After our busy, busy week here at Tenured Radical, we think it is time for a calm and genteel set of items to keep you busy this Sunday. To wit:
Kagan Hearings Kick Off On Monday: Thanks to PrawfsBlawg, a group blog maintained by a bunch of guys teaching in law schools around the United States, we have the witness list for the Elena Kagan hearings that start tomorrow at 12:30 (hat tip.). While they will begin with the senators going on record at tedious length (“life begins at conception, yack, yack, yack“) as if we and their constituents did not already know what they thought, testimonies to tune in for might be Lily Ledbetter, the litigant in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire(2007), called by the majority; and Stephen Presser, legal historian from Northwestern, called by the minority. Presser, who mostly writes about corporate law, can also be expected to speculate on how Kagan’s…
At a certain point you hit an age where you look around you and there are Other People who are reaching the pinnacle of their careers while you — well, you have a book, some articles, a good job at a snazzy little school and a well-read blog. Of course, the best may be yet to come. But right now I look at Elena Kagan and myself and see the similarities: educated at a single sex school (check!), and among the first generation in at the all-male Ivies (I was class of 1980 at Yale, she was 1981 at Princeton.) From then on our paths seem to have diverged. I labor in semi-obscurity at Zenith, she is shucking a top job in the Obama administration for a series of nasty encounters with the chipmunky Jeff Sessions and the opportunity to change history on the Supreme Court.
I, in contrast, who could have gone to law school with the other smart, ambitious women (which is what the female Dean of…
I am glad to see that I am not the only person on the planet who just assumed Ricky Martin was gay and stopped thinking about it. When someone used “Ricky Martin” and “gay” in the same sentence the other day, I missed it that this was a Historic Moment For We Homosexuals.
It was only when two or three other people said something like: “Ricky Martin word, word, word, word GAY!” that I came to understand that this was a news item. And it’s not as if I am so jaded that I simply don’t pay attention anymore. If anyone had said that Vladimir Putin or Colin Powell was gay, I would have snapped to.
Although Ricky himself feels “fortunate” and “blessed,” and testifies that his “years in silence and reflection made me stronger” (and richer!) “and reminded me that acceptance has to come from within,” not everyone is happy about this. New Media America reports: “Karen Rodriguez, a reporter and…
Are you one of the sickos who cheered when Joseph Stack flew his plane into the federal building in Austin last week? Of course not. According to the Washington Post on February 22 2009, although most of us were horrified by this cruel and violent act, “his suicide mission has clearly tapped a vein of rage among anti-tax, anti-government extremists.”
The way they see it, ‘he did the ultimate flipping of the bird to the man,’ said JJ MacNab, a Maryland-based insurance analyst who is writing a book about tax protesters. ‘He stuck it to the man, and they love that.’
It is not surprising Stack would be portrayed as a hero on fringe Web sites such as stormfront.org, a forum for white supremacists. But admirers also are expressing their appreciation on mainstream sites such as Facebook, where a fan page supporting some of the things he said in his six-page manifesto had more than 2,000…
This opportunity for concrete activism just in from Ian Lekus, chair of the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History (CLBGTH), an affiliated society of the American Historical Association (which is still the cheapest membership of all time: $US 5 for students, retirees, and the unemployed, to $US 150 for lifetime members. So join!)
This note is to update you all on the “Harvesting the Grapevine” project, sponsored by the Sexual Diversity and Gender Identity (SDGI) Committee (which I have chaired since November 2005) of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and funded by the Arcus and Gill Foundations, among others. In 2006, the SDGI Committee wanted to provide historical and sociological analysis of those campuses which had secured LGBTQ-inclusive non-discrimination clauses and/or partner benefits. The idea was to build recommendations based upon…
I was going to write about something completely different today. Then, when pulling together my URL’s for that post, I ran into this commentary at Gawker headlined: “Bill O’Reilly Wonders Why Gay New York Times Reporter Acts So Gay.”
