Thoughts from the archive

• Walking into an archive (and a town) I've never been to before doesn't feel strange, somehow, for as soon as I caught sight of Author's familiar handwriting, I felt right at home.
• It's completely irrational, but let's say Author has a side subject that ze is interested in writing about, like geometry or cutting out paper dolls. Every time Author starts talking about geometry or paper dolls (which other researchers have already discussed), I want hir to talk instead about what I'm interested in having hir talk about. See? Irrational.
• Those who (ahem!) have recently purchased a camera to take photos of materials like the cool kids do should be warned that they should test the camera before going to the archive. Camera manufacturers like to put in enough loud shutter clicks, beeps, and little musical flourishes when the camera turns on and off to embarrass the most intrepid researcher, especially when said researcher can't figure out how to turn them off without diligent Google searches for guidance. If you were in an archive recently and some fool had a noisy camera, that was me.
  

Writing houses again

Our family used to have a dog that did this: If she didn't want to acknowledge the presence of something she was afraid of, like a cat or something she'd chewed up and knew she'd get in trouble for, she wouldn't look directly at whatever it was but would turn away and look at it out of the corner of her eye.

I am that dog, looking slantendicular when I think about (1) the upcoming semester, which is coming up at the speed of light; (2) an upcoming research trip that I would normally look forward to but am not prepared for; (3) serious academic controversies as reported by diligent bloggers; and (4) a ton of writing that is not going well at all. You would think it impossible to avoid looking at everything on your desk directly, including the computer monitor, but you would be wrong, although I can safely report that a day spent trying and failing to write is much more exhausting than actually getting the thing written.

Fortunately, The New Yorker's article "The Rise of the Tiny House" let me escape into my writing house fantasy again for a little while. I'm pretty sure that will help. That and getting the writing done.

(I will write a real post soon.)

Home is where the dishwasher is

Historiann has an interesting post up about Michelle Nijhuis's "Not one more winter in the tipi, honey." It's about the gendered division of labor that creeps in when idealistic back-to-the-land-for-a-simpler-life types experience parenthood. The glamor jobs like siding the yurt win a lot of praise whereas the realities of invisible (and repetitive) domestic work like washing diapers don't, and the division of labor that usually attends these tasks often means that women bail out first on the Arcadian dream.

I think it's partly the invisibility of these tasks, as Historiann says, and partly their lack of glamor, but also the sheer amount of mental as well as physical energy that they take. I've never done anything remotely yurt-like in terms of pure back-to-the-landness, but being in the Land of No Internets in the summertime has given me a little appreciation for that life.

I used to get impatient when whoever was in charge of cooking would ask what we'd like for dinner hours before dinner time, but I have more sympathy for that now, though I try not to ask. Once you're the person in charge of cooking, baking, and the rest, you realize that if you don't think about it in advance--first at the grocery store, since it's a long trek back there if you forget something, and then counting back from dinner time to the preparation time you're going to need--dinner and breakfast and lunch aren't going to happen.

Now, to be fair, other family members always offer to take over some of this work, especially washing the mountains of dishes, and certainly at home we have an equitable division of labor: one person cooks and the other cleans up, and so on. I've chosen to take on the more traditional role at the LoNI mostly to give everyone else more free time and because I don't have to do this permanently. I've also done this as a kind of experiment in 19th-century living and as an exercise in shifting focus from one form of work to another.

A lot of commenters over at Historiann's mentioned Laura Ingalls Wilder's books, and I'm reminded of something the character Laura thinks about in The First Four Years. In this book, she's pregnant and feeling miserable, but she realizes that "the work must go on, and she was the one who must do it."

To get back to the "not one more winter in the tipi" idea: You can put a solar panel on a yurt or not, depending on how you feel that day, but for all the domestic tasks, the work has to go on whether you feel like it or not. That makes a difference.

Handwriting: a tipping point

Apparently Indiana has abolished the teaching of handwriting (cursive, I think, though the articles don't say) in favor of more typing.

• If you're at The Wall Street Journal, you see this as "the end of civilization as we know it," although I think Anthony Daniels is kidding.
• If you're at The Atlantic, you worry a little more about "how handwriting builds character."
• If you're Karin Harmon James, a psych professor at Indiana University, you talk about how "handwriting increases brain activity, hones fine motor skills, and can predict a child's academic success in ways that keyboarding can't." (The quotation is from the article and not from James.) What's disturbing is that James is talking about printing and not cursive in reporting this result: "The printing practice also improved letter recognition, which is the No. 1 predictor of reading ability at age 5." Eliminating practice of writing would thus have a negative effect.
  

