de Indias.”

Her book, on University of New Mexico Press, is also due out in early Fall.   Click here to read a synopsis of her upcoming work.

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Mina Carson‘s long-awaited biography of the complex Ava Helen Pauling, which comes out this June, is an important addition to the literature on women’s and family history as well as her famous spouse, Linus Pauling.

Ava Helen Pauling: Partner, Activist, Visionary shares the fascinating history behind one of the great love stories of the twentieth century and the personal story of Ava Helen’s own career as an activist first for civil rights and liberties, then against nuclear testing, and finally for peace, feminism, and environmental stewardship.

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Courtney Campbell and the Hundere Endowment for Religion and Culture announced three awards to support the Religious Studies initiative across the School.

1)      The first of these is the annual student award for best undergraduate and graduate paper address an issue of relevance to religious studies.  Please announce this to your students, and encourage any students who have submitted excellent papers in relevant classes to submit a paper.

2)      The Second is a teaching fellowship, which provides some professional development funds for developing a new course or revising an existing course to advance the aims of our current Religion and Culture certificate, and ultimately our anticipated major.

3)      The third is the continuation of the Hundere Publishing Fellowship that was initiated by Marc Borg, and provides some funding for course releases to allow a faculty member to work on and complete a book-length project.

Contact Courtney for more information!

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On Tuesday, March 26, Joseph Orosco addressed the United Nations Association of
Rose Villa in Portland on the topic of “Just Wars and Good Interventions”.

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Finally, we have a new face
in the front office!

Helen Wilhem will be joining us
while Heather Stinger is away.

Please stop in and say hello
if you have not already done so!

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Upcoming Events

April 2, 7:00 PM (LaSells Stewart Center, C&E)
A Dying to Tell:  Stories of Good Death
(A Hundere Lecture with Felicia Cohn)

April 08-11, 7:30 PM (LaSells Stewart Center, C&E)
OSU Holocaust Memorial Week
Alex Hinton, Ruth Klüger, Peter Hayes, & Henryk Grynberg (and more!)

April 16, 4:00 PM (Memorial Union, Journey Room)
American Liberalism and the Cold War: The Case for Monroe Sweetland
An American Culture and Politics Lecture with Bill Robbins

April 25, 7:00 PM (Memorial Union, Pan Afrika Room)
Lincoln’s Bequest: Losing and Finding Religion in a Time of War
A Hundere Lecture with Ray Haberski

April 26, 12:00 PM (Memorial Union, Pan Afrika Room)
Bellah’s Lament: the Making of Civil Religion in America
A Lunch Bunch Lecture with Ray Haberski

April 29, 4:00 PM (LaSells Stewart Center, C&E Auditorium)
Cultural Competence: The Spirit Catches You
A Hundere Lecture with Anne Fadiman

April 30, 7:30 PM (LaSells Stewart Center, Austin Auditorium)
Waging Peace:  The Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Memorial Lecture
Leah Bolger, National President of Veterans for Peace

May 06/08/10 (Memorial Union, Journey Room)
Science and Nationhood
A Horning Visiting Scholar Lecture Series with Robert Fox

May 07 (MU, Journey Room / LaSells C&E)
The American Military and Diplomatic History Conference
David Milne, Timothy Lynch, Danielle Holtz, Christopher McKnight Nichols

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The Last Word

Hard to believe another month has already passed us by.    A personal thank you to everyone who sent in updates and suggestions for this month – as you can see, even on a slow month, we are a fantastically active School!

If you have items or updates that you would like included in the next issue, please send them as well as any comments/suggestions to Robert Peckyno before April 30th!

The opera, wonderfully acted and sung by the leads Janis Kelly and Michael Mayes, was powerful and moving.  Heggie’s music, tonal rather than abstract, carried the story and its emotions effectively, with hints of jazz and rock and a folkish hymn that threads through the work.  Michael Mayes, his body pumped up and tattooed, his gait hunched and splay-footed, showed us Joe de Rocher before he ever opened his mouth.  The only false note was in the execution scene, when de Rocher is posed against a wall with outstretched arms, a forced and unnecessary evocation of Christ.

The last wish of de Rocher’s mother is that he be allowed to have the cookies she baked for him.  We don’t hear about his last meal.  But the Corvallis artist Julie Green has, in her series “The Last Supper,” painted over 500 plates with images of the last meals of death row inmates.  I saw them at the Corvallis Arts Center last month, where I took these pictures.  Most of them, like Mrs. de Rocher’s cookies, are painfully banal: cheeseburgers, pizza, fried chicken, French fries, ice cream.  Occasionally the prisoner refuses a meal; one requested only “God’s word.” Painted in blue on found plates, Green’s series gives the date of execution and the state, and the description of the meal as provided by the Department of Corrections.  The plates form a sorrowful parade of mundane wishes.  Green aims to add fifty plates a year until capital punishment is abolished in all fifty states; it has been abolished in 17 states plus the District of Columbia, but the vast majority of executions since 1976 (when the death penalty was reinstated after a brief hiatus) have taken place in Texas, Virginia, and Oklahoma.  (The Death Penalty Information Center gives full background.)

Green’s work makes no overt statement about the death penalty, but like Dead Man Walking, it forcefully expresses the essential humanity of even those we deem the worst among us.  It challenges the idea that we can, or should, legally kill others as a form of punishment.

Not that I don’t recognize the issues surrounding eating meat.  Joy Mench, an animal scientist from UC Davis, raised a bunch of these in her talk at OSU the other night.  She began with a shout-out to Emily Anthes’s new book Frankenstein’s Cat, which argues that biotechnology “puts human and animal welfare in conflict.” (here’s a recent interview of Anthes with Terry Gross).  Mench pointed out that biotechnology is only one of many technologies that are applied to food animals and that allow for greatly intensified animal husbandry and, for Americans, the cheapest food in the Western world.

Mench got her Ph.D. in the UK and contrasts American practices to European ones.  The British activist Ruth Harrison coined the termed “factory farming” back in the 1960s, and American farms have become more factory-like while Europeans, for a number of reasons, are backing off from the factory model.  One example is the use of CAFOs – confined animal feeding operations, the tiny “crates” that are used to confine pigs and other animals.  From an economic point of view, these certainly have advantages in terms of ease of feeding and preventing injury to the animal.  From a behavioral point of view (not to mention an ethical one) they are terrible.  Europeans have largely outlawed CAFOs; but legislation, said Mench, is not the answer in the more market-oriented US.  Although Proposition 2 in California prohibited CAFOs, not all states will pass such laws (Idaho and Nevada have attempted to attract California chicken farmers when Prop. 2 goes into effect in 2015).

Mench believes the necessary work toward more humane animal husbandry must be at the level of the retailer and the consumer – that in the US we need to work via the market. She is skeptical of the value of labeling, since many terms such as “natural” and “humane” have no legal meaning, and others such as “free range” imply oversight that is non-existent.  Instead she points to the effectiveness of consumer boycotts in forcing companies such as McDonalds to use humanely raised eggs, and believes that similar consumer pressure will lead to the elimination of CAFOs in the next decade.   I certainly hope that she is right.

But I am getting ahead of myself.  The workshop (or symposium, which sounds a little too Platonic to me), started with four short presentations on varying aspects of the digital world and its impact on the humanities.  Dan Rosenberg of the University of Oregon gave a lovely riff on the term “data” and its numerous ramifications.  The term “data” to refer to pieces of information emerged in English in the seventeenth century; “data” comes from the Latin “dare,” to give, whereas “fact” comes from “facere,” to do or make.  Data are givens, and rhetorical as opposed to the ontological fact.  Patrick McCray of UC-Santa Barbara talked about “big data” and how it has been used in sciences such as astronomy, noting increasingly complex organizational structures (according to this recent piece in Perspectives on History, historians’ organization of data is rather lacking in technological expertise).  He asked the important question of how data relates to our identity as historians.

I talked about Google books and the N-gram, again raising some of the points I had made here.  I went on to talk about the claim that history needs to be more rigorous and scientific, and what that might mean, pointing out that some of these critiques are not new, but that now more than ever we need to communicate what it is that historians actually do.  Rob Iliffe, who gave a wonderful keynote talk the day before on the Newton Project, declared that the impact of digitization in the humanities meant the end of close reading and the end of the life of the mind, turning libraries into “information hubs.”  “Modern books, “ he announced, “are museological artefacts,” and (my favorite bon mot) “presence is a fetish.”  But his conclusions were not all gloom and doom.  We humanists are on the edge of a brave new world, and we need to seize it and shape it – and in so doing rearticulate the value of the humanities to an increasingly skeptical world.  The two hours of passionate discussion that followed did not resolve anything but gave this “bibliobimbo” a lot to think about.

