Category Archives: Activist Historian

May 22, 2013, 4:59 pm

Being Good Web Citizens

If I were alive I would tweet Engels. Just saying.

Listen up! Vanessa Varin is trying to start a convo about ethical web practices over at the American Historical Association’s She was kind enough to solicit the opinions of the #twitterstorians about the practice of live tweeting panels, and has written a couple of good pieces which aren’t getting enough attention. This may be because the comments section isn’t working. Varin’s new piece, “Being a Good Web Citizen” is also now up, and worth a look as well.

All of us who were solicited for comment came out against #snark while live tweeting a panel, you’ll be glad to know. Twitter seems to be more vulnerable to the regrettable riposte than blogging is, and since the emergence of Storify, it’s far harder to take back. Varin cites Kathleen Fitzpatrick of the…

May 3, 2013, 8:31 am

It Isn’t Easy To Be Marx: Recent History in the Nineteenth Century

By Claire Potter

On the way to the airport, I began one of my travel activities: catching up with the paper publications that accumulate despite my best efforts to keep up. In this way I discovered John Gray’s review of Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life (Liveright, 2013). It’s a beautifully written essay about what sounds like a must-read summer book. According to Gray, this is a major revision of Marx, of his impact on history, and of the various willful readings and misinterpretations that made Marx’s work such a powerful influence on the twentieth century.

From my perspective, this is particularly timely. If you are a subscriber to Jacobin (which you should be), you will notice that Marxism is undergoing a revival of sorts, as young left intellectuals try to grapple with the turns history is taking and how we might think our way through to activist interventions….

April 8, 2013, 9:53 am

What A World Without Women’s Studies Looked Like

By Claire Potter

Before women’s studies, these signs were invisible.

Mariam Chamberlain, one of the founding mothers of women’s studies, died last week at the age of 94. A Ph.D. in economics, as a program officer at the Ford Foundation she disbursed around $5 million in grants to identify key areas for curricular change, as well to establish research on women through institutes like the Center for Women Policy Studies.

It’s easy to forget how important women’s studies was to reshaping what knowledge looked like. In part this is because there are fewer and fewer of us who remember what universities that were almost entirely run by and for men looked like. But the success of women’s studies has led to its transformation — into feminist studies, gender studies, queer studies — and to inevitable (as well as important)…

March 21, 2013, 12:32 pm

Stop and Frisk: Report on Floyd v. City of New York

By Claire Potter

Tenured Radical is currently out of the country. Today we turn this space over to Rachel Jane Liebert, a Ph.D. candidate in critical social/personality psychology at the Graduate Center, and member of CUNY’s Public Science Project. Below, Liebert is reports on day 2 of Floyd v. City of New York (notes from day 1 are here.) This trial that may determine whether the New York City police department can continue its policy of stopping and frisking young men without probably cause.

After the crowds of yesterday, I arrived at the courtroom embarrassingly early this morning and spent an hour or so smitten with the view out of the fifteenth floor windows of 500 Pearl Street. Wearing a hat of mist, the scattered snow-scene of downtown Manhattan was beautiful and meditative. It seemed twisted that I could find peace in the phallus of a system that pours people into cages. Perhaps…

February 26, 2013, 10:14 am

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Crowdfunding

By Claire Potter

Today’s guest blogger, Dan Royles is a doctoral candidate in history at Temple University. He is currently a dissertation fellow at the Center for Historical Research at the Ohio State University. Update: Due to your generosity, Dan raised almost a thousand dollars more than his goal by the deadline.

For almost a month, I’ve been using Kickstarter to raise money for my oral history project on African American AIDS activism. I’m a doctoral student in history writing a dissertation on the same topic, and as with many projects on the recent past, archival sources are relatively thin. But fortunately, although the HIV epidemic in black communities has claimed many of the very people who fought to stop it over the past thirty years, others are still around and eager to share their stories, so doing oral histories makes a lot of sense. I wanted to undertake a full-fledged oral…

August 24, 2012, 4:48 pm

Money Boys Got A Boo-Boo, Want Barack To Kiss It

By Claire Potter

In this week’s New Yorker, political reporter Jane Mayer unveils what we at Tenured Radical are not learning from those fifteen or sixteen robo-mails that come off the interwebz and onto our desktop: the Obama campaign is behind on its fundraising primarily because liberal-minded billionaires who floated the campaign in 2008 are unhappy.

“But they are billionaires, Radical!” you say — astonished. “Why are the billionaires unhappy?”

Apparently it has nothing to do with Obamacare or the tax code. It’s about parties. It’s about showing the love. According to his critics in the Hamptons, Malibu and Palo Alto, the President doesn’t call to schmooze, doesn’t drop them notes, and doesn’t send bar mitzvah cards. He doesn’t do endless “grip ‘n grin photos” that donors spend 10K for so that they can pretend to their friends that they are Barack O’Buddies. He doesn’t call the…

June 8, 2012, 2:53 pm

The Answer to Folks Dissing the Field of African American History….

By Claire Potter

Mary Church Terrell, @ 1940. Photo Credit: Tennessee State Library and Archives

….Is more African American history, of course. In the wake of Naomi Schaefer Riley’s ignorant and widely criticized blog post mocking young female scholars just beginning their work in this rich field, so many responses come to mind.

Riley, who seemed to have been genuinely surprised at how poorly the idea of closing African American Studies department was received, responds to her critics here and here. In both pieces she seems to be arguing that having a political viewpoint about a field entitles you to criticize anything and everything about it, as if you had actually read the scholarship. She also suggests that, as a journalist who is not an academic, she should not be held to standards of accuracy when she…

May 17, 2012, 2:00 pm

Th-th-th-th-th-that’s All, Folks! Speech Quirks That Work?

By Claire Potter

Is perfect public speaking really best?

I have received a lot of thoughtful reactions to the TEDx talk posted below, not only in the comments section, but in private communications as well. Responding to one new colleague who wrote me a gracious note, I admitted that I was a little self-conscious about the “ums” and “ahs” that punctuate my performance.

The more I have participated in visual and aural media as a scholar, the harder I have worked to eliminate speech quirks that I find distracting and amateurish. Everything is now memorialized on line, and anything not said well on the first take is recorded forever. Some of my performances sound embarrassingly unpolished to my own ear, and are discouragingly unlike the confident, fluent PBS Newshour talking head that I long to be. As I listen to …

May 9, 2012, 9:45 pm

Let’s Go To The Videotape

By Claire Potter

In case you missed this on April 14 2012 (which you did if you weren’t one of about 200 people at TEDx Connecticut College, “Rethinking Progress”) my talk just got posted to the TED site by the fabulous students who put on this event. Enjoy. And admit it: like me, you’re grading. You don’t want to read anyway.

April 20, 2012, 12:19 am

Hey Babe, It’s OAH Day One: Public History Rock and Roll

By Claire Potter

Photo credit

I was sitting in the lobby of the Milwaukee Hilton and a civilian came up to me. “Hey,” he said: “Have I seen you on the History Channel?”

“Uh, probably,” I said. There are three different documentaries about crime in the 1930s that feature me as a talking head. From time to time, someone makes the connection: the working class family who lives across the street, a small child on the subway, and my all-time favorite, the men at the men’s shelter on Third Street in lower Manhattan. Because of this, I think the History Channel is one of the most popular enterprises ever created: not only do people love history, but I suspect that institutions – prisons, shelters, halfway houses – leave it on all the time because it is completely non-controversial.

“But you know …