A Semester's Worth of History

It's been a rather longer hiatus from bloggerdom than I thought it would be. I didn't post at all in December and haven't posted anything in nearly six weeks. I have no excuses, and perhaps worse than no excuses, I forewent my chance to really post some good ones since I had three weeks with literally nothing to do but eat turkey and stuffing, drink wine and wassail, and watch full seasons of LOST and Star Trek. Instead that's all I did, and though I read a few books I'd been wanting to get through before the new semester began, I also spent a lot of time sleeping till noon and and staying out at night drinking with friends. Poor me, eh? So, I've finished my first semester as a graduate student and am in the process of beginning my second. I thought I'd make my triumphant return to the world of internet posting with a little reflection on that process and what I hope the new year has in store for me in academia.

Firstly, while I haven't been particularly surprised by the workload, the amount of reading I've done over the past four months is pretty staggering. With only two classes, one of which was a graduate/undergraduate mix and thus less intense, plus thesis research (which I did little for, since I haven't even fully settled on a topic yet), the reading was still at a high level. I haven't counted specifically, but I think I read somewhere in the neighborhood of 15,000 pages of text over the course of the semester, totaling somewhere around twenty-five full books and significant portions of perhaps sixty to seventy others. The amount of writing I did was also rather high (higher than usual, from what I've been told), totaling at around 115 pages--two lengthy research papers, five shorter reading analyses, two non-research papers, and two finals. Still, I never felt particularly overwhelmed, and after I mastered the arts of skimming and picking precisely the most important passages of texts without reading them in their entirety, the voluminous content breezed by rather quickly. I also managed to avoid having any serious panic attacks, although the one all-nighter I pulled to finish a 15 page final paper I had not had a chance to work on until the night before it was due, left me gasping for breath somewhere around 3 AM as I had serious doubts I would meet the 10:30 AM deadline. Of course, it all worked out though.

What has this process been like and how has it changed my outlook on the idea of history? I think one of the biggest lessons I've learned thus far is the difference between the study and practice of history. Studying history tends to be easy: you absorb all of the information in front of you by reading and understanding the arguments presented by historians. The practice of history, however, is usually a lot more challenging. One must know the proper research paths to take, how to evaluate the sources (not to mention the necessity of studying language to broaden one's source base), how to recognize the various points of views the authors bring to the table, how to approach history from the theoretical frameworks of the day while never denying the actual information one must find to confirm one's own theories (this of course, does not always happen, which is why one should derive theories after the research). This is a contentious topic in history, as many historians have been accused (and rightly so) of simply searching for information that confirms their arguments. I think the biggest difference between studying history as an undergraduate and studying it as a graduate student is the amount of theory and criticism employed at this level. This seems obvious in retrospect, but it never dawned on me as an undergraduate that this aspect of historical study was missing from my education. As an undergraduate, for the most part, one studies history, in the words of the founder of the professional history, "wie es eigenlich gewessen ist" or "as it actually happened." That is not to say that controversy over interpretation is not acknowledged, but in general, professors lecture, students take notes as authoritative, and papers and tests are written and taken to prove that a certain level of knowledge has been achieved. Not so, graduate school.

Most of the classes we take are on the theory and philosophy of history, rather than on the accumulation of knowledge. It is essentially assumed that you will do that sort of legwork on your own, and when class time arrives, the goal is not to regurgitate these facts, but to argue your case based on the evidence you've amassed. While this may not seem like earth shattering information (and it's not), I do find it interesting that history seems to be one of the few disciplines that is taught this way. Theory and criticism are not at all a part of the undergraduate experience. To me, this is a bit like being a biology major and never being introduced to evolutionary theory, or studying philosophy without ever understanding what metaphysics or epistemology are. I also received a bachelor's degree in English, and after the first few introductory courses, the coursework became rather theoretical to some degree, or at least we were initiated into the vocabulary of the trade. I had two courses on literary criticism as an undergraduate. Courses are rarely even offered on historical criticism or historiography at the undergraduate level.