Welcome to the first installment of the SHPR Digest – our new monthly-ish summary of news from across the School.  A big thanks to Bob for pulling this together and all of you who wrote in with updates.  As he says in his final words, we really do encourage you to keep us all up to date on your activities.

Have a great March!

Ben

Faculty News

A huge congratulations go out to Anita Guerrini who was just elected by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to be Chair of the Section on History and Philosophy of Science.

Dr. Guerrini officially became ‘chair-elect’ on February 19, 2013 and will assume the role of chair in 2014.    The 2014 annual meeting of the AAAS will be held in Chicago, IL – February 13-17, 2014 on the theme “Meeting Global Challenges: Discovery and Innovation.”

It would be great to have a large SHPR presence at this meeting as this would be a fantastic opportunity to showcase our programs.    You can submit symposium proposals through April 23rd, 2013.

Be sure to check out Anita’s new blog, Anatomia Animalia!

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Stuart Sarbacker was featured in the most recent issue of OSU’s research magazine, Terra in an article entitled “Green Yoga: Posture for the Planet“.   Stuart explained that in India, the birthplace of the exercise, yoga is beginning to stretch beyond the boundaries of one’s self and into the ecological realm.   A new movement called “Green Yoga” encourages men and women who practice yoga — called yogis and yoginis — to strive for bettering their environment.

Stuart will be teaching a course during Spring Term devoted to Green Yoga.

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• Amy Koehlinger‘s recent article “By Whose Authority” on the conflict between nuns and the Vatican was featured on the cover of the “American Catholic Studies Newsletter.”

Visit the Cushwa Center @ Notre Dame to read the full article!

• Amy along with Stuart Sarbacker has also started a reading group for faculty in SHPR, and throughout the university, on theories and methods in the academic study of religion.   Contact Amy or Stuart for more information!

• Amy and Courtney Campbell also teamed earlier this month to present:

“God Talk” in the Public Presidency

You can watch their presentation below!

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

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Joseph Orosco hosted the annual conference of the the Peace and Conflict Studies Consortium (PCSC) entitled “The Chemistry of Peace: Transforming Cultures of Fear Through Education.”   Peace and Conflict Scholars converged on Milam Hall earlier this month to compare notes, programs, and lessons learned.

The keynote for this event, “Crucible of Dissent: Ava Helen and Linus Pauling,” was delivered by Mina Carson who will be releasing a biography of Ava Helen Pauling later this year.   You can watch her presentation below:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

Be sure to also check out Mina’s new blog, The Historian’s Lens

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The Sun Magazine recently interviewed Kathleen Dean Moore for an article entitled “If Your House is on Fire” discussing the twin threats of climate change and corporate hegemony.

Moore’s presentation “Red Sky at Morning: Ethics and the Oceanic Crisis,” which was given at the Nobel Conference 48: Our Global Ocean, was also recently uploaded to YouTube.

You can watch her excellent presentation below:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

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Congratulations go out to Stacey Smith who will be guest blogging for the New York Times starting this month.

Look for her first published article sometime in mid-April!

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Stephanie Jenkins and Shari Clough have begun laying the groundwork
for a new philosophy outreach project entitled “Phronesis.”

Look for more details on our homepage in the coming months!

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Congratulations also go out to Michael A. Osborne, Professor of History of Science who has just been elected a corresponding member of the International Academy of the History of Science.

The Academy, based in Paris, was formed in 1928 to represent and organize the history of science at an international level.

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On January 8th, Oxford University Press released the The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Military and Diplomatic History co-edited by Christopher McKnight Nichols.   We will be celebrating the release of this monumental reference book with the American Military and Diplomatic History Conference which will be held on May 7th.

This release comes while Nichols is still getting a flurry of publicity and a recent 17 page rountable review in the Journal of American Studies about his most recent book, Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of the Global Age.

…Nichols has accomplished a major feat, demonstrating that isolationism was a far richer and more complex intellectual tradition than its critics have ever imagined–one that still speaks to our own time, freshening the stale formulas of the Washington consensus and allowing us to re-imagine the role of the United States in the world.  –Jackson Lears

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Speaking of books, Paul Kopperman‘s most recent book “Regimental Practice” by John Buchanan, M.D.: An Eighteenth-Century Medical Diary and Manual has been released to the Scholar’s Archive at OSU.   Unlike the 2012 version published by Ashgate Press, this complete and unabridged version includes over 300 pages of additional notes and historical context on Buchanan’s therapy for select diseases, surgical operations, and the uses and recipes for drugs.

We recently sat down with Dr. Kopperman to discuss this unique collaboration as the inaugural video for our new SHPR “Behind the Books” video series.

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

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Last month, the Horning Endowment for the Humanities sponsored an Alpine Environments workshop featuring several climate historians and scientists including Mark Carey (UO), Toby Dittrich (PCC), Mike Osborne (OSU), and Harold Zald (OSU).   The keynote for this event featured environmental historian Roderick Nash who was introduced by Jake Hamblin and spoke to an overflowing standing room only audience.

All of the presentations can be seen on our departmental YouTube Channel,
but you can view Nash’s full talk below:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

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On Feb. 11th, the annual Carson Lecture was held featuring Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra who presented a talk entitled “Silencing the Past: On Imperious Historical Categories.”   His talk, introduced by Nicole von Germeten, has rocketed up our YouTube channel and in one week is already our third most viewed video.    (David Luft‘s fall talk on Philosophy and Science in Nineteenth-Century Austria is still #1)

You can watch Dr. Cañizares-Esguerra’s lecture below:

[There is a video that cannot be displayed in this feed. Visit the blog entry to see the video.]

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Upcoming Events

March 6, 5:00 PM (Milam Hall, 301):
Religious Studies @ OSU: Perennial Philosophy

March 6, 5:30 PM (Valley Library, Autzen Room):
History Students Association Career and Job Fair

March 7, 7:00 PM (LaSells Stewart Center, C&E)
Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of our Fellow Creatures
The Spring Creek Project presents Virginia Morell

March 8, 3:00 PM (Memorial Union, Journey Room)
Thinking About Animals Thinking
A Spring Creek Project Symposium with Michael Nelson, Kathleen Dean Moore,
Dave Mellinger, Bill Ripple and Virginia Morell.

April 2, 7:00 PM (LaSells Stewart Center, C&E)
A Hundere Lecture with Felicia Cohn

April 4, 7:30 PM (LaSells Stewart Center, Austin)
Nonviolence in the Contemporary World / Samdhong Rinpoche
The Ava Helen and Linus Pauling Peace Lecture

April 08-11, 7:30 PM (LaSells Stewart Center, C&E)
OSU Holocaust Memorial Week
Alex Hinton, Ruth Klüger, Peter Hayes, & Henryk Grynberg

April 16, 4:00 PM (Memorial Union, Journey Room)
American Liberalism and the Cold War: The Case for Monroe Sweetland
An American Culture and Politics Lecture with Bill Robbins

April 25, 4:00 PM (Memorial Union, Pan Afrika Room)
Lincoln’s Bequest: Losing and Finding Religion in a Time of War
A Hundere Lecture with Ray Haberski

April 29, 4:00 PM (LaSells Stewart Center, C&E Auditorium)
Cultural Competence: The Spirit Catches You
A Hundere Lecture with Anne Fadiman

May 06/08/10 (Memorial Union, Journey Room)
Science and Nationhood
A Horning Visiting Scholar Lecture Series with Robert Fox

May 07 (MU, Journey Room / LaSells C&E)
The American Military and Diplomatic History Conference
David Milne, Timothy Lynch, Danielle Holtz, Christopher McKnight Nichols

For Your Consideration

Grant Proposal:  These NEH grants support national or regional (multistate) training programs for scholars and advanced graduate students to broaden and extend their knowledge of digital humanities. Through these programs, NEH seeks to increase the number of humanities scholars using digital technology in their research and to broadly disseminate knowledge about advanced technology tools and methodologies relevant to the humanities. The projects may be a single opportunity or offered multiple times to different audiences. Institutes may be as short as a few days and held at multiple locations or as long as six weeks at a single site. For example, training opportunities could be offered before or after regularly occurring scholarly meetings, during the summer months, or during appropriate times of the academic year. The duration of a program should allow for full and thorough treatment of the topic.

Receipt Deadline March 7, 2013 for Projects Beginning October 2013
Click here for more information.

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CFP:  Oregon Humanities is still seeking scholars, community leaders, innovators, provocateurs, artists, and other engaged thinkers to lead Conversation Project programs.

The Conversation Project offers Oregon nonprofits free, humanities-based public discussion programs about provocative issues and ideas. We are looking for leaders who are smart, passionate about ideas, and curious–who understand the role of the humanities in the public sphere, but who are also teachers at heart, regardless of their day job.