There are class considerations here, too: little Sophie and Ethan* in the suburbs will just add another class to their over-scheduled lives between private music lessons and computer camp while those in regular public school will not. As long as students can still handwrite essays on exams, I don't care if they write in cursive or not, but maybe we're at a tipping point in terms of teaching the physical act of writing with a pen.

But I've discovered something disturbing: I don't much like to write by hand any more, and my handwriting is getting worse from disuse. This is almost as disturbing as discovering that I pay better attention to the books I read on the iPad, even though it's not as easy to mark them up as it is with a pencil. This feels like another kind of tipping point, and I'm not sure I like it.

Has that happened to you?

*Names chosen from the most popular names for 2011--no offense meant to any actual Sophies or Ethans.

Grading: top down or bottom up?

At various points in my teaching career, I've heard of classes in which students were told something like this the first day: "Everyone has an A in this class unless you don't do the work" or "An A in this class is yours to lose" or "If you complete these 5 assignments under our contract, you will get an A." The idea is that this would dispel the students' anxiety about the class and make them work harder for the sheer joy of learning.

I could see the traces of this kind of grading when students would get to my class, look at an essay exam or a paper that I'd handed back, and say, "Why didn't this get an A? Where did I lose the points?"

My practice, as I would always explain to the students when the first exam was handed back, has always been the opposite: a paper starts from zero points/grades and rises up the grading scale based on its quality. A B paper isn't an A paper gone bad in some point-driven way but a paper that began as a 0 and worked its way up to a B ( or"good," as students often forget) level. Better papers worked their way up to an A. Some papers worked their way up to a C.

It seemed to me that the "A is yours to lose" theory of grading would create more anxiety than it would solve, since the only way you could go in such a system was down. Every evaluation opportunity becomes a chance only to fail or to maintain the status quo rather than improve. The best you can do is break even and not lose, but you never really win.

I was thinking of this recently because of something a student wrote about this summer. Her assumption was that all teachers graded on the "points down from an A" model, and her suggestion was that teachers instead start from the bottom and grade upwards since that is more motivating and since that is what students are used to in every game they ever play on their iPhones. I hadn't thought of grading and motivation in terms of games, but it's a great metaphor.

What's your practice?

No phones, no lights, no motor cars

I'm back, in a manner of speaking, although my body clock is still set to several time zones away. It couldn't be called a restful trip, what with flying in and then driving 4 separate trips of 500 miles each due to family emergencies, and when I woke up this morning, I'd been in so many different places that I didn't know where I was for a minute.

But there were a few days in the land of no internets, and that helped a lot. I've written before about the land of no internets, which feels sort of like a private family theme park where the 19th century comes alive (no phones! no internet! no washers! no dishwashers!). Life slows down and spreads out before you when you can't check messages and the phone is off. Instead of looking downward at the phone, a gesture that's become more and more ubiquitous, you lift your head. You look out across the water or across the room at your family members.

Some days I watched the rain pour down and decided that it was a good time to make some cookies or maybe a blueberry cobbler. Other days, I was out on the water and just breathing in the early morning smell of the air. At night, it's so dark I can see constellations that I don't see at other times, and if I ventured a few feet from the house, I wouldn't see it unless the moon is out.

When I left the land of no internets, I discovered that I'd been pelted with phone and email messages from colleagues who didn't take a hint from my previous "I am away from my desk" responses and seemed to want replies! right! now! to deal with issues that were important to them.

But I don't have to care about those messages when I'm in the land of no internets.

Update: light posting

More travel, including a visit to the land of no internets = no posts for a while.

Writing Vampire

Pack, get up at the crack of dawn, travel, work on something else entirely, return, wash clothes. Repeat that a couple of times and it does wonders for your writing schedule, as in "makes any concentration impossible." Not for everyone--there are stalwarts among you all--but I am so far from being in the writing zone that I'll have to schedule another trip just to get there.

I had lunch with a friend today, a writer. When the talk turned to writing, I couldn't stop asking her about it. So you write every morning? How many hours do you put in? You have a writing group? How is it going?

As she talked, I realized that I was drinking in this story of the writing process. It was gratifying to hear from someone who was doing successfully what I was failing to do this week, and it was also just guilt-inducing enough to make me want to try again, with renewed effort.

Gratifying and guilt-inducing. Filling up some need I had to hear about writing going well.