Shortly after entering the program, a second year graduate student, following an engaging discussion on how to be a historian, told me that "You will find out rather quickly what type of historian you are," by which he meant that the theories we accept and the theories we regard as bullshit will differentiate themselves rather early in our career. So far, I'm not entirely sure that I agree. Perhaps it's my moderate personality or my ability to find the positives and negatives in modes of discourse or perhaps I'm just wishy-washy, but I have not quite found any particular historical framework that I feel is either the theoretical approach to take, nor have I found any that I feel to be complete bunk. One recent trend in historical studies is, since the late 1970s and early 80s, postmodernism, which is extraordinarily difficult to define. As far as history is concerned, postmodern theory treats "truth" (and oftentimes fact as well) as entirely subjective and tends to view historical thinking and writing as more of a humanities study than a social science. In this ideational structure, literary criticism and linguistic theory inform history more than research into the past itself. Everything, as they say, is "text". While I believe that the vocabulary and rhetoric employed by postmodernism has enriched historical study, I think that the denial of factual information has done something of a disservice to the profession itself. One of my major problems with postmodernism has little to do with the more arcane and jargon-laden arguments set forth by the theoreticians and more to do with the imprecise definitions utilized by the field. I plan on writing a bit more on this later, but for now, suffice to say that, in my view, postmodernism contradicts itself by making a "truth claim" that "there is no truth" and by failing to understand the interplay between subjectivity and objectivity. Western thought in general, but postmodernist thought (and for that matter scientific, rationalist thought) in particular, regards subjectivity and objectivity as essentially binary or entirely separate from one another, rather than as a continuum, which I believe they are. That is to say, something is not either objective or subjective, but most forms of knowledge are somewhere along the continuum, and one can observe facts and make arguments that are more or less objective than other arguments. A denial of all objectivity (which many postmodernists do) is, to me, as illogical as denying all subjectivity as well. In any case, some postmodernists historians have an "anything goes" attitude, which celebrates bias, in a sense, by saying that since no one is really ever capable of true objectivity, we should embrace subjectivity. For my part, as a historian, I think it would be absurd to claim that we don't approach our subject with bias, but it would be equally absurd not to mitigate these tendencies and attempt to rely on evidence (and where it takes us, even if it takes us somewhere we do not wish to go) at all costs.

Finally, it's been an interesting experience working with undergraduates. I've had some contact with different levels of education via my two years as a substitute teacher in high school and middle school and my summer grading standardized test for the state of Kentucky. So far, the undergraduate experience has been less trying on my nerves but no less challenging intellectually. Obviously, in dealing with a higher level of student, one expects a higher degree of intelligence, writing ability, behavior, and so on. For the most part, this is true. As a teaching assistant, I haven't had any discipline problems with any students in my classes. I have to say though, that while many times students surprise me with their lack of certain basic sets of knowledge, most of them generally seem as competent in historical knowledge as I would expect the average college freshman to be. The class I TAed for had around 120 students, and their grades ended up following a pretty standard bell curve, though the apex of the parabola hovered around the low-B rather than the mid-C mark. Probably around a dozen students in the class were able to write sparkling essays in relatively polished prose that demonstrated a fair amount of knowledge, just as there were around a dozen students who believed that Italy was Sweden, the French Revolution occurred in the Early Middle Ages, and AIDS caused the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. And this is after listening to a semester's worth of lectures. Most students who can't handle it drop after the first few weeks but it's not uncommon for students who think that the Mediterranean Sea is named the "Sea of Calamity" to be there taking the final on the last day of class along with the history majors.

I look forward to my future semester. I have a class called Hermits and Heretics: The History of the Medieval Church, 300-1450, which looks promising, and I'm furthering my historiographical studies with both European and non-Western historiography as well as American historiography. Plus, I'll begin my thesis in earnest this semester through the prospectus course all first years must take in their second semester. I still don't know exactly what my thesis will be on, though it will almost certainly be on a late medieval or early modern history of science topic. Currently some ideas include looking at the evolution of the soul/body to mind/body dualism among natural philosophers from, say, Albertus Magnus to Rene Descartes. Another idea is to pick one country during a particular time period (or, after taking Hermits and Heretics, perhaps the Church) and look at its specific legal attitude towards astrology. I have a few others but haven't fleshed them out yet. I guess that's what the prospectus class is for. You can be sure, dear reader, that, like it or not, I'll probably be posting about it along the way. It's good to be back to the world of blogging and the world of academia.

A Short Hiatus from Bloggerdom and Some Things to Come

I'm currently in the home stretch of my first semester as a graduate student in history, which, as you can imagine, is why I've been away from the blogging world over the past couple of weeks. In fact, not counting the revised papers on witchcraft I posted here, I haven't done much of anything original since late September. Obviously, I've got a lot to do, so I probably won't post again until the semester is over around the third week of December, but I thought I'd give a quick preview of some things I intend to get up here on the site before the end of 2009.

Firstly, I have several book reviews I've written over the past few months and a few from over a year ago that I would like to post. I don't really do book reviews too often, but it's something that academic historians do for shorter works in journals, so I'd like to get some up here. I recently read a really fascinating work for my witchcraft class called The Devil's Dominion, about the existence of magic and its integration into religion in Puritan New England in the seventeenth century. It really put he events in Salem in political, religious, and cultural context and really breaks down some stereotypes about not only the ultra-rigidity of Puritan religious beliefs but also the myth of the strict homogeneity of their colonies. I know, it's one more post on witchcraft, but since it has to do with Puritan New England, I can loosely tie it to Thanksgiving. I'll post it soon. Some other books, history (though most is not terribly current) and otherwise, that I'll review soon include a a biography of Alexander the Great, an examination of the military explanation for the fall of the Roman Empire, some of the works of Arnold Toynbee, a few works on the history of astrology and magic, as well as some Jungian stuff. Like many other things I post here, these will mostly be revised versions of things I have written for myself in the past.