Proposals for 2013-15 Conversation Project programs are due March 8, 2013. Visit oregonhumanities.org to read the full Request for Proposals and apply online.

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CFP:  The Seventeenth Annual Meeting or the International Association for Environmental Philosophy will be held in Eugene Oregon on October 26–28, 2013.

There is still (a little) time to submit!   The Deadline on the CFP is MARCH 8, 2013.
Click here for more information!

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CFP:  The Interdisciplinary Encounters in Religion, Law, and Ethics working group at the University of California-Irvine contributes to the culture of interdisciplinary reading that focuses on probing the tensions in religious and secular ethics and legal systems.

The group is holding its first interdisciplinary conference on May 10, 2013 at the University of California-Irvine.

Deadline for submissions is March 10, 2013, 5pm PST.
Click here for more information.

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Grant Proposal:  The Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor will support a program to promote freedom of expression and association for majority and minority religious populations, focusing on youth and religious leaders. The program will design and implement a participatory online network and related social media tools to help foster respect for religious diversity, reduce sectarian tensions, counter violent extremism, and respond to calls for the punishment of blasphemy and apostasy.  Focused on Near East Asia / Indonesia.

Click here for more information and details.

Deadline for submissions is  March 22, 2013

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Grant Proposal:  Land O’Lakes Foundation Community Grants range from $500 to $25, 000. Some larger donations are made.   Land O’Lakes Foundation Community Grants Program provides support through cash grants to nonprofit organizations that are working to improve communities where Land O’Lakes has a significant concentration of members or employees. These include organizations:

•     Such as United Way that provide funding to community human services.
•     That work to alleviate hunger.
•     Designed to build knowledge and leadership skills of rural youth.
•     Active in addressing and solving community problems.
•     Promoting artistic endeavors — especially in under-served rural areas, touring or outreach programs.

Land O’Lakes Foundation funds national programs and programs in 20 states: Arkansas, California, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, Wisconsin.

Generally, grants are restricted to organizations that have been granted tax-exempt status under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. Community Grants are limited to one per organization per calendar year.

Click here for more information!

Final Deadline:   April 1st, 2013 (others later)

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Grant Proposal (for those up for a real challenge):  The Program Challenge Fund was created to support high-profile, primetime, limited series for the national public television schedule. The Program Challenge Fund is jointly administered by CPB and PBS, which make funding decisions based on mutually established programming goals and objectives.

Click here for more information!

Final Deadline:   April 4th, 2013 (rolling/bi-annual)

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Grant Proposal:  The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), a part of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), supports projects that promote the preservation and use of America’s documentary heritage essential to understanding our democracy, history, and culture.  This grant application information is for Publishing Historical Records projects.

Colonial and Early National Period
(projects preparing publications whose documents fall predominantly prior to 1820)

Final Deadline:   June 6, 2013

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Grant Proposal:  The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), a part of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), supports projects that promote the preservation and use of America’s documentary heritage essential to understanding our democracy, history, and culture.  This grant application information is for Digitizing Historical Records projects.

Final Deadline:   June 11, 2013

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The Last Word

This is our first attempt at a monthly-ish news post and this will be an evolving process.   I hope to release one of these around the first day of each month so that we can all keep up with everything going on across the SHPR.   Are there things that could be better?   Are there things you would like to see more / less of?    Do you have a great source of information you’d like to share?   Have you actually read this far?

If you have items or updates that you would like included in the next issue, please send them as well as any comments/suggestions to Robert Peckyno before March 24th.

Myhrvold’s talk, accompanied by lots of video, was great fun, smart and witty.  But I remain of two minds about modernist cuisine.  It is certainly fun and original and imaginative.  Yet reducing cooking to physics and chemistry to me robs it of its spontaneity.  It takes away, to a large extent, that element of chance that could lead to failure but could also lead to serendipitous moments of pure rapture.  And the centrifuges and liquid nitrogen and airs and foams strike me at times as simply gimmicky.

To be sure, modernist cooking has deconstructed and turned upside down and inside out our ideas about food, and that had led to some amazing experiences; I think of Grant Achatz’s Alinea and Aviary in Chicago, or my friend Jonathan Kaplan’s spectacular dinner parties here in Corvallis.  Their aim of engaging all of the senses is a worthy one, and the range of new tastes is astonishing.  That a gastropub in Portland recently offered a sandwich with Douglas fir mayonnaise shows, I think, how broadly these new flavors have reached.

But I persist in think that something is missing, and that at the end of twenty tiny courses one might be physically full and sensually sated but spiritually hungry.  Myhrvold discussed the physics behind decanting red wine, and to gasps from the audience demonstrated that the blender is a far better tool to aerate wine than a decanter.  But I would miss the ritual of slowly pouring the wine into the decanter and watching it sheet down the sides, of gently swirling it and smelling it.  I suppose I could pour it from the bender into the decanter.  I am happy to eat food from a centrifuge.  But I would rather eat my grandmother’s cannoli than anything else in the world.

Here is a portrait photograph of Dubinsky himself.

Arthur Dubinsky, by Clint Wade. Held by the Claremont Colleges Photo Archive.

This was taken by Clint Wade and is part of the Claremont Colleges Photo Archive. Dubinsky was Pitzer College’s first official photographer, among his other roles.

Dubinsky’s connection with Pitzer allowed him at least once to showcase his work there. Here is a small capture of an exhibit in Scott Hall at Pitzer.

Arthur Dubinsky photo exhibit in the lobby of Scott Hall at Pitzer College. Photo held at Claremont Colleges Photo Archive.

You can’t see much detail, but I am guessing that a significant part of this exhibit was prints from his collaboration with the great Steve Allen on a book about migrant workers called The Ground is My Table (1966). (See, for example, the portrait photo on the back wall.) Those of us who remember Steve Allen may not always recall his social activism and humanitarianism, of which this book was only a tiny piece. Steve Allen, Art Dubinsky, and the Paulings shared that passion for social justice as well as a devotion to humanism as a working philosophy. Dubinsky’s photographs for the migrant worker project recall the work of government sponsored photographers almost thirty years before (to which I referred in an earlier blog entry). See below for a bit more about Pitzer.

There is another small collection of photos on the web attributed to Dubinsky — snapshots, really, of a day in Washington Square in New York City in the early 1950s. Here we see Woody Guthrie and Rambling Jack Elliott. These photos are reproduced from an entry in the blog Dangerous Minds.

Here they are:

Woody Guthrie on right, by Arthur Dubinsky.

Who is the banjo player? Photo by Arthur Dubinsky, early 1950s.

This shows Ramblin Jack Elliott on the left and a rare bearded Woody on the right. Guthrie was apparently already showing signs of the Huntington’s Chorea that would hospitalize him within a few years and then take his life in 1967.

So, the plot thickens. These photos are all credited to Art Dubinsky. But on the official Woody Guthrie site, there is another photo taken clearly the same day, from a similar angle, credited to Robert Wersan. Robert, are you out there? Can you clarify? I’ve offered the link because the site has done a very effective job at keeping me from pirating the image itself!

The young woman on the right side of the third photo (behind Woody’s cigarette, she says) is self-identified as Marcia Stehr. She writes that judging by this image of her, the shots were taken earlier than 1954: like 1950 or ’51. She was a fan of these guys and remembers being there.

Amazingly, as I was drafting this, I found another shout-out about Dubinsky in the form of  a comment on Martin Colyer’s blog entry on this same set of photographs from Stacy Elliott, archivist at Pitzer College. She too has been looking for more information on Dubinsky. Follow that link too, if you will, to share with Stacy your insights and connections. She wrote in November 2012 that they had been  planning an exhibit of Dubinsky’s photos. Since the exhibit information did not pop up on Google, I am thinking and hoping that it has not yet been mounted, because I REALLY want to see it.

Here are the photos I seek permission to reproduce in the biography:

Linus Pauling and Ava Helen Pauling at pancake breakfast for WILPF (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom). Arthur Dubinsky, 1962.

Linus Pauling and Ava Helen Pauling in front of their cabin at Deer Flat Ranch in Big Sur, California. Arthur Dubinsky photograph, 1962.

Is this entry a jumble or what? I love mysteries, but I’d like this one solved. Where are the rest of Dubinsky’s photographs? Who owns their copyright? How can we get a handle on his biography? I strongly agree with archivist Stacy Elliott that his story should be told.

Pete Souza — AP photograph

One of Souza’s thousands and thousands and thousands of images of Obama.