Needless to say, I clicked, since it is part of my DNA to click on all things that promise gayness.
Apparently Jeff Zeleny, a New York Times reporter who is, in fact, gay, asked Barack Obama what has most “enchanted” him about being President in the first 100 days (along with what has surprised and humbled him.) Media Matters was the first to report what millions of Fox News viewers saw shortly afterwards, which was an exchange between Bill O’Reilly and Bernard Goldberg that you can view for yourself here, along with Zeleny’s original remarks:
Goldberg went on at length about the lack of masculinity displayed by the reporter as O’Reilly chuckled in a…
Despite everything I had to do today, I could not help but read this article in today’s New York Times. As a historian who is working on late twentieth century federal campaigns against pornography in the United States, I read anything with the phrase “Sex Predator” in the headline. When that headline also includes the word “Wisconsin,” as in “Sex Predator Accusations Shake a Wisconsin Town” — well, hold onto your hat, Harry.
Anthony R. Stancl, a good student who particularly loved political science, was expelled from Eisenhower High School last fall when he emailed a bomb threat to the school. Oh yeah. Can we spell “federal domestic terrorism laws?” Left with time on, and perhaps something else in, his hands, Anthony set up a Facebook page, using a female pseudonym and a fake profile (also actionable, as a recent verdict in a cyberbullying case establishes.) As a “woman,” Anthony …
“Dear Professor Radical,” wrote a longtime lurker who had finally decided, in desperation, to reveal hirself. “You told us about the job letter. About the phone call. About the conference interview. About wardrobe — even though you obviously know nothing about clothes: everyone knows you wear nothing but black and grey trousers from Banana Republic, complemented by matching T-shirts. And yet, right on the brink of crossing the finish line, you have abandoned us. WHAT ABOUT THE CAMPUS INTERVIEW, DAMMIT?!?”
Well, I’m sorry. This has been quite a dilemma for me, in part because we have been too busy interviewing at Zenith for me to attend to any of my professional responsibilities, much less write blog posts. But I had an ethical problem as well: should I actually be giving advice about campus visits when we, in the history department at Zenith, were interviewing eleven candidates …
So today I am home from the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, and instead of re-reading job candidate files, I am thinking about transgender activist Sylvia Rae Rivera, who is pictured on the left (as she always was.) I am thinking about San Francisco organizer Harvey Milk, pictured below, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office and the person from whom I have ripped off my title. As those who have seen the new Gus Van Sant movie Milk or read Randy Shilts’s book The Mayor of Castro Street know, the signature opening line of Harvey’s political speeches played on the stereotype of predatory criminal queers obsessed with “recruiting” the young into their “lifestyle.” He would hop up on whatever platform was available and screech, “My name is Harvey Milk, and I am here to recruit you!”
Thanks to a commenter, one of my first reads today (after the New York Times…
I am Claire B. Potter, Professor of History at The New School for Public Engagement, New York, NY. My specialties are feminism, political history and cultural criticism. Selections from my scholarly and public writing can be found here.
Comments Policy: There will be no purely personal attacks, no using the comments section to tease someone else relentlessly, and no derailing the comments thread into personal hobbyhorses. Violators will be dealt with politely and swiftly.
Doing Recent History
Contributors to this collection, edited by Claire Potter and Renee Romano, consider the wide range of challenges the practice of contemporary history poses. These essays address sources like television and video games, the ethics of writing about living subjects, questions of privacy and copyright law, and the possibilities that new technologies offer for writing history. Doing Recent History offers guidance and insight to any researcher considering tackling the not-so-distant past. Buy the Book
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Claire Potter's is the first book to look at the structural, legal, and cultural aspects of J. Edgar Hoover's war on crime in the 1930s, a New Deal campaign which forged new links between citizenship, federal policing, and the ideal of centralized government.
War on Crime reminds us of how and why our worship of violent celebrity hero G-men and gangsters came about and how we now are reaping the results.
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