Secondly, I have two pretty big papers coming up and once the semester is over and I've gotten back professor comments and made the necessary adjustments I'd like to post them here. The shorter paper I am writing compares Giordano Bruno and Domenico Scandella, two victims of the Inquisition in Italy in the late sixteenth century. By examining their respective cosmologies and heresies, I hope to draw some conclusions about the similarities and differences between elite and common conceptions of the cosmos at a time when a multitude of contradictory ideas proliferated. Scandella, a literate Friulian miller, was a man on the margins of society. He was exposed to cultural diversity and pluralism in his profession, benefited intellectually from the rise of the printed word, and performed an integral function within his peasant community though he was often alienated from it for his unorthodox ideas. Bruno was a peripatetic scholar who never resided in one location longer than a few years, and consequently, he was often a mistrusted figure in his adoptive lands. He advocated Hermetic and Neoplatonic philosophy, and his early acceptance of the Copernican heliocentric theory, though it had little to do with his eventual trial and execution, has earned him a place in the history of science. For these reasons, among others, both figures aroused the suspicions of the Inquisition. By positioning these two historical personages in the philosophical, religious, and socio-cultural settings of late sixteenth century Europe, I seek to better understand why their cosmologies were so offensive to the Church and why both were condemned for heresy. I also hope to submit this paper to a graduate student academic conference at North Carolina State. The longer paper is also a comparative paper, and I've written about the topic many other times, so I won't go into too much detail. In short, I'm comparing Andrew Dickson White - a late nineteenth century historian and president of Cornell University who wrote an extremely influential work on the history of science and theology, in which he argued that they have historically been enemies - with modern historian of science David C. Lindberg, who represents the modern school of thought that neither warfare nor harmony accurately depicts their relationship. Both these papers exemplify my general interests in history and I'll post them later in December.

Finally, I'm coming up on the one year anniversary of this bog's inaugural post, which is in the first week of January next year. This blog started, in part, due to the fact that I made it my new Year's Resolution at the end of 2008 to write more and I decided a blog would be the best testing ground for that commitment. I think the results have been pretty good though I am going to far well short of my one hundred post goal. I intend to write at least one post reflecting on my year of blogging and what I'd like to accomplish in the world of writing in the coming year. With my first semester of grad school almost behind me, I also want to write a bit on how that process has changed me, what I've learned, and how I have interpreted the lessons of graduate school. I don't necessarily want to write so much about history, but what higher education means to me and how this type of schooling is, in most ways, entirely different from all other education I've received up to now in my life. So, for the future, you can look forward (I hope) to some book reviews and some actual normal blog posts that have to do more with my life and less to do with my increasingly abstract thoughts. Enjoy!

On Organizing a Personal Library

"Good as it is to inherit a library, it is better to collect one."

~Augustine Birrell, Obiter Dicta, "Book Buying"

Despite the fact that I have been reading regularly since I was five or six and have been collecting books since I was at least a sophomore in college, I have never really sat down to organize my library or really put much thought at all in to how I arrange my books. Up till now, it's mostly been an issue of aesthetics, arranging books based on how well they looked on a particular shelf in a particular room; or on logistics, fitting an ever growing number of books onto ever shrinking shelf space. This may surprise some people since I tend to be a compulsive list-maker and categorizer, but I am, in general, an unorganized person, so developing a really well-planned-out library has never been at the top of my to-do list. It's been nearly three years since I have had all of my books in one location, and even when I did have them all together at my parents' house, the structure of the house was not terribly conducive to getting all of them in one place and shelving them on the basis of subject. Unfortunately, I was not able (nor really willing) to transport all of my collection from Indiana to South Carolina and ended up bringing down a little over a third of the books I own. I haven't been so anal as to count every book I own in two or three years, but at last count I had just short of 1600 and I'm sure I've accumulated at least another hundred since then. God bless Archives Book Shop and Curious Book Shop in East Lansing for providing me with an inexpensive, relatively wide array of books from which to choose. For obvious reasons, the books that made the cut are primarily non-fiction humanities and social sciences. Some major books left behind include almost my entire science fiction collection, most of my general and classic fiction and poetry, and even a fair amount of history not germane to my focus, such as the many general histories of the United States and World War II now whiling away in storage at my parents' house. It's always a tough decision to make, but after heaving the tenth or eleventh enormous box of books onto and off of the U-Haul I felt vindicated in leaving behind Page Smith's eight volume People's History of the United States and three years worth of Asimov's Science Fiction magazines.

"I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves."
~Anna Quindlen, "Enough Bookshelves," New York Times, 7 August 1991

So the real question is, how does one arrange a personal library? Using an existing method, such as the Dewey Decimal system or Library of Congress? The way a bookstore would arrange by genre? Or something a little more personal that really underscores my own mental arrangement of information? I opted for the personal, since I feel a library is at best a material representation of one's education and knowledge base, but with some important advice from the previous tried and true systems. For one thing, it doesn't make too much sense to use, say, the Library of Congress system to the letter when the vast majority of my books fit into only a few of their categories. Something much broader, but also more specifically tailored to my collection is important. I'm probably making this sound like it was a lot bigger an ordeal than it actually was, but I have to admit that I spent a fair amount of time staring a the stacks of books scattered about the floor completely flabbergasted as to how I was going to arrange all of these on the limited bookcases I possess.