Yet in some ways digital is mainly about convenience. One of Souza’s notable predecessors, David Hume Kennerly, recorded the Ford presidency with much of the same infrastructure available to him: a staff of seven, a darkroom, and the ability to display recent images in the White House. Having been a war correspondent a few years earlier, Kennerly got Ford to allow him to take some time “off” to visit Vietnam and Cambodia in the frantic, frightening days of March 1975. Documenting the advance of the Khmer Rouge, and the refugee crisis in both countries, Kennerly was able to give Ford a graphic view of the collapse of South Vietnam within a day of his return to the United States, thanks to the speed of the White House lab. Kennerly then shared the photos with the rest of the White House staff and visitors. “My stark, black-and-white photographs of refugees and civilian casualties soon replaced the color prints of dancers, state visits, and similar events that hung in the corridors of the West Wing. My pictures were everywhere you turned, even in the hallway leading to the staff dining room, and many people reportedly couldn’t eat after seeing them.” (In a rare politically inflected comment, Kennerly continues, “I only wish my pictures had been hung in the White House when the war began, rather than as it ended” [David Hume Kennerly, Shooter (New York: Newsweek Books, 1979), 174].) Kennerly had won the Pulitzer Prize for photography in 1972, when he was UPI bureau chief in Saigon.

Kennerly in the field, 1970s

One of Kennerly’s Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs (1971)

Kennerly became unusually close to the Fords — closer even than Souza is to the Obamas. His memoir, written within a few years of leaving the White House with Ford, is fairly honest about the flattened landscape of a post-celebrity life. Likewise he clearly relishes the time spent at the heart of power, privy to private moments as well as world-changing policy meetings. Once he was unable to resist adding his two cents to a high-level discussion of what to do about the Cambodian seizure of the Mayaguez crew . It’s good that Ford liked him.

Both Kennerly and Souza had been following their subjects before the White House, and both thus got the White House job as known, and trusted, quantities. The Fords, and the Obamas later, graciously accepted the historical burden of being on stage virtually all the time, stalked by a silent camera. Though the pictures do not record sound and thus in themselves do not threaten security breaches, the photographers have to achieve the highest clearances in order to do their jobs. The President’s Photographer includes a moving interview with Eric Draper, George W. Bush’s photographer, who recalls feeling “invisible” on Air Force One on 9-11, as the Secret Service shuttled POTUS away from Washington, D.C. for fear — reasonably — that he was a target. As Bush and his advisers consulted through the horror, Draper shot pictures. “I could stand just inches from the President and make pictures and he would look right through me.”

The President’s Photographer is a lush, beautifully produced documentary, with the cinematography matching the elegance of Souza’s photographic style. (The video was produced, directed, and written by Jody Lenkoski Schiliro for National Geographic.) Confronted with the challenge of crafting a narrative out of recording the presidency without making it all about f-stops, Lenkoski Schiliro chose to focus loosely on the White House campaign for the health care bill, with numerous excursions into other large and small presidential matters, from visiting three-year-olds to Obama’s first reckoning with the coffins of American military casualties.  In that case, Souza reflects briefly on his decision not to shoot inside the plane where the president was clearly distressed at the American dead; instead he captured a shot of Obama adding his salute to those of a line of servicemen.

It is fascinating to compare Souza’s photographic style to Kennerly’s, for example, or that of Yoichi Okamoto, President Johnson’s photographer. Both of the latter shot with film cameras (of course), and in black and white. Both had been combat photographers in previous phases of their careers, but so had Souza, who was in Afghanistan shortly after 9/11 and documented some of the barbaric tortures of the Taliban as well as the beauties of the Afghan people and landscape. Souza’s war images, at least in his Afghanistan portfolio, are in color, with the same smooth, luxurious look as his White House photos. (See http://www.petesouza.com/gallery.html?gallery=The%20Road%20to%20Kabul&folio=Image%20Galleries for the Afghanistan photos.) Souza has also, of course, shot in black and white. (See his extraordinary Plebe Summer portfolio on the same web site.) And Kennerly has shot in color; his web site displays images from the late 1970s and early 1980s in glorious (truly) color.

Kennerly has commented that he shot in black and white in the White House partly to eliminate flash, because he could use Tri-X at EI 800, making indoor shooting possible. In photographic history, that makes perfect sense. What is interesting is the contrast between the rough and ready (and brilliant) images that Kennerly left of the Ford presidency, and the National Geographic-style images that Souza is making of the Obama White House. Not sure what it all means, but I put it out there for reflection, debate  and disagreement in any case.

Yoichi Okamoto, Johnson’s photographer

Okamoto, Johnson in Honolulu.

One very, very important thing that this richness of still photographs does is erase the often vast political differences between one White House and another. The presidents share so much: the demands of ceremony, the need to blow off steam, the imperative of good PR (or not, which was an issue Kennerly had with Ford’s handlers), the still center of the storm. I’m not certain if it is good or bad to have politics erased in this manner –

or elevated so high that practical and crucial distinctions between parties and presidents fade away.

Would you like to be White House photographer? I’m afraid I really, really would. Snooping and playing fly on the wall suit me just fine. What I would not like, besides (to be honest) the relentless schedule, which is what it’s all about, is routinely giving up my images for editing by someone else. You know, it’s not even political or deeply philosophical — it’s just that I like to edit.

And it could well be that Souza’s shots don’t need much editing. It could also well be that I won’t get the call from the next president for my services. One can always dream.

Cracker Barrel. Gordonton, N.C., July 1939.

I’ve just finished reading Linda Gordon’s 2009 biography of Dorothea Lange (Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits). It’s a thorough, honest narrative of this difficult life and its astonishing production. And it must have been hard to be honest about this life of choices. It is still the case that a man who chooses his work over his children is unremarkable, whereas a woman who makes the same choice is vulnerable to criticism and censure, overt or implicit.

Linda Gordon has made a career of writing about difficult family choices, from birth control to family violence to welfare policy to adoption law and ethnicity. Tough stuff. Then she turned to a very different project that called on all her sensitivity to the ways in which personality and interpersonal relations intersect with culture, economy, and political crisis. She added to this a self-education in the history of photography, so that she could demonstrate how this extraordinary moment of American documentary photography grew out of and was woven weirdly into innovative social policy crossed with American social brutality. The almost accidental emergence of publicly supported documentary photography under Roy Stryker in the Farm Security Administration has shaped ever since how we think about, or picture, both documentary photography and America during the Depression.

Dorothea Lange, by Paul S. Taylor. 1934

Though most of Lange’s iconic Depression-era photographs are of rural and transient people, she grew up wandering New York City, educating herself in New York itself: “the citiest of American cities,” as Gordon engagingly comments. Her mother, single after abandonment by a ne’er do well husband, deliberately raised her children in the city, supporting them with good jobs as a librarian and then a social worker for the court system.

In many ways Dorothea would reproduce her mother’s marital and parenting history, sticking to a (first) artist husband who allowed the marriage to revolve around his art rather than hers, and allowed the parenting and step-parenting duties to fall to his professional wife rather than to him — so that he might be free to wander in pursuit of his art. Yet Lange also followed her mother’s example in forging an independent work life. She found her way uncannily to one of the best photographic educations available, apprenticing herself to Arnold Genthe, the noted portrait photographer. At Genthe’s New York studio she learned everything about running a photography business, from scheduling clients to preparing and processing the photographic plates. She worked with seven more professional photographers after that, and then took a course from Clarence H. White at Columbia University Teacher’s College. White gladly taught women — unusual even in artistic professions, of course, in the nineteen-teens. He taught Lange, Bourke-White, Laura Gilpin, Doris Ulmann.

Though Lange chose the road of studio photography at the beginning of her career, insuring an income for her family, she also happily connected with the artists and writers of Greenwich Village in that exciting era. She was bold and confident, a feminist in behavior, though not in identity, at least before her marriage. She and her best friend planned a trip around the world in 1918. They ended up in San Francisco, their money stolen, and Dorothea immediately got a new job at Marsh’s, a photographic supply store that served the important San Francisco photographic community, including Imogen Cunningham. With a few backers, Lange set up a portrait studio in San Francisco and achieved enormous and rapid success.

The story is way too long to tell it all! Gordon’s biography is satisfyingly thick and rich, a panorama of the too-few seventy years of Lange’s life (she died of esophageal cancer in 1965). We learn about her two marriages — the second, to Paul Taylor, much more egalitarian than the first fifteen-year partnership with the painter Maynard Dixon, though in both marriages she did the second-shift dance. She was both compliant and difficult, overfunctioning as a wife and a photographic colleague and still unable to escape the guilt of having to choose between making a full-time home for her children and maintaining a world-class portrait studio.

She tried to be a good mother to her angry young stepdaughter, but it was hard going. She and Dixon ended up boarding out Consie for considerable periods of time, and later their two young sons as well. It should be noted, and Gordon notes, that these were much more common arrangements at the time, and that the Dixons themselves took in two teenaged boys at various times during their fifteen-year marriage. Her marriage to Paul Schuster Taylor took similar shapes, with the five youngest children of their blended family placed with others when their parents hit the road for the New Deal. Overburdened and functioning as best she could in the constraints of her daily life, like most of us she found it difficult to analyze or understand some of the stubborn systems that kept her from achieving all she dreamed of as wife and mother as well as professional photographer. She could blow up at her stepdaughter, but she couldn’t really blow up at Roy Stryker, who despite Lange’s high profile, hard work, and massive production for the FSA, paid her less than many of the younger (male) photographers on staff.

