Ph.D. Octopus

Not sure about the baseball motif...

by Luce

Two of the four tentacles of the PhD Octopus attended the AHA in Boston this year — a third may have briefly shown his face before fleeing to New York. One can hardly blame him for his quick escape. Held in an indoor mall complex (connecting three hotels, the Prudential center, and Hynes convention) that can only be described as terrifying, it’s entirely possible that you could spend the entire conference forgetting to go outside. Except maybe if the alarm system were to go off in the middle of the conference. Unless they then just herded you into the tight corridors of the still very much indoor mall rather than into the great outdoors, with its various avenues of escape, because…well, I don’t really know the rationale there.

I managed to go to two panels and to see a few people I needed and wanted to see who aren’t typically in town, but I was also curious about what the AHA vibe was all about. During the time I took off before starting my PhD I spent two years working for a much much smaller learned society whose conference attracts about a fifth of the AHA, so partly I was interested in the comparative aspect. Having helped run many a conference for Society X (does that sound partisan to Skull and Bones? …. we were the opposite of Skull and Bones) I signed up to be a part-time grad student worker for the AHA (yes, if you were running around the AHA these past few days you may have caught sight of me wearing a stunning bright green t-shirt and perhaps directing you to the nearest bathroom).

The difference between my experiences of the two was mainly that the AHA seemed much more “professional” in a variety of aspects (not that my old workplace wasn’t professional; it was in many ways, but it still retained a nice, smaller, more intimate feel, with rules that were often meant to be broken). The AHA in comparison has a much larger and more complexly-titled staff, many of whom didn’t seem to have an academic background but instead were professionally trained in their area. Becoming professional historians (by getting a tenure-track position or a post-doc to finish the book) was highly highly emphasized at the AHA; the entire third floor was eery with the shuffled hush of “in-session” interviews. And maybe most symbolic of a professionalism that obviates intimacy was the $10 charged for a lost name badge, a rule that as far as I could tell was never broken.

But lest I be seen as a “conference griper,” a species I never looked on with much humor at my old workplace let me say that it seems there were many more jobs on offer this year than in previous years and even if it makes the conference a little jittery, it’s heartening that a number of the PhDs running around in suits were going to get some of these. I took away valuable things from both panels I went to, methodologically and substantively for my own work and also for thinking about the American university as a whole, and finally I was reminded of a semi-specious claim I’ve always made about my time in Cambridge UK: I learned how to do history and to think best by sitting around with fellow grad students at the local pub.

And happily there were bars at night at the AHA. May I recommend Lir on Boylston, the Pour House’s poor neglected neighbor which served up a really great Sam Adams Brick Red and a cozy seating area in the back replete with book-filled bookshelves? Thanks to Nemo and his friends and new and old NYU friends for a lovely time hanging out with historians.

Oh right, after some much-needed sleep, I will hopefully be reporting back on panels interesting for the intellectual historian in all of us and the academic crisis that… is all of us?

by Wiz

In 1834 a mob of Protestants, enraged that a nunnery in Charlestown (now Somerville) Massachusetts was supposedly keeping a woman against her will, attacked and burnt a Ursuline nunnery. Here is a newspaper description of the aftermath:

The subject of universal interest in the city today has been the work of destruction accomplished by a mob, last night and this morning, at and about the Ursuline Convent, on Mount Benedict, in Charlestown—resulting in the complete sacking of the principal building itself—a four-story handsome brick edifice, with wings, and front about eighty feet—together with the farm house, cottage, and every other building upon the premises, and also with the demolition or consumption by fire of all the furniture and chattels of every description, appurtant to the whole.

The idea that Catholic institutions– nunneries, monasteries, etc…– were enslaving white women was a common trope/fantasy in anti-Catholic imagery. In this particular case, tensions had been stoked by two events (likely conflated in the minds of the rioters). First, a woman named Rebecca Reed (a convert to Catholicism) left the Ursuline convent after sixth months, alleging she had been held against her will and wrote a tell-all book. Six Months in a Convent portrayed the Church as superstitious, greedy, and hierarchal, all common Protestant critiques of Catholicism. The proximate cause, though, of the riot, was a rumor that one Sister Mary John was being held against her will, after she had supposedly tried to run away, but was forced back into the Convent.

Even more worrisome, though, was that the Convent was located on “holy ground,” near to the Bunker Hill Battlefield. One arsonist explained that the Revolutionary heroes “thought not that within site of Bunker Hill, where the blood of heroes flowed, a Convent would be established, and their granddaughters become its inmates.” As a historian writes of the riot: “Built, inconveniently enough, within sight of Bunker Hill, the Ursuline convent desecrated the terrain of revolutionary struggle. The wave of anticonvent propaganda that followed the convent burning often resorted to the twin appeal of seduction and revolution, violated woman and nation, as if to perfect a still incomplete American Revolution.” I can’t imagine a possible contemporary analog.

