Too Late to Apologize

Am I late to the party posting this video?



Thanks, Dad.

The Town

If you have not yet seen Ben Affleck's new movie, The Town, you should know that several important events take place at the Phipps Street Burying Ground. There is also a car chase outside of Copp's Hill, but you only ever see the wall, not the interior of the graveyard.

I was so excited to see these locations. Pete, who has never been to Phipps Street, was very impressed by the fence I had to climb.

"At some point, we have to put some faith and trust in our authority figures."

I promise a shiny gold star to the first person who can make it through this article on the privacy rights of on-duty police officers without LOLsobbing.

Who Knew?

Another great headline from CNN.com: Karl Marx died poor? Who knew?

Yes, it is shocking that a 19th-century freelance philosopher, political organizer, and pamphleteer died nearly penniless. I always thought that Communist theorists were raking in the dough.

My only explanation for this is that someone at CNN thinks that Communism is a philosophy espoused exclusively by trust fund kids who sit around in Che Guevara t-shirts, critiquing capitalism while spending their oil baron daddies' fortunes on tuition and pot. Thus, it would stand to reason that Marx was really a self-loathing millionaire, rather than a man who could barely feed his family.

Responsible Quotation

This past semester, I was a tutor for the required methodology course in the history department. My students were all sophomores and juniors hoping to concentrate in history (pending their ability to pass this course, which, happily, they all did).

Over the course of the semester, one of the main topics of discussion in section was the responsible use of sources. They all wrote papers based on a common collection of primary sources, then read and reviewed each others' work, so we had ample opportunity to see how different people used the same sources to support completely different (and often contradictory) arguments. For the most part, these arguments were reasonable and faithful to the sources.

Several students had some difficulty accepting the idea that the same sources could be interpreted in such diverse ways. They wanted to know what happened, not what some historian decided had happened, and it was my job to break the bad news to them that histories are the stories we tell ourselves about the past, not revelations. Two students found this particularly hard to take and found themselves standing on the brink of a sort of nihilistic postmodernism — you can make up anything and call it history!

Of course, I did my best to talk them back from the edge of despair, pointing out that this was the whole point of basing arguments on primary evidence. It's true that you can make sources say pretty much anything, but it is the historian's responsibility to interpret the sources in a way that represents them faithfully and makes a brave attempt to arrive at some sort of good-faith understanding about the past.

One of the tools I used during discussion was this spoof trailer for Shining, a feel-good family movie about "a writer looking for inspiration" and "a kid looking for a dad." I think it helped clarify what I was trying to say about the malleability of sources and the importance of responsible quotation:

The New 1776

I have a soft spot in my heart for Robot Chicken's many, many jokes about 300.

"This is SCRUMPTIOUS!"

My younger brother sent me this one (stable copy here, in case YouTube takes down the embedded version):

Only click through if you want to see a Ken doll playing a shirtless, flag-caped John Hancock vault over a phalanx of green-skinned redcoats to sign the Declaration of Independence.

Watching "The Pacific"

I watched the first episode of The Pacific with my parents last night and was actually a bit disappointed.

Of course, I understand that it's not supposed to be Band of Brothers: West Coast, but I thought that the first half hour was a muddle. The boot camp episode in BoB introduced all of the characters and established them in time and space, but the first half of this first episode jumped among its 3? 4? main characters in a way that was hard to follow. Instead of introducing one, then another, then another, it switched scenes between Curly and Italian Guy, then introduced Southern Boy, and then, all of a sudden, we were at Guadalcanal with Curly 9 months later.

Maybe it's just that I have a hard time distinguishing between young white guys who are all dressed the same. I suppose they must have mentioned these characters' names at least once during the episode, but I've watched it twice and can't catch them (Curly introduces himself to a girl at the beginning, but his name is not repeated). I looked them up on IMDb, but having appearance-derived nicknames helps me keep them straight. I gather that Southern Boy is from the South because of his family's accents and that Curly is from the Northeast somewhere because the bus depot had a bus leaving for New York, but I have no idea about Italian Guy — Chicago? New York? No idea.

The battle scenes on Guadalcanal were harrowing, but, again, hard to follow. Some of that is intentional — confusion is an important part of the feeling for these scenes — but some was not. Who were those tortured dead guys in the jungle? American paratroopers? Fighter pilots? Australians? And how did Italian Guy's regiment get to Guadalcanal at the end of the episode? Did the American Navy fight its way through after we saw it get run off to sea? How long was Curly's unit on the island? We saw maybe two nights, but then they were all ragged and had week-old sores, so a month maybe? Some of this might heighten an authentic sense of experiencing random events with little understanding of the bigger picture, but it was not very satisfying as a narrative.

