Historical Image of the Day

Home of E.F. Caldwell, Larchmont, New York, circa 1900. Caldwell was a leading designer of metalwork and electric light fixture during the late 19th and early 20th century, something reflected in this room.

Appropriate Fines, Inappropriate Reasons

A woman getting fined $1.9 million for illegally downloading 24 songs is totally ridiculous. However, this made the fine more defensible:

Thomas-Rasset downloaded work by artists such as No Doubt, Linkin Park, Gloria Estefan and Sheryl Crow.

Can we fine anyone massive amounts of money for downloading No Doubt or Linkin Park? If I was president, this is the kind of legislation I would support.

Historical Image of the Day

Rogarshevshy family, Lower East Side, New York City, early 20th century.

Visiting the Lower East Side Tenement Museum tomorrow and wanted an immigrant image for the day.

Book Review: Dominique Laporte, History of Shit (1978)

It's a rare day that I pick up a book of French theory. However, deeply interested in issues of bodies and nature, Dominique Laporte's 1978 History of Shit seemed like a must read. And it's certainly damned interesting. For a piece of theory, it's well-written, breezy almost. It has pretty funny anecdotes from time and time and produces interesting ideas about how society (the French really--in the world of critical theory, does any other place exist? Though for those interested in spatial theory, Los Angeles plays that role) have thought about shit over time, how this mirrors ideas about language, and how the evolution of people's feelings about shit replicate themselves in urban planning, privacy, medicine, capitalism and other phenomena.

Of course, it is still French theory. Heavily influenced by Freud, Bataille, and Lacan, sometimes Laporte writes like it. It's a rambling book that's all over the place. Thus, it's best read both seriously and with a sense of humor. If you're looking for a consistent thesis or to follow every sentence, this isn't the book to pick up. But if you are looking for interesting insights into our relationship with feces and the human body, it's fairly enjoyable.

Rather than produce a point by point review, let me just discuss a couple of things I found particularly interesting Laporte talks about how shit turns into gold, especially under capitalism. This is both metaphor for production and capitalism, as well as the literal capitalizing upon shit. One way this happens is through medicine. Laporte provides fascinating examples of how people have used human waste in the past for medicinal purposes and beauty products. Nothing like a little urine rubbed on the skin to keep you looking young! While not going into any of this in much detail (it's a short book after all), he points out that St. Jerome stressed to Roman women to stop these practices, yet later the church would canonize a woman who punished herself by eating the shit of the people she doctored. In fact, religions throughout history have seen shit and urine as healthful things. But shit isn't just spiritual gold, it's financial gold as well. Today, we see this again. The fertilizer industry is an obvious example. But the use of urea in any number of products, including makeup and skin products is surprising. And there's the counterculture idea to drink your own urine. Frankly, this disgusts me, but it certainly fits into a long tradition in western culture.

And of course, there's the language. Laporte came out of the French radical movements of the 60s; he saw the false purification of the body as emblematic of the equally false purification of the French language. Thus the constant use of the word "shit." A psychoanalyst heavily influenced by Freud, Laporte tries to break down these barriers through his work. 25 years later, with a much more "profane" culture, if using descriptive words can in fact be profane, the book may not seem quite so shocking. After all, today, a book like this might well be used in the colleges without too much blowback. In this way, it's as much a primary source document for the development of obscenity and shock as it is a secondary source document about the history of shit.

As for actually using it in a class, I don't know. Like much theory, it would push undergraduates to their limits. I think they could handle it, but the question is how useful would they find it. They'd be titillated a bit by the subject matter and the title. But if I'm only going to assign one truly theoretical work (and I'm realistically only assigning one), would it work better than Foucault? Probably not, though it depends on the class of course.

Up

The first 15 minutes of Up is some of the most powerful cinema of the decade. The rest of the movie is pretty hit and miss. Much of it relies on stock characters from Disney films of the past, particularly the talking dogs and evil old person. Nonetheless, those first scenes are incredible.

PETA Idiocy

PETA outdoes themselves this time with utterly irrelevant, out of touch, and pointless commentary about Obama killing a fly.

Via Rob

Joyce

Call me a philistine, but Sarah's post on Joyce reminded me that I've read very little of him. I just don't have the patience or tenacity to work as hard as I would need to in order to get through Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake.

It does remind me though of an argument I used to have with people. If it took one a whole year to get through Joyce and understand it, would it be worth it? Is it worth a year of someone's life to understand any book at all? I generally say no, though I suppose for all the religious, social, and cultural references, the Bible might be an exception. Anything else, I don't know.

And again, feel free to call me a philistine.

Death to Everyone Is Going To Come

Haven't been blogging much due to my crazy summer schedule, but I do want to note the passing of a few interesting people:

1. Omar Bongo, the President of Gabon, died about a week ago. While a dictator (the world's longest serving head of state), he used his powers to protect the Gabonese environment. He did so basically through buying everyone off through oil money. This was falling apart toward his death and the incredibly valuable African rain forests that he protected are beginning to be invaded. The long-term future of those forests is now in question. This is one of the key questions of environment and the developing world--democracy tends to be at least as destructive to nature as dictatorship. Should saving valuable ecosystems mean we should also compromise on democracy?