"Far more seemly were it for thee to have thy study full of books, than thy purse full of money. "
~John Lyly

First off, I essentially eliminated anything that did not fit roughly and broadly into the categories of history, political science, philosophy, religion/mythology/folklore, science (mostly human perspectives on), language, and psychology from the equation. About 95% of all the non-fiction I own can be categorized as such, and I used them as my macro-categories. Anything not in those categories went to the miscellaneous shelf in our bedroom. I arranged philosophy and religion together partially because I think they are (or at least can be) facets of the same inquiry but also because Clemson groups them both into the same academic department and because many of the philosophy books I have are on the philosophy of religion. Mythology and folklore are in the same bookcase buffered by psychology, as most of the psychology books I own pertain to an exploration of the collective unconscious, Jungian and non-Jungian, and the greater sociological factors related to cultural anthropology and group psychology. I have about a shelf's worth of language studies, mostly dictionaries and grammar books for French and Latin, but also a few works in these languages as well as Spanish and Italian dictionaries, a book on defunct ancient writing systems, several histories of the English language, and most of Kirsten's books on speech-language pathology, audiology, and communicative sciences and disorders. Political science was a difficult one to arrange, primarily because I have just enough to justify its having its own section, but not so many that it really distinguishes itself. I opted to include it as sort of an addendum to history, as I see it as related in the way that psychology is related to mythology, but I'm not terribly happy with its location and may change it in the future. History was paradoxically the easiest and the most difficult. It was easy, in that I arranged them chronologically by subject matter, but difficult in that it is by far the largest section and took me a long time to decide how to integrate primary sources and very specific topics that cover long periods of time not related to any particular chronological era (histories of witchcraft and astrology being the primary examples). It was also difficult to decide how I wanted to incorporate ancient and medieval authors. Do I put Plato and Aristotle in with philosophy or ancient history? If ancient history, do I put them in chronologically with all the secondary sources or do I group all ancient writers together in their own subsection? Needless to say, I put a fair amount of thought into what, in reality, are mostly trivial matters.

"Let your bookcases and your shelves be your gardens and your pleasure-grounds. Pluck the fruit that grows therein, gather the roses, the spices, and the myrrh."
~Judah Ibn Tibbon

It probably sounds like I have a lot more books than I actually do after going through all of that. As I mentioned earlier, only a fraction of my books made it down from Indiana. I think somewhere slightly over one-third, or between 500 and 600 are here, so I may be a bit overzealous in calling it a "library". But Alcuin of York's library at the court of Charlemagne in the early ninth century, the envy of many a medieval scholar, reputedly had only a few thousand texts and the far flung monasteries at Jarrow and Lindisfarne even fewer and they were no less important to their owners. Perhaps one day when we own a house or at least have a larger study/office/library and I have a stronger back, I'll get all of them in one place finally. For now, I'm pretty content with what we have arranged. And, being in graduate school, I've already accumulated somewhere in the vicinity of thirty new books just in the month we've been here in South Carolina, and I'm sure that number will continue to grow. Happy reading all!

A Poetic Misunderstanding

Poetry is among the oldest arts in all the humanities. The oral culture of our pre-literate ancestors was one in which the most important mythological tales were told through bards who, in order to better facilitate memorization and rhythmic recitation, narrated their tales in meter. The earliest literature from the West and the Near East--the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey--has come down to us in verse, perhaps inextricably bound by what today we call mythopoeia, itself a self-conscious psychological interpretation of archetypes from our own collective unconscious. But the place of poetry in the 21st century, where not only the prose novel but also audio-visual media has lessened the impact of this once hallowed form, is not so highly regarded. Once the mark of an educated man, poetry, even among those of us ensconced in the arts and humanities, holds essentially no place in our curriculum. Since World War I, poetry has atrophied from the consciousness of the educated and is seen now as little more than a hobby or a habit.

However, if there's one area that poetry seems to exist in a particularly purposive way and in an especially decontextualized way, it is in politics. Certain poems, because of their rhythm, language, or form, have a certain ability to invoke inner emotional states that simple language often cannot. But what happens when, after so much decontextualization, after so often hearing the same phrases and words unattached from the themes of their author, that the meaning morphs, not beyond simply what the poet intended (I suspect most poets perfectly understand that the imperfection of language to convey abstract ideas will inevitably lead to their poems being read in ways other than that which they intend), but takes on a new meaning entirely independent from the poem itself. Politicians, and I suspect their critics even more so, make a career from taking things out of context and bending them to the will of their ideologies and political platforms. It is this misunderstanding that I feel has killed poetry far deader than the fickle vicissitudes of modernity.