Lange’s ability to move from recording the lives of the very rich to chronicling the lives of the marginalized poor was in some ways overdetermined. Lange had contracted polio in her childhood and she walked with a limp all her life. She grew up the daughter of a single mother responsible for her two children’s welfare and probably whatever income her ex-husband, Dorothea’s father, lived on. From her school days on she was compelled by the multi-class, multi-ethnic stew that was twentieth-century America. And she was a consummate artist who called herself a craftsman.

As we study the Depression photographs, we note, and Gordon analyzes, their aesthetic elegance and their profound respect for their subjects. She was accustomed to making beautiful pictures of people; she had commanded high prices for doing so. And here were people that to her were equally deserving of pictorial biography — of being noticed and shown as beautiful. Here is one of her pictures of migrant children:

And here, of course, is her famous Migrant Mother photograph, whose history Gordon treats with nuanced respect both for the photographer and for the subject:

Lange had been uncannily drawn to this subject, turning her car around twenty miles past the sign pointing to that particular migrant camp. She returned to find this family. Talking with them to learn their situation, she got them to agree to pose for photographs. The process that Gordon describes may seem initially to belie our commonly held notion of the spontaneous, unposed, and thus “real” nature of documentary photography — photographs documenting people, conditions, landscapes, and processes. Lange had the family pose for several shots, and this one, with the children facing away from the camera as she requested, is the one that became iconic, as Gordon and others have rightly observed.

It is not just our expectation, but also that of contemporaries, that the FSA photographs were not posed that formed the target for the first fire from anti-New Deal politicians who accused the photographers (correctly, of course) of manipulating elements of their photographs. Gordon takes on this issue of the authenticity of documentary photographs both to defend the FSA practices and also to explore the set of assumptions around what makes a photograph a real reflection of the world.

There are a number of other ironic twists and turns in the Migrant Mother story — among them that the woman, Florence Thompson, was Cherokee rather than one of the many “white mothers” displaced by the Dust Bowl. In 1958 Thompson saw this photograph in a magazine — after it had achieved prominence as part of the Family of Man exhibit — and threatened to sue Lange for using the photograph without her permission. Gordon does a lovely job of representing the distressed people on both sides of the camera that day and afterward: Lange, who never owned or controlled any of her FSA photographs and thus never made any money from that image, and Thompson, whose life continued to be a hard-luck story, tragically illustrating the ultimate failure of the FSA photography project and the other New Deal programs, too little and too fleeting to change the lives and insure the well-being of laborers in corporate America.

Congratulations go out to Dr. Christopher McKnight Nichols!

The latest issue of The Journal of American Studies
(Volume 46 / Issue 04 / November 2012, pp 1077-1094) roundtable reviewed and featured his latest book
“Promise and Peril” covering a lengthy 17 journal pages!

Highlights include:

“The scope and ambition of ‘Promise and Peril’ is refreshing…”

“Historians are in his debt for his sensitive excavation of different but complementary visions of America’s proper world role during a watershed moment. “

Visit this link to learn more about Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of the Global Age

Visit this link to learn more about Christopher Nichols.

http://www.opb.org/thinkoutloud/shows/women-and-political-power/

Here is another: Russian soldiers liberating Auschwitz find survivors in the quarantine building.

Auschwitz survivors with Russian soldiers, January 1945.

Working at this for several years now, Teeuwisse has created a significant number of evocative, deeply moving images. Her larger portfolio, and the project’s animus, may be found on her Flickr and Facebook pages.

Teeuwisse finds herself, according to Rosen, increasingly “crowdsourcing” her photo information. While she could identify Amsterdam scenes, she has asked for help via the internet to identify and find current images of streets in other European cities. The resulting photos are works of art, with the passion for narrative that good historical art reflects. Teeuwisse told Rosen,  ”You put the old photo on top of the new photo, you make them line up and then you start removing parts,” she says. “It is not about how you do it, because the computer does most of the work and it is not that hard to do. But it is about deciding what you want to show, what you want to remove and where you want the viewer to look at. If you make the right choice the combination tells a story, it makes people think” (quoted in Rosen, “Scenes from World War II Photoshopped onto Today’s Streets,” The Atlantic, October 24, 2012).

Photographs are all about decisions; as Teeuwisse says about the computer, the camera does most of the work and the photographer gets to focus, so to speak, on the vital job of deciding what to put in and what to take out. Memorials are likewise all about decisions, and the decisions change over time with the politics of history.

I first traveled in Europe in the summer of 1974, as the United States agonized over a corrupt presidency and an endless, pointless war. At that time that other war– the one Americans had begun to think of as “the Good War”  – was just thirty years in the past, though to me as a twenty-year-old it seemed another era, despite my father’s having been of military age in the early 1940s (that’s another story). Of course he and his friends rarely talked about that time. I started to understand how recent the war really was as my sister and I rode trains through Europe and walked through French towns. There were layers of war memorials: from the Franco-Prussian War, from World War I, and from the most recent conflagration, World War II. In addition, we were visiting an old Europe: still in recovery, still provincial, still linguistically complex and still delighting in confusing American teenagers with multiple currencies, lumpy mattresses, and bidets, though no toilets, in the hotel rooms. It was the Louvre before the pyramid, the metro still reserving seats for the war wounded, Eurail passes still affordable for college students wanting to make a ridiculously grandiose sweep through Europe in eight weeks.

Weirdly, though we carried a pocket camera, we took only about a dozen pictures, as far as I can tell, during our eight week pilgrimage. Maybe this is not true — maybe I just saved a handful. To perk things up here and give my readers a laugh, here is a snapshot of these three college students ready to take on the world:

I’m in the middle. I’ll spare my companions’ feelings by omitting their names, though I love them both dearly. Note my pink bell bottoms. Stylin’. June 1974.

Today Europe is very different. Not placid, not untroubled, not uniformly prosperous, but integrated (though sometimes with sharp discomfort), technologically sophisticated, expensive — and still, as always, beautiful, delicious, seductive.

The memorials change as cultures change and time inserts itself between us and the events remembered. On a recent visit to Paris, I compulsively photographed the plaques that commemmorate the dead of the liberation of Paris in 1944. On official holidays, the city decorates these plaques with flowers.

Henri Jean Pilot,mort pour la France 1944

There are other memorials as well: plaques honoring the Communards slaughtered by the reconstituted French army in 1871; plaques mourning the Jewish children deported from every school and neighborhood between 1942 and 1944 (for which in July this year president Hollande took responsibility on behalf of the French); plaques more happily celebrating French writers and artists.

What Teeuwisse accomplishes in part with her careful, caring Photoshop work is the bridging of past and present.
She reminds us that the quaintly pockmarked walls of Europe are in part the remnants of war, and that the shops, homes, highways and bridges of today stand both despite and because of the actions and agonies of those men and women caught up in terror, survival, and resistance seventy years ago.

But the Pentax MX was a piece of cake next to the first camera my father passed down to me nearly twenty years earlier: a 1951 Diax viewfinder with a Schneider-Kreuznach f2.8 45 mm lens and a Synchro-Compur shutter. (I have the camera, with its lovely brown leather case, in front of me as I write, but for ease of posting I’ll borrow the following image from the Leitz Museum site:)

Diax I, 1951. I don’t think my father ever had the cool brightline finder on the top. It might have helped! Source for the image: http://www.leitzmuseum.org/CameraMakes/Diax/diax_I-1.html

The camera is a thing of beauty, but using it was just groping in the dark. Actually, darkness was your enemy, because there was really no convenient way to judge depth of field…you had to guess how far away your subject was. You could, and you had to, set shutter speed, f stop, AND distance. I had a simple light meter that was supposed to give me information to choose all those settings and make them work together. (Judging from the surviving indoor shots, I must also have had a flash attachment.)

Yet the punchline is cheery. The images I took with this camera really aren’t bad. Drafting this entry, I wrote initially that this was because of good old Tri-X Pan, which was extremely tolerant and very sexy. But as I think about it (and as my reptile memory is stirred) I’ll bet it was Plus-X film, with a slower and gentler emulsion.

This picture was taken on the Boston waterfront in 1968 or 1969 — it was gritty and smelly down there, but it WAS a beach. A bunch of us prep school girls were doing that era’s diversity thing and playing with some quite awesome city kids. The sky was overcast, which produced filtered or diffuse lighting — great when you have NO idea what you’re doing. Groping in the haze, I guess that would be called.