Yes, blog friends, I have become a writing vampire.

"Twitter can do it all"

A conversation I've been having with increasing frequency lately goes like this (redacted for content essence):

Enthusiast: "Twitter can do it all. Links to scholarship, trends in the field--it's all there. You should try Twitter."

Me: "I'm on Twitter, and I follow a fair number of people. It has some useful resources."

Enthusiast: "You really should try Twitter. It's great for keeping up with scholarship."

Me, with a little more heat: "I'M ON TWITTER. It has some useful resources, but it doesn't have everything."

Enthusiast: "Twitter has everything. It's wonderful because people tweet great insights into literature. You really should try it."

Me, giving up: "Thank you for the tech tip on this marvelous resource. Gee, I had never heard of it before."

Enthusiast: "Twitter can do it all! You should try Twitter!"

I'll spare you the rest. Let's just say the communication loop is not reaching from my mouth to Enthusiast's ear. I've talked before about how annoying it is when people assume that because you have a nuanced view of what a particular technology can and can't do, you just don't get it, so let me stop there.

Here is what I've heard in these conversations and more formal settings. Twitter is the following:

1. a great branding and self-promotion mechanism for scholars and grad students
2. a means of keeping up with the scholarship so you don't have to read those pesky journal articles
3. a source of great insights by great thinkers in the field before the insights are published
4. a way to get the gist of various speeches and sessions at conferences
5. a way to find links to resources that you'd otherwise never see.

I find #5 the most useful and sometimes #4, but "great insights"? My reaction to a lot of tweets is "well, sure," or "of course" or "that's interesting. I'll check out the link." Maybe I'm not following enough people, but I've never seen a tweet that made me feel as though Moses had come down from the mountain top with tiny, 144-character tablets.

Edited to add: in the comments, Dr. Koshary hilariously captured this "join my church" attitude:

"My Twitter is a mighty Twitter. Twitter is so great, you really should come to know Twitter. If loving Twitter is wrong, then I don't want to be right! Twitter can do anything, but Twitter lets us accidentally send sexually explicit messages meant for significant others to our parents because Twitter loves us enough to let us make our own mistakes."

Leaving on a jet plane

Some are jetting off to exotic climes like Blargistan or the Berks conference. Dame Eleanor, What Now, ADM, Dr. Koshary, and others are doing the summer writing challenge that Notorious and ADM are hosting. Still others are contemplating workspaces, like Profgrrrl, or devising monthly challenges, like nicoleandmaggie, or thinking about summer writing, like Dr. Crazy, or being (rightly) concerned about the editing they're receiving, like Horace.

As for me, I'm doing some of the above, including enough travel to disrupt the writing process, not that it takes much to disrupt the writing process. I was away, and now I'm back, and shortly I'll be leaving again. It's all stuff I signed up to do, so I shouldn't complain, but when has that ever stopped me from complaining?

Those long quiet days of trying out arguments on the cats as I sat at the desk may be over for a while, but I'll bet--or hope--that there's a burst of writing when I get back.

How to Put a PowerPoint onto an iPad

Say you already have some PowerPoint presentations that you use for classes (I mostly have pictures for the class to analyze), and you want to try using them on the iPad. Here's the problem: even if you have Keynote on your iPad, if you don't have Keynote on your main computer because it's not a Mac, Apple won't let you transfer the files via iTunes.

Here is a workaround that's probably known to thousands of people, but since I just figured it out, you get to read about it here.

1. Using Dropbox, go to the presentation. (You can also email it to yourself and open it on the iPad.) Once it's downloaded, click on the little box with an arrow in the upper right-hand corner ("Open in"). Choose Keynote.

2. It will download into Keynote, with a few warnings that the font might look different.

3. Tap on the presentation to open it. That's all there is to it.

4. You can edit the presentation in Keynote (add presenter notes, change the text, etc.), but apparently you can't save it back to Dropbox. To get the new edition on your main computer, click on the little wrench and go to Share and Print. You can save it as a keynote file, as a .pdf, or as a PowerPoint file and email it to yourself.

5. Now here is the awesome part: say you want to leave your iPad up at the podium and walk around while you show the PowerPoint. If you have an iPhone,you can use your iPhone as a remote control for the slides if you download and install Keynote Remote. Both devices have to be on the same wireless network, which shouldn't be a problem in a classroom.

If you have a separate Bluetooth Apple remote, it doesn't appear to work with the iPad (or at least I couldn't get it to work).