I spent much of the morning watching Ted Kennedy's memorial service, and it is ineluctable that in the discussion of a Kennedy, whether deferring to the "curse" or not, someone feels the need to quote Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Ulysses's final line about striving, seeking, finding, and never yielding, if I may paraphrase, and it is almost always quoted, in the words of David Yezzi, of The Wall Street Journal, as a "buoyant rallying cry." And those who hear these words in this context are most often apt to think of them as such. But, though I am no literary theorist or critic, it bothers me as a fan of this poem, when these lines are uttered in triumph rather than in lament as they, to my mind, are meant to be read. The poem underscores Ulysses' realization that, with age, comes invalidity, decrepitude, and the feeling of uselessness accompanied by a greater understanding of the fragility of life. Tennyson describes Ulysses--who once ruled Ithaca, fought gallantly in the great Trojan War, and braved the Mediterranean Sea for over a decade before returning home--as an "idle king", a "man made weak by time and fate." "How dull it is to pause," Ulysses bemoans, "to make an end, to rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!" reminding us all not of his greatness, but that all greatness, no matter the heights, shall one day succumb to that which fells us all: the unalterable progress of time. The Kennedy's always quoted this poem (especially Robert, but also Teddy) to promote the drive and determination that so defined their political lives. And now, perhaps with Teddy's passing, it can finally take on the authorial intent of introspection into the fate which awaits us all. These themes are not the most romantic in poetry, but as the age of poetry waned, it became a theme all too common amongst her greatest children. T.S. Eliot, perhaps more than others, in his Gerontion and Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock, understood that all that shines will one day burn out, the art of poetry included.

Perhaps, as Kirsten mentioned as she leaned over while we watched the service, the Kennedys really were aware of Tennyson's meaning all along and took Ulysses' advice to heart. Perhaps they understood that, with but one life to live, it is in striving and seeking and finding and never yielding that we find most fulfillment in life. And the tragedy that this family has endured has surely imparted to them the lessons of this reality. And that, in the end, when we are at the precipice, weak with age, deteriorated, our halcyon strength behind us, the words and deeds which we bequeath to our younger generations really are "buoyant rallying cries" and, in true Greek fashion from which the myth of Ulysses derives, it is our words and deeds which echo throughout eternity long after we have yielded to time. If Ted Kennedy's words and deeds do this, they may have been quoting Tennyson correctly after all.

The Move to South Carolina and the Clemson Graduate History Program

So, we're finally settled into our new home in South Carolina. The move went swimmingly and we had no snafus along the way. Kirsten and I ended up getting a place in Central, South Carolina, which is about two miles east of Clemson, back towards the Greenville direction. It's in fact no where near centrally located in the state and is called Central because it is exactly halfway between Charlotte, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. The town grew up here because it's right along the railroad line between the two cities. It is fairly small at only a few thousand people, and outside of the downtown area, it seems to be primarily a town for Clemson University upperclassmen and graduate students who commute to school. One other notable tidbit about Central: it's the hometown of Senator Lindsey Graham. So, yeah, there's that, too.

The first week of graduate school hasn't entailed a whole lot just yet. I currently feel like I'm living through the calm before the storm as I have my reading list (22 books long, plus 5 for my TA class, plus thesis research) and am theoretically supposed to start doing some preliminary research for my thesis this semester, which begins in earnest next January. So far, it's mostly been attending meetings and getting acquainted with the faculty, staff, and campus. I am taking three classes this semester, though in a sense one could argue that I'm taking as many as four or as few as two (ah, the grad school factual argumentativeness). I have Historiography, which is essentially a history of history, and this will explore historical methods, modes of historical inquiry, phases through which the idea of history has passed, and how past and present historians have regarded the craft, beginning with Herodotus and Thucydides and wending our way all the way to the 20th century. My "substantive" course is on witchcraft, and considering that I wrote my writing sample for the department, in part, on witchcraft, this felt like a natural choice. I have to admit I was a bit reticent about taking this course because it is taught by an American postmodernist historian of women and gender, and I am neither an American or postmodernist historian. However, after looking at the reading list, at least the first half of the course seems to focus on witchcraft's European origins and tracks its development from antiquity through the Middle Ages to the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe before it jumps the pond to America. This seems like it is, in a sense, going to be another historiography course, in that the methods and interpretations of witchcraft history will be studied even more than the content of the historical record, but for a topic with such scant historical evidence and even less historical consensus, I think this is a fair approach. The third "course" I have is thesis research, which is entirely independent research I'll do on my own about whatever topic I want my thesis to be on. Since I probably won't sit down with anyone to discuss this in any major way until January, this will be less like taking a class and more like gathering materials I may want to use down the road. Presumably, when I'm not reading and researching for my other two courses, I'll be scouring the library looking for resources for this future project. However, I have no idea yet what I want to write my thesis on (actually, I have several, but don't really know what I'll pick).