Here’s another photo from that year. This time the children came to our campus. My son, who is African American, saw the computer screen when he came in from school and commented that it looks like an “old fashioned picture — a scene from slavery days.”  It’s ironic and appropriate that the image feels that way to a kid forty years later. (On the other hand, it may be nothing more profound than the boy’s suspenders that elicited that response.) The children had a great time that day, which was the point, but in that explosive era of social change we were hyperaware of the Lady Bountiful aspects of the occasion, and the whole relationship.

Boy on a fence, Massachusetts, 1969. Scan of the original print.

I’m so glad I took those pictures. I’m amazed they survived. What’s on my computer now are scans of several batches in drug store envelopes. I must say that was some nifty camera that allowed me to point and shoot and get ANYTHING at all with no autofocus or built-in metering.

But also I don’t remember who I was when I took these photos. I don’t remember having the nerve to carry a camera around and point it at people. The story I tell myself now is that it has taken me many years to become brazen enough to seize the street that way, even with my friends. But clearly that’s not exactly right: the nerve has come and gone, and come back again. I don’t think I’ve ever lost my interest in photography and taking photographs — just my nerve. There really can be a silver lining to growing older. Just as we must gracefully give up our illusion, when renewing our driver’s licenses, that our hair is brown or blonde, rather than gray or white, we may give up our inhibitions about invading people’s privacy or stealing their souls or presuming on their politeness. When you look like someone’s grandmother you might as well act like her, too. The privilege goes with the territory.

From that perspective, I like to think that I spent a few days as a kid practicing to be a middle-aged photographer.

Robert Sterling Carson, about 1944.

Did you ever find a photo that changed an important story in your life? Most of us have had that experience, I believe. It doesn’t have to be a photo; it can be an overheard phone conversation, an uncle’s casual remark, or a letter that somebody did NOT intend for you to see.

Sometimes, if you’re really lucky or the universe has decided you’re ready for a double whammy, it’s not just your private story that changes, but a public story as well — the nest that held your private history gets blown apart or retwigged. (Another made-up word. Sorry, Mom!) The story I want to tell is not dramatic (for which I’m grateful) but it does have to do with both my private family history and my understanding of a larger cultural history.

After all this buildup I’m going to tell you that this is about college boys dressing up as girls.

As a girl myself, though a bit of a bent one, I have to admit that I’ve never understood how interesting it is to men to dress as women. I don’t mean just the guys who really need to do that. I mean all the guys. We know that the drag shows that entertained the troops during World War II were REALLY drag shows — these were guys who were used to cross-dressing, for the most part. But in addition, guys at least in the “olden days” just thought it was a lark to dress up and camp it up. Here’s one of the photos I found:

If my father is in this photo (and I have to tell you I’m not sure if he is), he’s the one in the boobs.  But this is from a collection of photos I found in a box I finally opened a few years after he died. Though we kids begged periodically for slide shows, and became very familiar with early family photos taken with Kodachrome, these were black and white prints.Because Dad is in some of the photos, I can’t say for sure who the photographer was for most of the pictures in that collection. Here I do think he’s behind the camera rather than behind the bra.

The collection comes from the years after Pearl Harbor when my father and thousands of other kids joined the military training programs designed for college men. My dad and his brother chose V-12, for naval trainees. It had to feel like chaos — not like college. The guys were shipped all over the place. My father started college at Williams and ended up spending some time at Cornell. After V-J Day he finished at Amherst, persuaded to transfer by his hometown girlfriend, my mother to be, a Smith girl.

He was alive. He never shipped out. He had specialized training that he never used. I look back and know that he was a lucky as well as a privileged fellow. After he was rushed through his undergraduate program, so that American universities could accommodate as many veterans as possible,  he went on to medical school.

But I think of the shy guy I knew as I grew up his daughter: the diffident man who rarely made any claims for himself, and talked about his feelings, his hopes, and his disappointments only at odd moments, generally after a couple of drinks, right out of the blue. And I think of what those years must have done to him, and what he missed that might have been pretty cool for him. This is nothing compared to what boys went through who shipped out, who landed on D-Day, who survived the Pacific war, or did not. This is nothing. But this is the man I knew and loved, so I have some insight and concern.

Not my mother.

What I see in this oh so poignant roll or two of surviving college pictures is a guy who had friends, or at least companions, who hung out with guys who put stuffing in bras in order to make their friends laugh, and who had some peaceful moments of study in a dormitory or fraternity (I don’t even know which). I THINK I see a guy who was as interested in photography then as he was all his life, even though he clearly didn’t take all these photos and I can only assume he took most of them. For the ones he’s in, he probably just handed the camera to a friend. There are also pictures of his and Uncle Dave’s commissioning, probably taken by their mom or dad or maybe my aunt Susan. Here is one:

My father is on the right. He was the younger brother. He had curly blond hair and his ears stuck out. In this photo he looks plenty worried, and he had good reason, but thank God, he dodged the bullet. As for the rest of life — well, it was good enough. More later.

But back to college…these photos just knocked me out. Look at this next one. Look at the lighting, and the cropping, and the — I don’t know, the subject’s utter willingness to sit there scrutinized by a friend with a camera.

What was different for me after I saw these photos?

First, I was able to tell myself that my father did OK in college, despite the war’s upheaval. That is, every so often he got to hang around in his residence hall/dormitory/fraternity and cross-dress with forty of his closest friends.

Second, I could see that taking photos mattered to him. Although I didn’t take the opportunity to ask him when he started taking pictures or why he took pictures (it was OH so hard to get him to answer questions about himself), I can see here pretty clearly that he had that drive to make images that I share today.

In a totally unfair way, because he’s so long gone and I have nobody to answer to, I have often joked that he was not a very good photographer despite his obsession with equipment ads in the photo magazines. After I found these pictures, I decided that my remarks were not only kind of mean, and unaccountably so, but also inaccurate.

The last photo I attach here is of a college campus on a winter night. I think this is Walker Hall at Amherst College — a lovely building no longer standing, razed in 1963 to make way, ironically, for the Robert Frost Library. ANYWAY, I really want to say two things about this photo. One, I think it is good. But even if its subject is the thing that is “good,” and it’s just a snapshot record of an evocative moment, what is most important to me as Dad’s daughter is that he was moved to take this photo. He thought it was a lovely scene, with the bare tree branches and the nineteenth-century building and the lights glowing over the snow.

And I love that idea of this young man trying to capture that moment. To end where I began, discovering Dad’s pals wearing bras and reading books was a sweet story-changer for me; but more important is that the existence of this sheaf of photos reinforces, rather than changes, my story of my father. Shy, awkward, unconfident, “silent Bob” had things he really, really wanted to say about things he found beautiful. He was a witness, he paid attention, and he left a record of that. And behind all the awkwardness and the things left unsaid between us, that’s the man I  hoped I knew.

Is this Walker Hall at Amherst? — about 1946.

CLA Dean Larry Rogers and SHPR Academic Coordinator David Bishop.

SHPR Academic Coordinator David Bishop
was honored during CLA day with the
Carolyn Maresh Professional Staff Award,
which recognizes outstanding job performance
and dedication to the College.

Professor Jose-Antonio Orosco

Professor Joseph Orosco was awarded the 2012 Best published Op-Ed from the American Philosophical Association Committee on Public Philosophy. He was one of five philosophers so honored.  The original op-ed which ran in the Corvallis Gazette Times on March 31, 2011 was entitled “As I See It: Tuition bill the decent option.”

Click here to read the original op-ed.

Horning Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History Emeritus, Mary Jo Nye

Congratulations also go out to Professor Mary Jo Nye!!!

She has been awarded the 2012 John and Martha Morris Award for Outstanding Achievement in the History of Modern Chemistry and the Chemical Industry.

The presentation of the award will take place at the 9th International Conference of the History of Chemistry in Uppsala in August 2013. (http://www.9ichc.se/programme/)

We are so very proud of all of them and these awards are a testament to both their skill and dedication as well as the strength and vitality of our program as a whole.

From Maya’s garden

It took me an awfully long time to figure out what “IQ” means to a photographer. (For those non-photographers out there who don’t like waiting for the punch line, it’s “image quality.” I know, you knew that. In my own defense, I had expected something rather more technical and obscure.) But in addition to poking a bit at the primary meaning of that term, I also like the double entendre it evokes in the context of the relationship between the amount of money you spend on gear and the jaw-droppingness of the photos you capture.