2. Delbert Osguthorpe, an important environmental activist from the 1960s, passed away recently as well. Osugthorpe's major contribution was exposing government chemical weapon testing and its effect upon sheep population. Of course, the government claimed releasing these gases into the air was harmless, but this was a lie.

3. One of the great historians of slavery, Philip Curtin, has also left us. Curtin helped us understand the slave trade and get a real sense of how many Africans were forced onto these voyages, 9-10 million. This was actually significantly less than many others believed. Numbers of up to 20 million were common, but little research had gone into this question before Curtin's 1969 book The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census.

4. Finally of course there is David Carradine, about who I will only say that autoerotic asphyxiation is a particularly bad way to go out.

Changes in the Historical Profession

Why the Times would be interested in the vagaries of the historical profession I do not know. But I think the cry over the decline of "traditional" fields of history is way overblown. Having just spent half a year reviewing Herring's From Colony to Superpower, a new overview of American foreign policy, I certainly feel that thinking about America's relationship to the world in a strictly diplomatic way has limited value. The article finishes by discussing how one department had to change the hiring line to "US and the World," as if this was a bad thing. Instead, such changes should be embraced, as this, admittedly amorphous, field, has an incredible amount of interesting things to say about how we have related to the world.

As for the rest of the article, it seems to me that legal history is on the rise and I think we are going to see a revival of economic history because of the financial collapse and the interest that has spawned. But ultimately, such an article is really an attack on studying race and gender. That race and gender is somehow disconnected from diplomatic or economic history is absurd, as many young scholars are aware.

Really this is much ado about nothing.

Grading America's Sacred Cow

I'm grading AP US History exams this week. What was I thinking? Anyway, the question I am grading is on the American Revolution. It's a standard question about major events between 1763 and 1776.

I've talked about my annoyance at how we think about the Revolution before. We still see this event in black and white, with the British as actual bad guys and the Founding Fathers as saints. Even progressives, people who are usually open to thinking in new ways about the past, ar e loathe to touch this question. In fact, many times, I've seen people get real touchy when you suggest the Revolution was a lot more complicated than it is usually made out to be.

Obviously, high school teachers are still teaching this subject in a black and white manner. With very few exceptions, students buy whole hog into the myths of the Revolution. According to them, the British were completely wrong, the Founders were heroes, the Tories don't even exist, and in the end, the greatest country the world has ever seen began.

I don't want to again revisit my arguments that maybe winning the Revolution wasn't as black and white as it seems. You can read about it here.

But I am very interested in how you can feel the anti-tax sentiment pour out of the students. Has our revolutionary mythology helped foster some of our greatest problems today? I wonder if those familiar with the revenue problems of California would think so.

Historical Image of the Day

Child labor, South Carolina textile mill, 1909

Historical Image of the Day

Female welders, Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company, World War II

Historical Image of the Day

Coke ovens owned by Sewanee Fuel & Iron Company, Grundy County, Tennessee, 1928.

Off to Louisville

Off to Louisville for the next week to grade AP US History exams. I'm hoping to get some blogging done, but it could be light. It really depends on whether the hotel room has free wireless. Last year, the hotel did not. And really, WTF? You can't provide free wireless? Really?

This year, I'm in a different hotel so hope springs eternal.

Anyway, I'm sure the grading will be the most exciting thing that happens to me all year.....

And if any readers are in Louisville and want to get together, drop me a line.

Historical Image of the Day

Farmers evicted from their land, near Tyronza, Arkansas, 1930s.

Historical Image of the Day

New York Times advertisement taken out by the city of Greenville, Mississippi, 1954. The city was selling itself to northern investors as a great place to build factories.

PETA Sucks

I really hate PETA. In fact, although an environmental historian and someone who cares deeply about the environment, I can't stand the whole animal rights movement. There are many reasons for this--from its puritanism to its ideological inconsistencies on which animals deserve protection to its flirtation with anarchism in the 90s to its rampant sexism. The utter tone deafness of PETA is really shocking.

And now, in the wake of George Tiller's assassination, PETA has reached a new low.

A national animal rights group plans to erect billboards in Wichita urging people on both sides of the abortion debate to go vegetarian.

One version of the billboard says, "Pro-Life? Go Vegetarian." The other says, "Pro-Choice? Choose Vegetarian." Both feature a photo of three baby chicks.

Lindsay Rajt, campaign manager for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, said the billboards were prompted by the recent shooting death of abortion doctor George Tiller, who was killed Sunday at his church.

"The discussion of the value of life is front and center right now in the public conversation," Rajt said today.

"We think we would be irresponsible if we don't talk about how we're all guilty of extreme cruelty to animals every time we sit down to a meal that includes meat.

Um, no. Equating meat with killing an abortion doctor is simply immoral. And I'm sure that people who believe differently than myself think the same thing about comparing meat to fetuses. What do they think they will accomplish here?

Bill O'Reilly, Propagandist of Terrorism

Also, he's an apologist for terrorism that he helped cause.

O'Reilly is as great a threat to peace and safety in this country as Osama Bin Laden.

Historical Image of the Day

"Solution of the Labor Question in the South," Harper's Weekly, 1865

Historical Image of the Day

This week's images will be of labor & labor issues in the South

Alexander Smith & Sons Carpet Company agreeing to deal to build a factory in Greenville, Mississippi, 1950.