The final "course" is the course in which I'm a teaching assistant. It's a freshman level lecture called "The West and the World Part 1" and essentially it's Western Civ. meets world history from prehistory to about the late 17th century. So, this is exactly along my lines of interest, and since TA assignments tend to be random, I'm very lucky to have gotten it. The course looks like it will be, as its name implies, about integrating the traditional study of Western history within the global context and looking at its unfolding comparatively with much of the rest of the world. It's lecture-based (there are about 125 students) and the professor said that almost the entirety of the tests will be based around his notes. My role, along with the other TA, will be primarily supportive: attendance taking, paper and test grading, student advising, running review sessions, etc. So, I'll certainly treat it like a "real" class that I'm taking, in that I'll take notes and read all the books so as to better serve the students. Plus the reading list actually looks very interesting and includes brand new books on, among other things, the formation of the polis in ancient Greece, the most recent archaeological studies on the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius and the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and the theological, philosophical, and political motivations behind the Gothic cathedral of Chartres.

Although I don't want this blog to turn into a "here's what I did today" type of blog, I think that I might be writing more of that in the coming months as the bulk of my time will be spent with my nose in a book and conducting research, for which this blog may serve as a "rough draft of thoughts" so to speak. Coming soon, I anticipate I'll write about the organization of my library, as it was an ordeal that was much more difficult than I thought it would be, and to bounce a few thesis topics around. And in the slightly more distant future, I will likely post some of my papers or versions/edits of them. So, if you don't like history, now would be the time to stop reading.

Update and a Quick Preview

I haven't posted anything for a month and really don't have an excuse. Summer would have been the perfect time for me to sit down at the computer and write blog after blog but it didn't happen. I think it's partially because I have had virtually no routine all summer long and blogging has been one of those things that's gotten lost in the shuffle. So, even though I think everyone who reads this blog already knows the stuff I'm about to type, here's a quick synopsis of the last month and introduction to the next six or so posts I intend to write.

July was in some ways a really busy month and in some ways a really boring one. I spent most of the month working at the one part-time job I was able to get--grading the fifth grade social studies portion of the standardized test for the state of Kentucky. Suffice to say that it was simultaneously hilarious and depressing. The job was filled primarily with educators making some extra cash during their summer recesses, employees of the temp agency Kelly Services who had recently finished up other assignments, and people like myself, who had enough college credits to qualify for the job, and needed something to do for a month or two. I signed a "confidentiality agreement" stating that I wouldn't reveal any student responses (despite the fact that all of the responses were anonymous), and even though I've passed some of them along in private conversation, I feel it's probably not appropriate to post them here. But, for a taste, let me just say that around 15% of Kentucky fifth graders seem to think that Martin Luther King, Jr., freed the slaves, spoke at Abraham Lincoln's funeral, and single-handedly ended the Civil War between North and South America.

The only other major thing that happened in July was that Kirsten and I took a trip down to South Carolina to visit Clemson, look for an apartment, and for Kirsten to look for a speech-language pathologist position. We have, in fact, secured an apartment in Central, South Carolina, which is about a 12 minute drive form campus. The Upstate, or Upcountry, region of South Carolina is quite beautiful. It is essential the far southern tip of the Appalachian Mountains and the Blue Ridge chain is only about 25 minutes north of where we'll be living. We already went hiking once and it was gorgeous. Plus, though the area is sparsely populated by most standards, we are less than 30 miles from Greenville, SC, which has over 100,000 people and around 20 miles north of Anderson, which is about half of that. Clemson is extremely beautiful as well, and a bit different from what I'm used to. Indiana University and Michigan State are both very large state schools of nearly 40,000 students, and Clemson's student body is only around 17,000, but it was the size of the campus, which one could walk across in maybe 20 minutes (as opposed to nearly an hour at the others), that really amazed me. It is small but exactly what I want a college campus to look like: quaint, idyllic, and quintessentially Southern in style. Magnolia trees line the streets, and the buildings are largely an old Southern colonial style (from what I can tell, I'm not that great with architecture) with deep red brick walls, and columns on the larger buildings. I got to meet some of the staff in the history department as well as a very helpful graduate student. All in all, it was a pleasant experience and I look forward to beginning my scholarly journey in just a few more weeks.

Finally, I want to briefly preview the next few blogs I'm post. Those of you who are Facebook friends may remember a little over a year ago when I posted a six part series of notes on medieval philosophy (or, likely, that you don't). In any case, I am planning on reposting them here over the next few days, not so much so that people will read them again, but more for my benefit, because I was rather proud of my work on them and there are some edits I would like to make, some extra research I'd like to do, some hyperlinks I'd like to insert, and some intellectual avenues I wouldn't mind strolling down again. If you've read them before, feel free to ignore them, but I'd like to move them to my blog, since it's obviously a far more appropriate place for the content than in Facebook notes. After that, my next blog should be coming to you from the Palmetto State! Hope you had a great summer!

On Moving from Michigan back to Indiana

So, I've officially moved back to Southern Indiana after two years in East Lansing, Michigan, and although this is just a stop over until Kirsten and I move to South Carolina in August, I thought this might be a fun time to talk briefly about living in the Mitten State, some things I liked and didn't like about it, and some differences between living there and living in Indiana.

