March 10, 2013, 7:09 pm
By Claire Potter
To celebrate women’s history month, I have decided to tweet an historical fact about a woman, or women, every day in March. Silly? Perhaps. Fun? Why yes: I’m enjoying it enormously. Women’s history rocks.
So far, women as different as abolitionist Harriet Tubman, the Empress Josephine Bonaparte, and Svetlana Alliluyeva have appeared in the Twitter feed to the right of this post. I find these women by simply entering the date in Wikipedia’s search box: a list of events, births and deaths show up in an entry devoted to that day. Presto!
Well, not so fast.
You might be surprised to learn how very few items in these lists name women as historically significant figures. Sometimes there are three or four women named; sometimes it is only one. One day there were absolutely no women listed and I had to get creative: I picked a major civil rights event and did some newspaper research…
Read More
January 30, 2013, 10:17 pm
By Claire Potter
Were Americans ever this off the rails? I mean ever, in the history of this country?
In case you thought the right wing could get no stranger, a TEA Party dude, gunnie, birther, and blogger named Nathan M. Bickel is forwarding the theory that the Sandy Hook Massacre was an elaborate deception perpetrated by the media and their shadowy liberal allies. Bickel, who calls Bay City, MI, home. has a second page on a blog devoted to the Lutheran faith. On a third blog, he identifies himself as a former pastor.
Among other feature of this grand hoax which has been an excuse to persecute people who need to defend themselves by firing multiple rounds every second, Bickel argues that:
- Adam Lanza could not have committed the murders at Sandy Hook because he had died the day before;
- Dylan Hockley, one of the murdered children, is still alive;
- supposedly grieving parents were…
Read More
January 7, 2013, 11:48 am
By Claire Potter
Oysters, please. And then deep fried oysters for the main course.
I can think of a number of good reasons to have a conference in New Orleans. At the top of the list is the excellent, moderately priced food, served at relatively uncrowded restaurants a stone’s throw from the hotel. For the three full days I was at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting I did not have one bad meal (although I was with someone who did.) Furthermore, there are a couple of landmark places that seem to draw the tourist trade (such as the famous Acme Oyster House), leaving equally great places like Desire and Felix’s open to the rest of us. At Felix’s (where I had gone for a little alone time Saturday night because I felt conferenced out) they open the oysters and smack ‘em right down on the bar in front of you. And they…
Read More
November 16, 2012, 12:30 am
By Claire Potter
#2012ASA agreed to wait until after the election to deconstruct empire. Subsidize with tax dollars hasta pronto. Hillz
It’s very rare that I get a response to a post on academic conferences like this one. In the comment thread to yesterday’s post, archie_kelvin asks:
A long, long time ago, on the dear departed “Brainstorm” site, there was a long, long thread (in response to a post somewhat like TR’s) about attending an academic conference in a sunny clime, far away from the campuses of most attendees.
archie followed up with a bunch of questions, which I will attempt to answer (and yes, archie, my panel went very well today — thanks for asking.)
Aren’t these things just boondoggles, mini-vacations wholly or partly on somebody else’s tab?
All conferences, in all professions, are at least partly…
Read More
October 20, 2011, 3:32 pm
By Claire Potter
Long-time readers of the Radical know that I rarely write about my own institution. There are good reasons for this, other than getting raked over the coals by the National Review Online, which can really bump readership big time. But today I want to stand up for a student who did kind of a dumb thing. Since this was an entirely public thing, is all over the interwebz, and the student is not my student, it falls well within the boundaries of Good Taste to comment on This Bad Thing.
Yesterday a friend posted this piece about single-sex education published at Jezebel to my Face Book page. With a zinger headline you couldn’t resist, “Women’s Colleges Promote Sweatpants & Poor Tampon Hygiene, Says Wesleyan Student,” (October 18 2011), blogger Margaret Hartmann, a Wellesley grad, takes on Zenith soph Vicky Chu. A Zenith transfer student, Chu trashes the single-sex school where she …
Read More
May 6, 2011, 11:44 am
By Claire Potter
Tenured Radical is over at Cliopatria today, with an original about a conservative history flack, Texan David Barton, that will not be cross posted here. In an attempt to remain a legitimate member of the Cliopatria team over at History News Network, I’m going to try to post original material in each place from here on out. We’ll see how that works: going rogue seems to be more my strength.