I learned about this in the comments on one of Pogue's posts at the NYTimes. Pogue also talks about something called "presenter view," which I had never heard of before: although the audience sees just the slide, you can see your notes and a preview of the next slide. You get to "presenter view" by going to Slide Show, Set Up Show in PowerPoint.

Random bullets of still here

• I come back to the blogosphere after a week or so and discover that many of the posts are about food--lovely food, like Comrade PhysioProf's fabulous pizza or Dr. Crazy's excellent restaurant meal. Do we rediscover food again once the semester is over and we realize that we have, you know, bodies that like to eat?
• In another vast epiphany, I realized that have fixed opinions about what makes a panel work: my panel, my rules. The rules are pretty simple:
  
1. Shut up and let the panelists shine, but don't let them talk past their allotted time (that one is a no-brainer).
2. Shorter is better for presentations, since everyone's attention spans are getting shorter.
3. Be prepared for massive technology fail but do all you can to make it succeed, like getting the presentations set up on a single computer ahead of time if possible instead of switching between them
4. Let the audience talk rather than posing a bunch of questions yourself or letting the panelists just ask each other questions.
• Addendum: I also realized that I am impervious to the criticism that arises from enforcing my rules because they work.
  

The hazards of reading literary criticism at home

As I was working at home yesterday, there was a knock at the door. I was concentrating on what I was reading, so I had the book in my hand as I opened the door and saw a clean-cut young man with a stack of handouts.

It was a religious-oriented local lawn service business, and since I didn't need the service, I politely said so. We were polite and cordial in our conversation, and then he turned to go.

As I was closing the door, he turned back to me.

"Is that a good book?"

"What?" I'd forgotten that I had the book in my hand.

"Is that a good book to read?"

"Yes. It's a book of literary criticism," I said, and shut the door.

Why on earth would he ask about the book? I thought at first maybe it was one of those salesmen's ploys--you know, where they ask for a glass of water to keep you talking to them. That hadn't seemed to be the case here, though.

Then I looked at the book in my hand. Like so many cultural studies books by a prominent publisher that rhymes with Luke Luniversity Fress, it had a provocative image on the cover--an image of a naked woman swathed in gloomy draperies, in fact. I'm sure the naked woman was performing gender or destabilizing gender identity or representing the hegemonic forces of history, but whatever she was doing, she sure was naked enough that the lawn guy noticed--and, to judge by his peculiar parting expression, didn't approve.

Random links about technology and teaching

Take these with a grain of salt and my standard disclaimers: I like technology and think it has valid uses in the classroom, hands-on learning can be useful, and all the rest.

• Here's an experiment: say you have a class that for some reason is mostly lecture, and in the eleventh week (which we could call the "week 11 slump," because anyone who's ever stood in front of a class knows that's what it is) you tell the students they'll be part of an exciting experiment about learning, and you let the postdocs take over and give them all kinds of cool interactive tools. For one week. The students who have practiced on these tools perk up and do better with their week's learning than a control group. Would you then conclude that "Postdocs Can Be Trained to Be More Effective than Senior Instructors"? You wouldn't? What kind of scientist are you, anyway?
• Kim Brooks, at Salon, wants something different to happen with high school English so that her first-year comp students can write better. I think she wants fewer hands-on assignments that ask students to make videos about how Hester Prynne would act today and a few more assignments that focus on making sure that students can write a sentence that has (1) a subject, (2) a verb, and (3) a clear point.
  
• But if you go to USC, you might get to keep making videos instead of writing papers. For the record: making videos can be a valid pedagogical choice, of course, and students can come up with some very sophisticated visual arguments. But sooner or later students are going to have to write something, aren't they? A cover letter? An email? A report? Do geologists (one of the examples) get to turn in a video assessing the prospects for drilling for oil in a particular region, or do they have to write a report? I'm guessing the latter.
• According to the Chronicle, Stanford med students, who were issued iPads last fall, demanded paper notes or books instead of reading their required books on the device, although they found the iPad useful for sketching and taking notes in lectures: "But when Stanford's School of Medicine lent iPads to all new students last August, a curious thing happened: Many didn't like using them in class. Officials had hoped to stop printing an annual average of 3,700 pages of course materials per medical student, encouraging them to use digital materials instead. Some students rebelled, and Stanford was forced to resume offering printed notes to those who wanted them. In most classes, half the students had stopped using their iPads only a few weeks into the term."
• At least no one's requiring that Atlas Shrugged be taught lest money should be withheld from the school. Oh, wait: "A separate grant from BB&T funds a course on ethics and economics in which Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is required reading. The novel, which depicts society's collapse in the wake of government encroachment on free enterprise, was recently made into a movie marketed to tea party members."