Anyways… on the night of August 11th, a mob of local Protestants gathered outside the convent:

A few moments after the signal was given, as above described, a gang of about fifty persons—as nearly as we can ascertain—but certainly at no time exceeding sixty—having gathered about the front door of the Convent, and made considerable noise by way of warning the inmates to flee, proceeded to affect a forcible entrance.The whole party, we should observe here, were disguised. All of them, so far as we can learn, had their faces painted—some after an Indian fashion, and others in other ways; and a part of the number employed devices and disguises of various other descriptions, adapted to conceal the individuals concerned in the outrage, from recognition, at the time of its execution, and of course from punishment hereafter….Of the destruction of all the buildings by fire, however, there is no doubt. The fire was set, in different parts of the Convent, probably about 12 o’clock, after considerable time had been spent in breaking up the furniture, including three pianos, an elegant costly harp, and other musical instruments. The whole establishment was in a blaze before one, and was reduced to ashes in the course of an hour or two.

Historians, as is their wont, point out that whatever the immediate causes of anti-Catholic rage in Boston, the Convent riot was a manifestation of much deeper social ills. Specifically, one historian argues, the social tensions of industrialization and the growing fears of Irish immigration:

The Scots-Presbyterian bricklayers who formed the core of the mob and who understood themselves as chivalric agents vented their anger over their own decline in status and decreasing wages on a convent community of leisured women, hidden from public view, supported by foreign capital—and, to the extent that the Ursulines garnered the allegiance of Protestant women, a community that disrupted masculine control of the family. Paradoxically, then, the convent emblematized not just reactionary Old World power but also fearsome economic inequities of American industrialization.

Deeper anxieties of class, religion, ethnicity, and nationalism were played out, in other words, in a fight over the ability for “outsiders” to build a religious building on ground claimed by a fearful group of “native” Americans. What could go wrong?

By Wiz

A couple of days ago Rand Paul had his balls surgically removed by Rachel Maddow on her show, concerning the issue of whether or not private businesses have the right to discriminate. Watch it below, if you haven’t at one of the ten million places that already linked to it.

Particularly obnoxious, to me at least, was when Paul mangled the history of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Here is the relevant part:

PAUL: You know, one interesting historical tidbit, one of my favorite historical characters is William Lloyd Garrison. And one of the interesting things about desegregation and putting people together, do you know when it happened in Boston?
MADDOW: What do you mean, the desegregation? In general?
PAUL: You know when we got — you know, when we got rid of the Jim Crow laws and when we got rid of segregation and a lot of the abhorrent practices in the South, do you know when we got rid of it in Boston?
MADDOW: I — why don’t you tell me what you`re getting at?
PAUL: Well, it was in 1840. So I think it is sort of a stain on the history of America that 120 years to desegregate the South.
But William Lloyd Garrison was a champion and abolitionist who wrote about freeing the slaves back in the 1810s, ’20s and ’30s and labored in obscurity (ph) to do this. He was flagged, put in jails. He was with Frederick Douglass being thrown off trains.
But, you know, they desegregated transportation in Boston in 1840, and I think that was an impressive and amazing thing. But also points out the sadness that it took us 120 years to desegregate the South. And a lot of that was institutional racism was absolutely wrong and something that I absolutely oppose.

Paul’s history is, well let’s say, a bit shaky here. His point, I guess, is that segregation ended in Boston because Garrison changed public opinion, rather than through government action. This is not accurate for reasons that are very relevant for the debate about libertarianism.

First of all, the low hanging fruit: This is picky, perhaps, but William Lloyd Garrison started abolitionist agitation in 1831, 1829 if you count his speech at Park Street Church, but most historians would say 1831, when he founded The Liberator. So, Paul fails on the dates when he claims Garrison started in 1810s.

Second, segregation did not end in 1840s in Boston. Perhaps Paul means the segregation of the railroads, which the abolitionists did largely achieve in the 1840s in Massachusetts. But the Public School system was not desegregated until 1855, Harvard did not graduate an African-American until 1870, and many churches, theaters, lecture-halls, and other public institutions remained segregated throughout the period. The leading scholars on Black Boston write: “In antebellum Boston, blacks were segregated into a few highly concentrated areas of the city, restricted to Jim Crow accommodations on public transportation, isolated in schools that were rapidly deteriorating, and scholastically inferior, excluded from juries, and seated apart in white churches, lecture halls, and places of entertainment.” (Horton and Horton 73)

Here, for instance, is a quote from The Liberator, Dec 12, 1853: “Rev. Theodore Parker administered, in a recent Sunday discourse, a well-deserved rebuke of the spirit of caste, which in the Puritan city is exhibited towards that portion of God’s heritage whose skins are colored unlike the majority; and for an illustration, referred to the concerts of Monsier Julian, at Music Hall, from one of which respectable colored persons had been excluded.”