The College Towns

The only truly apt comparison between living in East Lansing and living in Indiana I can comment on is living in Bloomington. Having grown up in very rural southern Indiana where half an hour trips to Louisville, Kentucky, occurred at most two or three times a month, making the move to Bloomington, Indiana, as an eighteen-year-old college freshman felt a lot like moving to the big city. Of course, once you've been to a few of them, you begin to see that college towns have a particular feel to them that isn't quite small town, isn't quite big city, and isn't quite anything in between. So, the only real basis of comparison I have between Michigan and Indiana can be found in the comparison between East Lansing and Bloomington. In general, to be short, I liked Bloomington better. East Lasing is immediately adjacent to Lansing, which is about as industrial as cities get and the oppressive feel of the factories was ever present in a way not found in the generally quaint and idyllic Bloomington. Age probably had a lot to do with it, and I imagine that if I had moved to East Lansing at eighteen I might be singing a different tune. This is not to say that East Lansing had no endearing charm to it, and as a college that has a particular emphasis on agriculture, plant, and soil sciences, Michigan State's campus was actually rather lovely, and somewhat comparable to Indiana University's: while Indiana's was more aesthetic and focused more on landscaping, Michigan State's was more about variety and utility, and the great diversity of trees and flowering plants was refreshing. However, while East Lansing is certainly as large and diverse as Bloomington, I felt like Kirsten and I exhausted all there was to do there (that we cared to do) in relatively short amount of time. There are, to be sure, some ways in which East Lansing more than met my expectations. While Louisville and Bloomington generally have better cuisine and edible fare to be found, East Lansing blew the two previous towns out of the water in the sushi department, which I certainly developed a taste for while in East Lansing. Though the lack of good Mexican and Irish kind of depressed me. Michigan is also something of a Mecca of microbrews; I think it may be among the largest concentrations of them outside Oregon and New England, which was wonderful, but it turned out to be actually rather difficult to find many of them in bars. Liquor stores (excuse me, "party stores") carried most of them (Bell's, Dark Horse, and Arcadia being the best), but the breweries themselves were spread out and there were no particularly good ones in East Lansing (Harper's was nearly laughable), so it often left me feeling rather like the Twilight Zone man in the library with broken glasses.

Sports was also another interesting topic. I must confess that I can't be particularly objective when it comes to sports, since I am a lifelong Hoosiers fan and was instilled with this type of fandom in a nearly religious childhood indoctrination. Looking at it as objectively as possible, I'll say that the basketball fan comparison between East Lansing and Bloomington is a bit of a draw, both marshaling equally rabid support among the student body (though I must say, in Indiana, you can drive hours away from Bloomington in any direction and still see a multitude of IU paraphernalia, whereas a trip very far into the countryside surrounding East Lansing and the MSU gear much more rapidly disappears). And, I've been impressed (or weirded out) on more than one occasion by large crowds of MSU students randomly erupting into the school fight song in bars. However, football is very different. IU has very little football tradition and the state of Indiana in general has stricter alcohol laws than Michigan, so the tailgating culture at MSU was nothing like I had experienced at IU. My only memory, in fact, of Bloomington's tailgating scene, is that it was confined to a few roped-in parking lots just outside the stadium, generally there were nearly as many fans of the opposing team, and alcohol was strictly regulated and confined to designated areas. Not so, East Lansing. To put it mildly, the entire campus of MSU (which is, by area, even larger than IU) turns into one enormous outdoor party. When Kirsten and I went to our first tailgating, the amount of cars and trucks and blankets overflowing with lounging students, parents or just rabid fans, grills and coolers completely amazed us. And apparently, alcohol on essentially any part of campus was permitted. We saw some students walking down the streets of East Lansing, beers in hand, waiting for the moment they crossed onto university property so they could pop the tab. It certainly made Kirsten and I wonder how IU was ever voted "biggest party school" in 2000 when this was the typical Saturday morning on MSU's campus.

The States

I had a love/hate relationship with the state of Michigan. When I left Indiana in the fall of 2007, the state was among the reddest in the nation. Kerry was defeated three-to-two in 2004, and Indiana had yet to turn blue (albeit by the slimmest of margins). Michigan is a much bluer state than Indiana, though this democratic leaning is much more labor-oriented than anything else. Michigan in fact has one of the highest NRA membership rates of any state in the union and there is a certain libertarian streak to the populace, as there is with many of the other Scandinavian influenced Great Lakes States (I was told multiple times that if I found Michigan liberal, I should visit Wisconsin and Minnesota to see an even stronger version of the Michigan progressive). One of the greatest ironies of our move to Michigan, was the political weight of my vote. We moved to Michigan just as the democratic primaries were getting into full swing, and because of Michigan's moving of the primary to an earlier date, the results of our voting were deemed null and void, not to mentions that the only names on the ballot were Dennis Kucinich and Hilary Clinton. Strike one against democracy. The next blow came when Kirsten and I decided to register in Michigan rather than Indiana, because, at the time, Michigan was looking to be a battleground state in 2008 while Indiana looked to remain solidly red as it had been since 1964. Of course, history proved me wrong, since my adoptive state went for Obama big time while my home state, which I had written off, became one of the biggest battlegrounds. All I can say is that I wish I'd been able to be a part of Indiana's historic move into the blue column.