I think that the producers recognize that Americans know less about the war in the Pacific than the war in Europe, but I don't think that they make many concessions to that lack of knowledge. It's hard to know what's going on in the battles without going online and reading some background info (which I did between my 1st and 2nd viewings). A few well-placed lines like, "The Japanese are going to attack us from the sea," or "I'm glad our Navy was able to come back and drive off those Japanese ships that just sunk all our ships 5 minutes ago" would have gone a long way to making things clearer.

I was pretty excited to watch The Pacific — my Papa fought in the Pacific theatre, though not on the islands (he was in China-Burma-India, flying supply runs over the Himalayas). I'll probably keep watching, especially now that I've gone and read all of the auxiliary material that explains who all the characters are. I will reserve final judgment until I've seen more, but I thought that episode 1 was an inauspicious start.

Faces of America

Are you watching Faces of America on PBS? You should be (also check out African American Lives and African American Lives 2).

Pete and I watched African American Lives with his family two Christmases ago and it inspired us to get our own DNA tests.

Faces of America has been pretty interesting so far, though it does tend to highlight family members who pulled themseves up by their bootstraps and succeeded in America because they just never gave up, at the expense of the louts and ne'er do wells that exist in every family tree. I can just imagine Prof. Gates doing my "Book of Life": Well, shall we start with your syphiltic great-grandfater or those DeAngelis cousins who were executed by the Allies after WWII? Maybe those draft dodgers in Argentina instead?

Still, I like to watch. It inspires me to use my research skills on my own family tree and, exhausting that, Pete's family tree.

Episode 3 airs tonight (Wednesday, February 24th) at 8:00 on PBS.

Happy (Belated) Birthday, George Washington

Sorry, I forgot about this yesterday.

I'm sure that everyone in the world has already seen this video, but it still makes me laugh every time.

Lost Cause Nostalgia Again

Tami at What Tami Said offers a trenchant critique of the pop-country band Lady Antebellum that may be of interest to some readers (cross-posted at Racialicious).

Though it sounds like Lady Antebellum's Lost Cause Nostalgia doesn't extend much beyond its appellation, I'm glad to see other people calling out the casual romanticization of the antebellum South. This is not a case of over-the-top neoconfederate fantasy like Gods and Generals, but it's important to recognize that casual references that idealize the antebellum South are a symptom of something fairly odious. It's easy to laugh at something as epically ridiculous as Mary Fahl's Going Home, but Lady Antebellum might slip under the radar.


I love this video. Seriously, try to keep a straight face past the 2:15 marker. It gets me every time.

iTunes Obscenities

I was poking around on iTunes today, looking for a Christmas gift, and happened across the page for No Irish Need Apply (2003). For those of you who have not seen it before, this is a CD recorded by The Gallant Sons of Erin, a band composed mostly of my family members, reenacting buddies, and neighbors and specializing in Irish-American music of the mid-19th century. My Dad plays guitar and sings, my uncle plays banjo, I play tin whistle, our friend Todd plays bodhran, our neighbor Nan plays fiddle, etc. Most of the songs are related to the experiences of the 28th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry during the Civil War.

Anyway, I had never seen its iTunes page before, so I was surprised to see that one of the song titles had been censored. "Fág an Bealach"* is the rallying cry of the the 28th MVI ("clear the way" in Irish), but it seems that iTunes read that first word as a slur and replaced the a with an asterisk. It's fun to see our album marked as potentially racy when, in reality, it is nuclear-level nerdy.

Come gallant sons of Erin who battle for the right,

Come show your Yankee brethren how Irish lads can fight!

The flag is waving o'er us and brightly gleams the day

We're bound for Carolina, Jeff Davis clear the way!

Fág an Bealach, Fág an Bealach, Fág an Bealach

Jeff Davis clear the way!

We bear a noble motto,'twas heard in days of yore

When the famous Connaught rangers swept o'er the Spanish shore.

The foe went down before it, and so they will the day

When Erin and Old Bay State shout, "seceshes, clear the way!"

Fág an Bealach, Fág an Bealach, Fág an Bealach

Seceshes clear the way! 

Our gallant comrades gone before have opened wide the track,

The bloody lash shall fall, but not this time on Cuffee's back.

Hark! How the noble fellows call from far Port Royal Bay,

Come on, me boys, the hunt is up, seceshes clear the way!

Fág an Bealach, Fág an Bealach, Fág an Bealach

Jeff Davis clear the way! 

Old Erin's spirit wakes again, her sould is mounting high,

The soul of Robert Emmet gleams from out each patriot eye.

Lord, help the southern cohort, who in the battle's fray

Shall hear our Irish slogan, "seceshes, clear the way!"

Fág an Bealach, Fág an Bealach, Fág an Bealach

Jeff Davis clear the way!

* Sometimes spelled "Faugh a Ballagh." When I was about 13, we had a pair of kittens named Faugh and Ballagh.

Authentic Fabrics

Via Jezebel, this article in the Smithsonian Magazine highlights the work of the wonderfully named Rabbit Goody, who weaves historically accurate fabrics for Hollywood costumes. Some of her big projects include the John Adams HBO miniseries and work with various historic homes.