In other Radical news, you can go here for an interview with moi written by Zenith cub reporter Abbey Francis, who made serious effort to make me sound less ungrammatical than I usually do. Go here for a list of summer reading on Africa compiled by Swarthmore’s Tim Burke (dude, the only book that you cannot leave off this list is Jonny Steinberg’s Sizwe’s Test: A Young Man’s Journey Through the South African AIDS Epidemic.)
March 28, 2011, 1:17 pm
By Claire Potter
Little things come in, and I sock them away. But so that no one has to file any paperwork, or break my system passwords, here’s what’s lying around my email box today:
How do I get these things? Go here to buy a set of Prince William and Kate Middleton paper dolls, each with fifteen different outfits. The dolls themselves are in their underwear, which I think is kind of interesting in the sense of what a future monarch and his queen might not have permitted even twenty years ago. I would have understood if I had received an email soliciting me to purchase the “Past Presidents of the AHA Paper Doll Set,” promising hours of fun as we cross-dressed Barbara Weinstein and Tony Grafton, but this one’s a mystery, Governor Walker. My guess is that they bought the American Studies Association mailing list.
Do the AHA survey, save a tree. Have you ever wondered — as I do — why…
Read More
January 3, 2011, 10:48 pm
By Claire Potter
We at chez Radical went to Black Swan last night, by far the most over-rated movie of the season. You know you are really in trouble as a movie viewer when the character you like the most is the predator ballet master who just swaps in one prima for another, asserting that ballet skills are all well and good, but what really makes you a star is getting in touch with your inner f**k-bunny. “Go home and touch yourself,” he advises the Natalie Portman character, after a particularly uninspiring rehearsal. Ho-kay!
Trying to come down off the dreadful high of that movie, I turned to the New York Times Magazine and found myself literally dumbstruck for the next half hour at the story of how Melanie Thernstrom solved the heartbreak of childlessness after five rounds of infertility treatments. She and her husband bought some ova, had them fertilized with his sperm, hired two other women to…
Read More
October 21, 2010, 3:21 am
By Claire Potter
Today’s HuffPo has a blog post by former Barnard adjunct prof Thaddeus “Bad Thad” Russell who, by his own account, was kicking a$$ in History and American Studies on the Upper West Side of Manhattan until his colleagues finally found out what he was teaching. The story is a little murky, it’s true. Russell, who took his PH.D. at Columbia, describes himself as an “eccentric” and claims to have been highly influenced by his counter-cultural upbringing and education. He gave a job talk which horrified his colleagues and their counterparts at Columbia and, after four years of impermanent work at Barnard, was not offered a tenure-track position.
If Russell’s job talk was anything like this post about the job talk, I can see why.
What kind of a teacher/scholar is Thad Russell? Again, not clear: some of his work is terribly conventional, some aggressively…
Read More
August 8, 2010, 5:09 pm
By Claire Potter
On Friday, I was happily pawing through an unprocessed collection at a famous nearby archive, when I came upon one of the little treasures that illustrate the hot-house crypto-lesbo atmosphere of radical feminism in the 1970s: the mash note.
This figure (who will remain nameless for reason that become obvious below if they are not already) had drafted a letter to the object of her affections. The letter may, or may not, have ever been sent, and was redrafted at least once. It detailed the progress of the crush over time and lingered over explicit descriptions of the feelings that the crusher excited in the crushee. Most importantly, it used the effort to unveil that-which-had-never-been- spoken as a form of seduction. A particularly fine touch was the admission on the part of the author that what had tipped the scales into full-blown lust was the Object of Affection’s ravishing…
Read More
Follow @TenuredRadical
Follow Tenured Radical through your favorite RSS reader: SUBSCRIBE