Charlotte Forten, a black feminist, keep a meticulous journal throughout the 1850s and 1860s. A relevant entry from September 1854:

“I have suffered much today,- my friends, Mrs. P and her daughters were refused admission to the Museum, after having tickets given them, solely on account of their complexion. Insulting language was used to them.—Of course they felt and exhibited deep, bitter indignation; but of what avail was it? None, but to exit the ridicule of those contemptible creatures, miserable doughfaces who do not deserve the name of men. I will not attempt to write more.—No words can express my feelings, but these cruel wrongs cannot be much longer endured. A day of retribution must comes. God grant that it will come very soon! (Forten 98)

The point, of course, is that moral suasion and consumer choices—Rand Paul’s solution to segregation—did not work. Let me repeat. Non-state consumer action did not desegregate all public facilities in Massachusetts. Abolitionist pressure did convince some theaters, a number of railroads, and other companies to let in African-Americans. But, by any standard, segregation, but de facto and de jure, remained a fact in Boston.

Which is why—you guessed it—abolitionists and their allies turned to the government. First the State Government, and then the Federal Government. Wendell Phillips—Garrison’s close ally—testified in front of the Massachusetts legislature in 1841, on the issue of Railroad Desegregation (the abolitionists began a boycott campaign only after the State Government failed to act on the issue). This is a description of the event from his biography:

Privately owned railroads received “special privileges and franchises” from the state, he argued. The state, therefore had the right and the duty to make these enterprises treat all citizens as equals. “These corporations are public servants,” Phillips maintained,” and therefore bound to serve in accordance with the laws of the commonwealth,” which had been designed “to secure the rights of all the people.”…Since law, according to Phillips, must insure the public’s good above all else, legislators should override the private choices of the segregationists…. As Phillips had made clear during this contest, however, he now equated racial equality with the public’s good and insisted that positive law must prevent an individual’s discriminatory use of private property.” (Brewer p. 98-99)

No politician was as associated with the abolitionist legacy as Charles Sumner. Sumner devoted the last of his life to passing a Civil Rights Bill that would, in the words of Eric Foner “Guarantee all citizens equal access to public accommodations, common carriers, public schools, churches, cemeteries, and jury service.” (504) As he died, Sumner whispered to a visitor “you must take care of the civil rights bill… don’t let it fail.” (533) But fail it did, shot down by compromises in the Senate, and then a Supreme Court, and so segregation lasted, in much of America, for another 100 years.

In case the point isn’t obvious, Rand Paul’s idea of how to fight segregation and racism is simply nonsense. The power of privately owned business, institutions, and individuals is too great to be fought simply by consumer choices and moral suasion.

by Wiz

I’ve been doing research in Boston for the last couple of months, though I am based out of New York. So I thought I’d share some observations on the two in the spirit of Amanda’s comparison between Austin and Brooklyn.

If you don’t care about Boston or New York, or about my narcissistic ramblings, you can skip this post.

Point Number 1: This is an unfair comparison. New York is so clearly superior it hurts. Bars are open later (and they’re cooler and more numerous), public transit is amazing, the food is world-famous, everything is bigger, etc…

Number 2: Bostonians are a sporty, jogging bunch. I blame this on the unfortunate confluence of two overlapping groups, both of which are overrepresented in Boston: Wasps and Ivy Leaguers. If there is one thing that Wasps like, even more than bad art made out of beach shells or sweaters over their shoulders, it’s jogging.

Number 3: One way in which Boston clearly beats New York is in its Burrito-based chains. This surprised me. But Boston’s got Boloco, Anna’s Taqueria, Boca Grande, and Felipe’s. These are all relatively similar, it’s true, but of high quality. In comparison, New York is a fairly anemic burrito environment, with most of Manhattan dominated by mega-chains like Chipotle or Qdoba. On the other hand, the pizza mostly sucks in Boston. And don’t even get me started on the bagels. Finagle a bagel my ass.

Number 4: Boston and especially Cambridge have a much better out-door music scene than New York. On any half-way nice day, there are old hippies or scamps from Berkeley all over Harvard Square, Newbury St., etc…playing bad Beatles covers or stupid drum routines. It’s silly but pleasant on a nice sunny day. Paradoxical, in its way, since historically New York is a much better place for professional music than Boston is.

Perhaps this is because in New York musicians go for the subway, and so are dispersed, whereas in Boston they tend to congregate in the few places that have lots of outdoor activity, but I do think one unfortunate consequence of New York’s position as the world leader in music and art is that it makes amateurs a bit reluctant to make fools of themselves, which is essential to any outdoor music scene.

Number 5: Between the fashion industry, Williamsburg hipsters, and stylish up-town types, New Yorkers clearly are a shockingly vain people. In Boston, on the other hand, there are two types: those for whom the relevant fashion question is which North Face jacket goes best with their college sweat pants, and those for whom the question is which Kennedy circa 1958 you are imitating.

Number 6: Both city’s sports fans are loutish assholes. But there is something endearing about the utter lack of decency in the Boston sports fan, wearing his Celtics t-shirt in gthe freezing cold, singing nonsense songs while puking in his Red Sox hat. I’ll never forget being at a punk rock show in Boston, when, during the inevitable wait for the band to come out for encore, the crowd just started chanting “Yankees Suck, Yankees Suck” Didn’t make any sense, was completely out of context, and yet… somehow, it worked.