Textiles are certainly not my specialty, but I love them. I have several coverlets from Family Heirloom Weavers in Red Lion, PA and they are so wonderfully cozy-looking. Warm, too!

Don't Light a Torch on Michael Wigglesworth's Grave

Today's Maine Sunday Telegram features a story about Walter Skold, founder of the Dead Poets Society of America. Skold visits the graves of American poets, documenting them and occasionally leaving poems and trinkets.

My favorite part of the article was this anecdote from Skold's visit to Michael Wigglesworth's grave in Malden:

Visiting a graveyard at night can be a dicey proposition and requires special permission. Skold learned that lesson the hard way last year on Halloween when he was nearly arrested in Malden, Mass., where he and his son lit torches at the tomb of the Rev. Michael Wigglesworth, Puritan author of the "Day of Doom."
"Little did I know that there was a little woman who watches over the cemetery and she told the police that there were people performing satanic rituals," he said.

Slate on "Gravers"

Yesterday, Slate published an article on people who visit graveyards for fun. Most of the article is devoted to people who volunteer for Find A Grave, who apparently call themselves "gravers."

It's sort of a strange article. The author repeatedly supports his interview subject in the belief that visiting graveyards is something to be embarrassed about. "It's not surprising that Cara feels she needs to make excuses for hanging around a cemetery," writes Adrian Chen, though he never really digs into the cultural assumptions that might make him think that's an obvious conclusion. He has a paragraph or two about Mount Auburn and the rural cemetery movement, but is not very reflective about the place of cemeteries in 21st-century America. Chen maintains an air of good-natured bewilderment throughout and ends by implying that "gravers" should find something better to do with their time.

It's all very silly. Chen is a humor writer and I suppose that this article has some appeal from a "look at these whackos" point of view. Plus, Halloween. Still, it's weak as a humorous piece because Chen discovers that the gravers are actually pretty normal. It's weak as a news piece because it is unreflective and doesn't get to the heart of the matter. Why do people do this? Why do you think it's a weird thing to do? What does that tell you about our society?

In all, harmless, but I might turn the final question back on Chen: "You don't have anything better to do than this?"

Connecticut Zombies

 
The Hartford Courant goes there:

New Britain Cemetery Tour Will Resurrect City's History

Do You Haunt Graveyards?

CNN wants to know.

A Herd of Majestic Giraffes!

Thanks to Stephen V. for recommending that I take a look at the Emergence of Advertising collection at Duke. This digital collection includes several thousand scanned images of advertisements from the 19th and 20th centuries, including colorful cartoons, broadsides, and Kodakiana.

One of my favorites is this pamphlet advertising the Sells Brothers' Circus.

Generation Gap?

I am utterly mystified by the coverage of Jenny Slate's debut on Saturday Night live. Apparently, during a skit in which she played a "foul-mouthed hard-core biker chick," Slate slipped up and uttered what the pearl-clutching media is delicately calling an "F-bomb."

Gasping ensues. Will she be fired? Will she go into an unstoppable spiral and commit suicide? Will we ever forgive her? When will those naughty writers learn to be civil? Will NBC have to pay outrageous fines?

Give me a break. For the life of me, I cannot understand why an adult saying "fuckin'" in its most innocent, adverbial form at 1 in the morning deserves any notice whatsoever. Neither I nor any of my fellow Millenials would bat an eye at hearing this usage in normal conversation. It's not like she was testifying in front of congress — it was a skit called "Biker Chick Chat."

My Cat is Famous on the Internet, Part II

I promise I will get back to regular gravestone posting soon. It's been pretty crazy around here this first week of classes.

In the meantime, I direct you to this weekend's crop of LOLcats, featuring a certain kitteh.

You may recognize this picture from this post, featuring a hungry cat, a sunny window, and Pete's birthday flowers.

Law and Order: Seventeenth Century

Today's New York Times has a strange little article about "New York's Coldest Case" — the murder of John Colman on September 6, 1609.

The author has some fun with the case, interviewing modern detectives as well as historians. They determine that local Native Americans probably killed Colman, possibly in retaliation for earlier attacks, though it is also possible that he was murdered by a fellow crew member.

It's a fluffy piece, but one line stood out for me. One historian, Kathleen Husler, unhelpfully describes the mixed Dutch/English crew involved in the incident as "a typical blend of sociopaths and working men." Is it a well-known fact that sailors were often sociopaths? The choppiness of the article makes it difficult to decipher exactly what Husler meant, but I think historians are generally on shaky ground when they try to diagnose historical actors with mental illness in order to explain their behavior. Perhaps she just meant that sailors were a violent and unruly lot, which they certainly were. But even in a fun little throwaway interview, it seems unproductive to characterize their behavior as antisocial and abnormal, rather than appropriate to their situation and worldview.