I want a meeting . . .

Disclaimer: This isn't inspired by anything in particular.

• I want a meeting that doesn't simply repeat and elaborate on information that's already been disseminated by email, especially if the information is, as always, more bad news about the budget.
• I want a meeting that recognizes the truth of this statement: "Email is for announcements. Meetings are for action."
• I want a meeting in which faculty venting about issues that can't be changed and won't be the subject of a concerted protest is either banned or kept to a minimum.
• I want a meeting in which the phrase "We will talk about this at the next meeting" after the subject under discussion has already been talked about endlessly will be banned.
• If there's supposed to be a vote, I want a meeting in which the vote will happen.
• I want a meeting in which entirely new information that I've never heard about, even after attending every single meeting, is not presented in the context of "everybody knows about this" as a done deal.
• I want a meeting that doesn't happen and is canceled if there's no reason for it beyond the fact that it is scheduled.
• I want a meeting that I can come out of feeling as though I’d accomplished something instead of feeling angry and helpless at what the powers that be are imposing on us.

This will probably be *poofed* for rantiness, but I had to say it.

Library tales

The Little Professor has a post up about the University of Denver, which decided that a modern library could do without those messy paper things with pages. You know the things I mean: they have no digital content at all and are thus entirely useless. Best to put them in an off-site storage facility where they won't be in the way of students who want to hang out with their laptops. Here's someone who speaks for a lot of us:

Faculty members who have objected say that, while database research is important to modern-day academics, Denver researchers will invariably lose out on serendipitous discovery that comes with perusing a library’s stacks. “I know it’s kind of a touchy-feely argument, and I wish I had documented my own experience to prove it,” Headrick said. “But it’s very, very common in a lot of the social sciences. I’ll leave with five other books that I find while looking.

It's funny. We believe in digital serendipity: we find things when we're searching online that we never thought we'd find, and we boast about it. That's what Twitter is for, apparently. So why are we so apologetic about the "touchy-feely" nature of paper serendipity, which is at least as important to those in humanities fields?

And is anyone else getting tired of the argument that those of us who find it useful to look at books on shelves just don't get the digital age? I get it. I really do. Being able to search for and access texts online is a wonderful thing. But to sing the old song again, paper is a technology, too, and sometimes it's the most efficient one. I can scan through a book, read a few pages, check the index, and know whether to take it out or not in a minute or so.

I was thinking of this the other day when I went to our campus library, which was filled with students studying. (The presence of books doesn't seem to have hurt their ability to do this, by the way.) As I was checking out, the librarian helpfully pointed out that books could be delivered to departments if faculty ordered them. I appreciate that service and will probably take advantage of it at some point, especially if I'm pressed for time. There's a tradeoff, though, and its name is serendipity.

Spring madness

I have a question: how many of you have noticed that at the end of the spring semester, universities (or departments) get a little squirrelly?

Maybe some issue comes along that wouldn't rattle anyone in the fall, but in the spring everyone starts sending furious emails about it.

Or maybe a department meeting gets very tense all of a sudden over a seemingly minor issue.

Or everyone gets in an uproar about some announced policy that's been around for ages but now is seen as the decline of civilization and the end of Truly Serving the Purposes of a Liberal Education.

I can't describe it any better than this, but in my house, we call it the annual spring madness and all but place bets on when it will strike. I've seen it wherever I've taught, so it's not limited to one place. Have you seen it, too?

Notes from a former adjunct

There have been two blog threads I've watched going the rounds recently, threads I've watched from afar. One is the "burnout after tenure" thread (seen at Historiann's and elsewhere), and the other is the controversy over Tenured Radical's advice to adjuncts. I spent a lot of years as an adjunct, so I have a few thoughts:

• When TR tells you "Don't listen to senior colleagues who tell you that there will soon be a line in your field and that you are ideally positioned for it," believe it. Repeat it. Cross-stitch it on a sampler. Tattoo it on your forehead. Anyone who would tell you that is probably trying to be (1) kind or (2) hopeful about your prospects, but it's just cruel.
• Let me put it this way: If they're not willing to put a ring on it, so to speak, when they're telling you that they can't live without you because of all your fancy extra service work and great teaching, they're not going to be more likely to do so when a shiny new parade of faculty candidates comes to campus. If you decide to stay when your department is courting the shiny ones, that's your decision, but do so with your eyes open.
  