And now, after nearly six months of having a blog, I think it's finally time that I use it for what it was intended: bitching. For a state that revolutionized the automobile industry, one would really think that Michigan would be a great state to drive in. No, no. Michigan in fact has some of the weirdest traffic, driving, and parking laws I have ever seen. I will never understand the logic of the "Michigan U-Turn" (a u-turn put in place down the road in lieu of a left turn at busy intersections) nor will I understand how incessant, asinine, and absurdly arbitrary parking laws designed to catch illegal parkers and raise revenue for the city can possibly be an efficient system. I lived in Bloomington for four years and never once received a parking ticket. I received two in my first week in East Lansing - once for parking facing the wrong way down the street and once for parking in a very poorly and confusingly marked "no parking" zone. It is as absurd as it sounds. Michigan driver's ed also seems to emphasize things that are relatively downplayed in Indiana. Kirsten and I wondered for months why Michigan drivers seemed to stop so far back at stop signs and lights. It's because they're taught to be able to see the white line before the intersection. This is probably a good thing, but it could be extraordinarily annoying when trying to turn right on red.

The Weather

Finally, it's difficult to talk about Michigan without talking about the weather. Now, understandably, the climatic difference between mid-Michigan and southern Indiana is not the same as, say, the difference between North Dakota and South Carolina (one a former potential graduate school location and one the current choice), but my place of birth is several degrees of latitude south of where I lived in Michigan, not to mention the fact that mid-Michigan lies between two very large bodies of fresh water, whereas southern Indiana lies in a very low-lying river valley. Their temperatures vary depending on so many factors, but I generally found the highs to be, on average about 15 to 20 degrees cooler in mid-Michigan than southern Indiana. Case in point occurred just a few days ago, after our first few days home, when the highs soared into the mid-80s here in the Ohio Valley (with humidity around 60%) and the weather report for East Lansing was 63 degrees, sunny, and negligible humidity. But, they have a saying in Michigan (and several other northern Midwestern states): "If you can't stand the winters, you don't deserve the summers." I would agree. Upon moving to Michigan, I was expecting and preparing for the worst. And after the first winter, I felt like I had experienced a "normal" Michigan winter, but I was told by locals that it was one of the worst winters they'd experienced in years. As someone who, for the most part, dislikes snow and winter, I was pleased by my overreaching assumption of just how bad winter would be (We received nearly 100 inches of snow that winter, and the temperature dipped below zero consistently throughout January and February). There is a certain idiosyncrasy to these winters that also surprises non-natives, me among them at first. Living in southern Indiana, the winter never gets consistently cold enough to freeze a large lake over with ice, yet Kirsten and I observed on multiple occasion people who would walk a half mile across a lake to visit a friend's house on the other side and talked about how they looked forward to the winter every year so they could walk to their friend's houses who seemed so far away during the rest of the year. People also do more than ice skate and ice fish on these lakes. Our first experience at one of these lakes entailed cautiously walking a few yards onto the ice while the accustomed Michiganders drove their four-wheeler ATVs at reckless speeds across the frozen pond. How regional fun can be. And this is all relative of course. We were constantly being reminded by the Yoopers (the U.P.ers, or the people who come from the Upper Peninsula), who, by the way, like to call those from the Lower Peninsula "trolls" since we all live "under the [Mackinac] bridge") how warm our winters are or how little snow we get by comparison. I'll never forget when we received one of the last snowfalls of the year, the ones that occur just as spring is starting, and Kirsten and I saw a man in running shorts and a tank top jogging down the road as we were receiving around 8 inches of snow. He seemed entirely unfazed.

A Return?

Overall, my two years in Michigan surprised me in a lot of ways. I disliked it at first, primarily because it was so difficult to find work and, after a short while, somewhat difficult to find things to do. But like many places, you find yourself liking it in odd ways and missing it when it's gone. It's easy to make friends when you're is in high school or college, and you're surrounded by peers and people going through the exact same things as you, and I count nearly all of my best friends in the world among those I met in high school and college. It was more difficult in East Lansing, where I worked mostly with people much older than me in the school systems and with people much younger than me at the coffee shop I worked at part time. There were very few late-20-somethings who had moved six hours from their homes while their significant others went to school. But, as it turns out, I've missed some of the people I met in Michigan terribly in just the week and half I've been gone. Michigan, much like New York, which I visited earlier this year, is a place I'd say I wouldn't mind living in, but which I wouldn't want to make a life in. And one never knows. While I imagine I'll be primarily looking in the Northeast and West Coast for graduate schools following my two years at Clemson, I wouldn't rule out altogether (after, I'm sure, a lengthy conversation with Kirsten) a return. University of Michigan does have a great history program. . .