How smart do you have to be to know that it’s not really money that drives that relationship in a simple progression up the effectiveness/expensiveness graph? (I think I made up a word there. My mom would not be proud.) Even more complicated, today you can spend a whole lot of money on a REALLY simple camera. I spend $400 on a new iPhone because I want all that memory for all my iPhotos (and documents and apps and audiobooks and…). A Canon compact with more megapixels and a better lens is half that much money. We can and should argue about the relative capabilities of these two cameras, of course. There are some things the iPhone camera does as well as or better than the Canon compact. The real argument, as Chase Jarvis first taught us, is that the iPhone (or, well, Android) is the camera that you always have with you.

iPhone flower mania

As I wrote in another post, when I got serious about photography in my thirties, I reanimated all the assumptions about taking pictures that I’d developed in my teens: that a real photographer has fancy equipment and lots of it; that a real photographer takes her pictures from loading the film in the camera to lifting the print out of the fixer; that a real photographer does it all and knows it all.

Those have been hard assumptions to shake, even when some of my favorite photographers have operated with radically different rules for themselves, and even when the digital revolution substituted first Photoshop, and then Hipstamatic, Snapseed and Instagram for the intoxicatingly smelly darkroom. For those like me who adore “street” photography — which means, roughly, hanging out in public and grabbing unstaged images  — the real revolution was George Eastman’s handheld Kodak at the turn of the 20th century, and then of course the übercool Leica in the mid-1920s. The Leica, like the iPhone, was not cheap, but also like the iPhone, it was super-portable.

Leica II, introduced in 1932

Besides believing that a real photographer had to know how to use all that equipment and take every kind of photograph, I also believed that a real photographer would always use all the fiddly dials on the 35mm camera, making all the exposure decisions for each shot. My father gave me my first SLR: a Pentax K1000. That was a workhorse, like the Ford Falcon that was my first car. But in a while, I wanted something cooler, something that said “real” photographer. So I saved my money for a Pentax MX, all black, and all manual. I was not to allow myself to use automatic focus, even.

Pentax MX, with that gorgeous all-black body

The weird thing is that my teenaged daughter decided on the same rule for herself last summer. Unless I was talking in my sleep and she happened to walk by and hear it, I believe that in the last fourteen years I have NEVER articulated that rule, or my own history with it. I certainly don’t believe it any more. Heavens, without autofocus I’d NEVER catch even a fairly good moment, let alone a “decisive” one (à la Cartier-
Bresson – I should be so lucky).

I will not go on to discuss my daughter’s equipment rules, which in the way of things for a parent has cost me some money.

But can you be a great photographer if you only use an iPhone, a pinhole camera, or a Brownie from eBay?

Of course, my mind screams. Of course. The image is all. The tools are there to facilitate capturing the image. But you can capture the right image with the wrong tools, and you can certainly capture endless wrong images with all the right tools (I know lots about that).

For the flower picture on the top, I was carrying around my DSLR; once home, I punched the image a bit with Lightroom. For the flower picture on the bottom, I had my iPhone in my pocket and the wind stopped moving the petals around for a moment. For online purposes, they are both colorful, cheerful images. Were I to print them any larger than 4×6,  the top one would undoubtedly show better detail (though at full resolution, the iPhone photo is surprisingly sharp). These photos make two cases. One is that a good lens in front of a bigger sensor captures more detail (and the goodies that go with detail, like the pleasing bokeh — that is, the unfocused background). The second is that this is the kind of photograph in which detail, including color accuracy and depth of field, probably matters.

OK, now let’s think about a different kind of photo. Think about the black and white brilliance of Henri Cartier-Bresson, or Elliot Erwitt, or Robert Doisneau. (Follow the links to see some samples of their work if you don’t remember it.) They used great cameras, small, unobtrusive, FAST, and sharp. Their equipment was tailor-made (or machine-made) for the uses they put it to. It was not the equipment that made their photos great. It was their courage, humor, persistence, and patience, as well as their willingness to train themselves to see. Their photos are great because of composition and content (emotional and editorial impact) more often than level of graphic detail. Still — the equipment helped. Photographs are records of light, and their cameras, properly used, captured specific moments of light. When the moment came, the camera was there and fast and capable.

We are lucky today to have a bazillion equipment options, including the camera that is always with us, whose original purpose was not, in fact, to take pictures. The equipment is cheaper — for what it does — faster, more versatile, and let’s not even start talking about the digital universe that opened up barely a decade ago. Wow. We don’t have to spend $7000 on a Leica in order to capture that decisive moment.

But it’s still tempting.

I bought some chemicals and paper and an enlarger. I went with Ilford supplies, which was actually pretty clever of me. In the era before the internet, I had to do a lot of work to teach myself all the things I needed to learn without a human to teach me. There was an extraordinary photography library in the Carpenter Center. More on that later. The armloads of books I took out did not have instructions on how to get my exposed film into the tank, far less into the enlarger. In retrospect I am astonished by my enterprise in learning this set of processes literally all by myself.

Why in the middle of Harvard Square did I not seek out a teacher? I think I was embarrassed. I was a historian, not an artist or a journalist. I certainly did not feel entitled to learn photography. And yet clearly at the same time I believed that the only way I could become a photographer was to learn the practice from beginning to end — from loading the film in the 35mm camera SLR to developing the film and printing the pictures. In fact I wondered if I could ever claim to be a photographer if I didn’t develop and print color film. Thank heaven for the digital era.

My childhood friend Maya in the 1980s

But, in other words, the same rules that made me think I could only be one thing also made me believe that to be another thing, I had to “be it” all the way.

As opposed to the twenty-five thousand photos I’ve uploaded to Flickr in the last few years (no, not kidding) I’ve got one or two hundred I’ve scanned from prints from the 1980s.The images that survive from those years of experimentation are precious to me. So is a relative stranger’s offhand comment about a photo I had just printed: a sapling in a snowy field. I thought it might be banal or hackneyed (qualities that scare me much less as I approach sixty than they did when I was thirty). “I like your eye,” he said. Pick up line? Nah. He came with a date.Thirty years later, you see, I still remember what the guy said.

The books I took home from what seemed like a massive library in the Carpenter Center — they were monographs in a very selective history of photography that I was teaching myself. I rifled the shelves and took the ones that appealed to me. I liked street photography and journalism. I liked black and white. I liked sharp edges and contrasty prints. I liked urban grit. All these qualities are still the ones that grab me at an exhibit or in a magazine. I’ll write another time about a European photographer I “discovered” this summer at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

I think I liked these guys because they took pictures of the olden days. Of course they didn’t; they took cutting edge pictures of their own times: war, loss, catastrophes, madness,  play, who-knew-what-would-happen-next moments. But the same attraction that drew me to writing history drew me to these photographs. I’m still not sure how to name that attraction. That’s one thing I am after in this blog: to dissect and label the ineffable in words.

In addition to Capa and Doisneau and Brassai and Cartier-Bresson, there was one portfolio that I took out of Carpenter several times. It was by Elsa Dorfman, and I think it was Elsa’s Housebook. 

Elsa’s Housebook: A Woman’s Photojournal. David R. Godine, 1974.

What was thrilling about this book was that it captured a woman’s day-to-day brushes with celebrities on the rise, with academics, with her garden, with corners of her house — and it was a book. It was a book by a woman who dared to take pictures of moments of her life, lit by the sun or the clouds, against pedestrian backdrops. They were the pictures I wanted the confidence to take.

And indeed, as one Amazon reader points out, these were the pictures that Dorfman took before she was Dorfman, the supersized Polaroid portrait taker. She made herself into a photographer who rightly lands on lists of noteworthy photographers. And she did it with passion, with persistence, and with enough confidence to keep doing it.

Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan by Elsa Dorfman (1975)

And even still now. I had frozen her in time in the deep recesses of my memory, but she is now in her mid-seventies (and I am just about sixty, so …what was I thinking?). Her web page (elsadorfman.com) is playful and extensive. This article by Alicia Anstead offers a history of Dorfman’s Polaroid portraits.

            Riddley Walker (1980) is a post-apocalytic story about a twelve-year-old boy who has the power to interpret myth – to riddle.  He lives in southeast England some centuries after a nuclear war has ended Western civilization.  Odd remnants of it remain in the form of a legend known as the Eusa story and in a traveling Punch and Judy show that serves as what government there is in the rough settlements of what used to be Kent.  All of this sounds strange, and it is; but what makes this novel extraordinary is its use of language.  When civilization collapsed, so did language.  Riddley speaks and writes a phonetic, garbled patois.  Hoban’s imagining of this shattered language gives this novel its power.  I recently read Cloud Atlas and its central post-apocalyptic story is also written in its own half-collapsed language.

Like Hoban, Sendak dealt with myths and half-remembered fears.  His books all have that quality of dreams which bend and distort reality.  Max sails for a year and a day, and Mickey falls through the floor (and out of his clothes) into the kitchen.  Goblins steal babies (I found Outside over There too dark to read to my toddlers).  He too played with language, slipping in and out of meaning as his images slipped between waking and dreaming.