• Let me put it another way: do you remember the movie An Officer and a Gentleman? For those who didn't see it, Richard Gere is a Navy officer-in-training and Louis Gossett, Junior, is the grizzled old sergeant. Gossett knocks the snotty attitude out of Gere and teaches him life lessons. At the end, Gere is a shiny new officer, ready to have an exciting career, and Gossett is . . . the grizzled old sergeant, waiting to knock some sense into the next batch of snotty recruits and show them the ropes. I did not want to become that grizzled old sergeant (adjunct) showing the new officers (t-t faculty) the ropes of the place, even if it meant getting out of teaching altogether.
  
• On the other hand, New Kid says that "there is a whole cohort of people out there for whom contingent employment is their career." Absolutely true. A lot of people who were adjuncting in my old department are still adjuncting there many years later, either because they had family ties or because they didn't want to leave grad school city.
  
• I have known people who have retired from their positions as adjuncts, and they were happy about their careers.
  
• I've also known people who became administrators of programs, or advisers, or otherwise were employed in academia without tenure-track positions, and they were happy, too.
  

This isn't to say that there shouldn't be more tenure-track jobs, or that the job market is bad, or that those who want t-t jobs shouldn't be angry, or any of that. I don't have any advice.

Scenes from the front office: "Excellence without Money" in action

It's registration time, and two days after it started, Required Course X is completely filled up for this summer and next fall. I've fielded my share of desperate emails this week and went to our departmental front office to see if there were any options. Nope--no options.

Students were coming through the doors as I waited, and the phone kept ringing. The message our administrative assistant gave was always the same:

"No, sorry, there aren't any more sections available."

"Sorry, but because of budget cuts, we only have so many instructors to teach that, and the sections are all full."

"I can put you on a waiting list for fall."

"Sorry, the sections are all full.

"Sorry."

"Sorry."

It's not the students' fault. I know that some of them have been trying to get this course for a while, and that others were ready to sign up but it was already closed when their registration time opened.

It's not my fault. I volunteered to teach the class this summer in part for the money, of course, but in part because it's something that students need to take. (Yes, this goes against the "put research first! Only teach your specialty!" ethos that we all get told, but I believe in this course and its benefits for students, so I'm teaching it anyway.)

In a way, it's not even the fault of the upper administrators, since after the state budget cuts, they may not have the money to pay for this, either.

It's a living example of Roxie's "Excellence Without Money" in action.

Why the study of history matters: April 12, 1861

In honor of the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, I'd like to say a little something about why the study of history matters.

Now, unlike my esteemed blogfellow Historiann , I'm not a historian, nor do I play one on tv, although I get a little dramatic in class sometimes about historical events. I'm what movie stars or the Mafia would call a "civilian" as far as history is concerned--an interested civilian, one whose idea of a good book is something by Drew Gilpin Faust or Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, but a civilian nonetheless.

When I was in elementary school and we learned about the Civil War, we learned that it was fought over slavery. Slavery was wrong, and the North wanted to put an end to it, and the South wanted to keep their slaves, and they fired on the North at Fort Sumter, and the war was on. We had learned about Harriet Tubman (but not Frederick Douglass), and we admired her work on the Underground Railroad. There were, in fact, some Underground Railroad houses in the area, although I didn't know that at the time.

When I got to high school, though, I was told that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War. No, that was a simplistic, babyish way of looking at the causes. "States' rights" was the issue, plain and simple: a conflict between the federal government and the states over governance. This may have been the same year we learned about "triangular trade" rather than "the slave trade." At any rate, I remember this vividly because it made no sense to me to be told that slavery was just a side issue, basically an economic spat in which the North wanted to deprive the South of its labor force. People were being bought and sold, yet "states' rights" was the issue? That seemed just plain wrong, even to a daydreaming teenager like myself, but history was presented as Holy Writ back then.

Here's why the study of history matters: because otherwise history gets taught as Holy Writ in one immutable narrative strain with no acknowledgment that it is just one of a number of strains and not necessarily the best one. What I realized some years ago is that my history teacher, high school edition, must have been caught up by the revisionist Southern historians and that that was the narrative he was teaching us. We did not know that there were other strands that told a more truthful story, or that historians were always working on finding more information and telling a more truthful story. But that's what studying history teaches you--that the story is always evolving--and that's why I'm glad there are historians.