online registration for conference attendees

For those of you attending this year's conference in New York on November 17-18, online registration is now available from CUNY's Center for the Humanities. The fee is $60 for all attendees. To register for the conference, click here.

Additionally, those who are on the program for the conference are required to become a member of the Society for U.S. Intellectual History. Our organization is in its first year and is not yet, unfortunately, living in the digital age. So you'll have to fill out a form by hand, and send us a check. To join the society, complete the membership form and send a check or money order for $40 (payable to the Society for U.S. Intellectual History) to:

Raymond Haberski, Jr.
Secretary, S-USIH
Marian University
Marian Hall 307
3200 Cold Spring Road
Indianapolis, IN 46222

---

Mike O'Connor
Chair, Conference Committee (2011)
Society for U.S. Intellectual History

Ponderings on Black Internationalism

I'm off to the Association for the Study of African American Life and History this weekend to present on Juliette Derricotte's Christian Internationalism on a panel devoted to black women's internationalism. I'm very excited that Gerald Horne will be commenting on our papers.

I've been batting around the idea of "black internationalism."This is a continuation of an earlier post thinking about internationalism in general. I had casually defined it as the way people of African descent (particularly American, since that's what I study) relate to the world outside of their own country. Pan-Africanism would be a sub-theme within black internationalism, but so would students going to graduate school in Europe when they were barred from American universities, or black soldiers being posted in Europe or Asia (who could be like Colin Powell, who is not a race-first thinker).

Marc Gallicchio in The African American Encounter with Japan and China: Black Internationalism in Asia, 1895-1945, defines it very differently. For him, it was the "view of world affairs that drew a connection between the discrimination they [African Americans] faced at home and the expansion of empire abroad." He argues that this began right around the 1905 victory of Japan over Russia, when blacks started to identify with Japan as a victorious people of color. James Campbell documents the same world view in Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005 in his chapter on Langston Hughes. Prior to the New Negro period, African Americans had traveled to Africa as cultural ambassadors for the western Christian way of life, most commonly as missionaries or settlers in Liberia. But even Marcus Garvey, a paragon of the New Negro era, wanted to create an empire in Africa, led by new world people of African descent--he wrote to all the black people in the world that he was the Provisional President of Africa. "It is a political job; it is a political calling for me to redeem Africa. It is like asking Napoleon to take the world." I bring Garvey up as an example of why the transition might be later than 1905.

Tim's Light Reading (10-6-2011)

[Update: Obviously I wrote this post before the news of Steve Jobs' passing hit. - TL]

1. Stanley Fish asks: Who is your Stanley Fish?

Here's my favorite passage from the piece:

Why? Because were I ever to meet him [i.e. your "Stanley Fish"], the odds are that I would like him (the public record suggests that he is an admirable fellow) and if I liked him it would be hard for me to continue beating up on him. (Despite the proverb, familiarity does not breed contempt.) In fact I would immediately regret, and want to take back, all the nasty things I had said with such zest.

You might be surprised to know that my bugbears are not usually hard-working intellectuals. For the most part, I try to avoid bashing people who actually attempt to think through things---even when I disagree with their conclusions. I've found that my "long-time personal pinatas" are usually of the pseudo-intellectual variety: politicians, pundits (some left and right-leaning), popular culture figures (e.g the (former) cult of Oprah), or some mix of the three (e.g. Newt Gingrich). I dislike the passive and active anti-intellectualism of posers and poseurs.

2. Classroom Styles, Colorfully Described

Is America a Christian nation? A proof

I am teaching a course for elementary education majors on United States history. It is a broad course that deals with the politics of the classroom as well as the content these future teachers will need. We dealt with the idea of religion and the American constitution recently, discussing James Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments" as a way to defuse the emotionally charged contemporary issue of America as a Christian Nation.

So here is my question: can we write a proof that provides students with a way to deal with the logic of that statement? Here is my attempt.

If America is a Christian nation then it does not possess a civil government. Because if it had a civil government whose existence depended on Christianity then it would no longer be civil.

If this is true then its opposite true, that if American is a Christian nation, then Christianity in America depends on the government's support of it and without such support Christianity would not survive.

But since we know that Christianity would exist without government support, then America's government can neither be a support for it nor exist because of it. Thus American is not a Christian nation.

All About Vasectomies

Last night my department hosted esteemed cultural historian Elaine Tyler May, author of the trend-setting Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era, which I often assign to my undergrads. May gave an endowed lecture based on her latest book, America and the Pill: A History of Promise, Peril, and Liberation, a short and accessible, yet provocative and revisionist history of "the pill," which just turned 50 last year.

The most interesting chapter in the book, from my perspective, and the most fascinating part of her lecture last night, which included some fantastic images too expensive to be included in the book, is the question of "A Pill for Men?" May explores the long and complicated history of why a pill for men has never been developed and approved. Although the reasons are myriad and complex, the single greatest factor is that men have always had less to lose than women by having unprotected sex, and thus the incentives to ingest hormone-altering chemicals have not been a factor in inspiring a market for such a pill--such inspiration (profits) being the driving force of the resources and scientific power necessary to the development of a pill for men. Related to this, though, is the long history of male ambivalence towards male contraceptives. The image below, from the cover of a 1972 issue of Esquire, best reflects such ambivalence (which is an understatement). I find this image amazing on so many levels.

The Silverman Machzor and the Culture of Mid-Twentieth-Century American Judaism

We are now in the middle of the Jewish High Holidays:  Rosh Hashanah began last Thursday at sundown; Yom Kippur begins this Friday at sundown.*  Since coming to University of Oklahoma in 1998, I have davened on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur with a traditional minyan that a few OU professors put together for the occasion.**  It's a bit of a catch-as-catch can affair.  We have access to a spare Torah from Emanuel Synagogue in OKC, which also lets us use a portable ark of theirs.  And the machzorim (High Holiday prayerbooks) that we use are hand-me-downs that were once used by OU Hillel, and which they got (apparently) from a synagogue in Pittsburgh, PA.  These machzorim are the 1951 edition of what's usually called the "Silverman Machzor" (after its editor Rabbi Morris Silverman), a prayerbook first published in 1939, which was the official High Holiday prayerbook of Conservative Judaism in this country for the next three decades.***

Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising that a prayerbook assembled in 1939 shows its age, though the 1951 edition has clearly been changed substantially from the original (the Holocaust, yet to occur in 1939, has been added to the Yom Kippur martyrology, for example).  But for just this reason, I find our 1950s prayerbooks a fascinating glimpse into mid-twentieth-century American Judaism.****