To Sendak, technology is toy-like and playful: Max’s boat could be folded of paper, and Mickey’s airplane is made of bread dough.  Technology is much more ominous to Riddley Walker.  As in Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (written two decades earlier), the remnants of techno-civilization are mysterious and awe-inspiring.  Riddley marvels at the remains of a power plant in Cambry (Canterbury).  But the awe elides to a pervasive sense of loss, as Riddley recognizes how much knowledge has disappeared.  No one knows how any of this might have worked.  Many seek the secret of the Little Shyning Man the Attom.

When Riddley finds a stained glass window in Canterbury Cathedral dedicated to St. Eustace, this myth mingles with the Eusa story.  Hoban explores history and language, how our stories develop and change over time, and how we need stories to tell ourselves.  Like Max and Mickey, Riddley reaches deeply into the half-slumbering core of ourselves to find what meaning he can.

A Symposium to Commemorate the Centennial of Woman Suffrage in Oregon, 1912-2012

LaSells Stewart Center, Construction & Engineering Hall

Oregon State University

November 1-2, 2012

“Woman Citizen: Past, Present, and Future” brings scholars, elected officials, activists, and community organizers to OSU to explore women’s roles as citizens and women’s political impact in the local, state, and national arenas. As OSU’s commemoration of the centennial of woman suffrage in Oregon, the Symposium is intended to promote education and discussion among students, staff, faculty, and community members and to encourage civic and political engagement. All events are free and open to the public.

Throughout the Symposium, participants are encouraged to peruse the Century of Action exhibit chronicling the suffrage movement in Oregon and the poster session featuring research projects by OSU graduate students in public policy.

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 1

Please join us for a light breakfast in the Guistina Galleria beginning at 8:30

9:00 a.m.

Opening Remarks

Marisa Chappell, Associate Professor of History, Oregon State University

9:15 a.m.

“The Hand That Rocks the Ballot Box: Women Vote”

Susan Scanlan, President, Women’s Research & Education Institute and Chair, National Council of Women’s Organizations

10:30 a.m.

“How Women Won the Vote in Oregon and Why that Victory Matters”

Kim Jensen, Associate Professor of History and Gender Studies, Western Oregon University

11:30 a.m.

The Suffragists

A screening of the new Oregon Experience documentary, followed by a discussion/Q&A with the film’s director, Kami Horton, and Kim Jensen.

12:30 p.m.

“Is the Personal Still Political? Women’s Private and Public Lives”

Stephanie Coontz, Professor of History, The Evergreen State College and Co-Chair and Director of Public Education at the Council on Contemporary Families.

Symposium participants are invited to join us for lunch in the Guistina Galleria during Professor Coontz’s presentation.

2:00 p.m.

“Women Changing Communities: A Roundtable”

Participants include: Sobia Paracha (OCADSV); Laura Isiordia and Brenda Mendoza (CAPACES Leadership Institute); Debbie Vought (Citizens for Safe Schools, Klamath Falls); Toni Ryan (CARDV); Jo Anne Trow (Corvallis League of Women Voters). Facilitator: Lorena Reynolds, Instructor of Women Studies, OSU

4:00 p.m.

“Economic Citizenship for Women: Progress and Possibilities”

Alice Kessler-Harris, Professor of History, Columbia University

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 2

Please join us for a light breakfast in the Guistina Galleria beginning at 9:30

10:00 a.m.

“Women in Government: A Roundtable”

Participants include: Barbara Roberts (former Oregon governor and Secretary of State and current Metro Council member); Julie Manning (Corvallis mayor); Sara Gelser (state representative); Jackie Winters (state senator); Delores Pigsley (chair, Confederated Tribes of Siletz). Facilitator: Sarah Henderson, Associate Professor of Political Science, OSU

12:00 noon

“Women and Leadership: Looking to the Future”

Barbara Roberts, former Oregon Governor

Throughout the Symposium, participants are encouraged to peruse the Century of Action exhibit chronicling the suffrage movement in Oregon and the poster session featuring research projects by OSU graduate students in public policy.

The Woman Citizen Symposium is made possible by the generous support of sponsors: OSU Women’s Giving Circle; the Horning Endowment in the Humanities; the Hundere Endowment in Religion and Culture; the School of History, Philosophy, and Religion; the School of Language, Culture, and Society; the School of Public Policy; the College of Liberal Arts; the Vice Provost for Student Affairs; OSU Libraries; OSU Center for the Humanities; the OSU President’s Commission on the Status of Women; and the League of Women Voters of Corvallis.

“Nichols has accomplished a major feat, demonstrating that isolationism was a far richer and more complex intellectual tradition than its critics have ever imagined—one that still speaks to our own time, freshening the stale formulas of the Washington consensus and allowing us to reimagine the role of the United States in the world.” – Jackson Lears

You can read the entire article online at: TheNation.com.

How about the historian’s knowledge?  How do we know what we know?  Is it all just texts?  Well, of course it’s all just texts – we deal with the written word, and little else.  I thought about this a lot when I was writing my book on George Cheyne.  How could I expect to get a handle on the life of an 18^th century Scottish physician?  I have always been bemused by the fact that Cheyne and I are physical opposites: he was huge, tall and over 400 pounds; I am not.  I have always loved detective novels, and doing history is in some ways like solving a puzzle – except the pieces are scattered all over the place.  In Cheyne’s case, I put together what he said publicly with what he said privately in correspondence.  With that went what other people thought of him, publicly and privately.  On top of that I looked at his setting – what was happening around him, the political and cultural milieu.  I looked at his material circumstances, which I became very conscious of when writing for the Oxford DNB and looking at numerous wills.  On the basis of all this, I came to some conclusions about what Cheyne was like, what he believed, and what it was like to live his life.  Of course I could be all wrong, but that’s why history is an ongoing enterprise; it’s never finished.  When I was in college I read Quentin Skinner’s essay on meaning and understanding in the history of ideas, and it made a deep impression on me.  He argued that the text could not be separated from its context, that you had to have both to understand an idea.   I could worry forever about the Russian doll of the reader reading the read text and what it means, if anything.  I would rather assume that the writer (who in the 18^th century, I think, was not as self-conscious as most writers today, except for Sterne) meant something and that maybe I can find out what that something is.  It is true that I will never really “know” the eighteenth century, I will only know it from the twentieth.  Since time travel is not yet a viable possibility, I guess that will have to do.

“Oregon Women Vote:  A Centennial Celebration” promises a lively evening headlined by actress/historian Tames Alan’s entertaining presentation, “Soldiers in Petticoats:  The Struggles of the Suffragettes” about the national suffrage movement. (For a preview, see www.livinghistorylectures.com.)

JoAnne Trow, President of the Benton County Historical Society and Museum, will provide the Oregon perspective with remarks from her popular talk, “Why Did It Take So Long?” about the Oregon suffrage story.

Local poet, playwright, teacher, and actress Shelley Moon will conclude the show with a dramatic performance that unites the women’s suffrage movement with the ongoing voting rights struggles of other groups excluded from this essential element of full citizenship.

Corvallis Mayor Julie Manning will be the evening’s Mistress of Ceremonies.  Following the performances, attendees are invited to enjoy light refreshments in the lobby.  They will also have an opportunity to honor inspiring women leaders who influence their own lives.

“Oregon Women Vote” honors the pioneering success of Oregon women’s efforts, as well as National Historic Preservation Month.  The event is co-sponsored by over 20 groups, organizations, businesses, individuals, and local governments.

Films are screened Tuesday evenings at 6:00 p.m. in Owen Hall at OSU.

April 10: North Country hosted by Charlotte Headrick, professor of Theatre Arts.

April 17: 14 Women hosted by Women in Policy, School of Public Policy.

April 24: The Hours hosted by Anita Helle, professor of English.

May 1: A Crushing Love: Chicanas, Motherhood, and Activism, hosted by Norma Cardenas, assistant professor of Ethnic Studies, and Kryn Freehling-Burton, instructor of Women Studies.

May 8: Triangle Fire: The Tragedy that Forever Changed Labor and Industry, hosted by Anita Guerrini, professor of History and Horning Endowed Chair.

May 15: Cover Girl Culture, hosted by Aurora Sherman, assistant professor of Psychology.

May 22: The Color Purple, hosted by Jim Foster, professor of Political Science.

May 29: They Call Me Muslim, hosted by Faiza Al-Saaidi, instructor of Women Studies.

Application materials should include applicant’s name, address, phone number, e-mail address, and the names and phone numbers of two referees (students must include one faculty member as a referee); a one-page description of the project; and a summary of applicant’s education and background, not to exceed one page. Submit application by April 27, 2012 to: Sally Hacker Award, Center for the Humanities, Oregon State University, 811 S.W. Jefferson Ave., Corvallis, OR  97333-4506. hacker-award-2012