Thoughts on Ferguson
November 25, 2014 § 10 Comments
This is Emmett Till, who was murdered when he was 14 years old. This is Emmett Till after he was abducted by a gang of men in rural Mississippi on the night of 28 August 1955. These men, headed by local grocer Roy Bryant, pistol-whipped Till, beat him, gouged out his eye, and then shot him. When Bryant, who was transporting Till’s body in his pick-up truck, was questioned as to what happened by an African American man, Bryant said that “this is what happens to smart niggers.” This picture sickens me. Till’s mother, Mamie, insisted on an open casket for his funeral so the world could see what happened to her little boy.
Last night, as I listened to the prosecutor in Ferguson, MO, and, then watched President Obama’s response, and watched the outrage on Twitter in response to the Michael Brown decision, I thought of Emmett Till. Last night, I had the depressing thought that Emmett Till died for nothing. I teach American history, and Till’s murder is usually regarded as a key moment in the birth of the Civil Rights movement in the United States.
Michael Brown is just one of many black men and boys to be killed in the United States by white men, oftentimes white police officers. I couldn’t help think last night of Trayvon Martin, and of Tamir Rice, the 12-year old boy gunned down by a police officer for waving a toy gun at a playground. But, the kinds of events that led to the deaths of Rice, Brown, and Martin aren’t all that new. For example, Yusef Hawkins. Or Amadou Diallo. I could go on.
Till was killed because he flirted with a white woman. Martin was killed because a neighbourhood watch captain thought him suspicious. Rice was killed because he was playing with a fake gun. Hawkins was killed because he was black in a white neighbourhood. Diallo was killed because he looked like a suspect in violent rapes. Brown was killed, well, I’m not entirely sure why. Because in August, the police claimed that the officer who shot him didn’t know he was a suspect in a convenience store robbery, though last night, the DA said that that’s why Brown was stopped.
So the right has come to the conclusion that Brown was a criminal and got what he deserved. My Twitter timeline last night had the occasional tweet or re-tweet to this effect. And news coverage I’ve read this morning follows that up. I say whether or not Brown rolled a convenience store is immaterial to his murder. The officer fired twelve shots at Brown. Six of those hit him. Two of this hit him in the head. The issue here is that a white police officer thought it necessary to fire twelve shots at an unarmed man. Fox News in the summer wondered whether Brown was, in fact, unarmed, given his physical size.
Ultimately:
https://twitter.com/Matthew_Barlow/status/537075505087131648
Perhaps, like last time I posted on race, I will get trolled by the racists. This time, I will not post racist comments in response to this article (I control what comments get posted, and, until last time, I generally allowed free speech here), but I will take them, and create a new blog post of racist, idiotic comments. And should I receive threats in response to this post, I will report them to the authorities. Consider that your fair warning.
The Burning of Bridget Cleary
November 19, 2014 § 3 Comments
My students in my Irish History course read Angela Bourke’s fantastic The Burning of Bridget Cleary and wrote a paper on it. The essay question asked them to situate Bridget Cleary’s murder within the context of Irish politics at the time, as this is what Bourke does, and why her book is so powerful. So much so that I assign this book every time I teach Irish History.
In reading the essays this semester, my students were particularly struck by the comparison of the Irish Catholics of the late 19th century with ‘Hottentots’ and Catholic Ireland with ‘Dahomey’ by both the British and Irish Unionist press. This was, of course, code for dismissing Irish claims to the right to Home Rule by comparing them with what the British regarded as ‘savage’ African nations. Leaving aside the racism inherent in this construction of Africa for another day, what struck me this year with the papers was the very fact that my students were so struck by these comparisons.
The major theme of my course is the way in which Ireland existed as a British colony, and the ways in which the British colonial discourse worked in keeping Ireland separate from, and excluded from, the wealth that accumulated in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland by the 19th century. This is obvious in moments like The Famine, especially when the Under Secretary of the Treasury, Charles Trevelyan, declared The Famine a gift from the Almighty and celebrated the change to reform Ireland away from the ‘perverse’ character of the native population.
For me, teaching Irish History, this has become de rigeur, I see this discourse and I don’t, it’s so deeply embedded into my brain. Thus, I really enjoyed seeing my students’ response to the discourse of Irishness on the part of the Unionists and British in 1895, when Bridget Cleary was murdered. I suppose it’s one thing to imagine Trevelyan’s cold response to The Famine as something that happened a long time ago. But, sometimes 1895 doesn’t seem like so long ago.
Bourke’s book has pictures of the inside of the Clearys’ cottage in Ballyvadlea, Co. Tipperary, and we see their poverty laid bare. However, the Clearys were not, actually, poor by Irish standards. But, because we can see some comparison between the Clearys in 1895 and our world today, they don’t seem so far away. Michael and Bridget Cleary were in their 30s and were childless. But perhaps more than that, they both had careers, so to speak. He was a cooper and she a milliner. Bridget, unlike many women of her era, especially in rural Ireland, was more or less independent. Thus, the Clearys look more like us than Trevelyan, and therefore, closer to us. So to read this comparison of the Clearys’ people, Irish Catholics, with African tribes dismissed as ‘cannibals’ is shocking (again, leaving aside the racist assumptions implicit in the dismissal of Dahomey as the land of cannibals).
And this is why I love teaching, I love the opportunity to get refreshed and re-enforced by my students as they discover something for the first time.
Gratitude
November 17, 2014 § 6 Comments
A couple of week ago, I published this piece on the new racist discourse in the United States, thinking that this was pretty bloody obvious to anyone paying attention. I was surprised at the response. The post went viral, it’s been re-blogged a bunch of times, tweeted and re-tweeted, and got a lot of readers. I was also inundated by comments on the post, to the point where I had to close comments on it. I closed comments largely because I got a couple of threats in response to the post, I should note (nothing serious). This soured me to some degree, that people would take time out of their days to threaten me over what I wrote. Some of the comments that I did allow to be posted were bad enough, but there were a good 15 or so I did not post that were largely incoherent rants about Muslims, African Americans, and women, and how they are collectively ruining the world. But, it’s easy enough to dismiss wingnuts.
But what I suppose I overlooked in this storm of negativity is the positivity that came out of the post, and all the people who left positive comments on the post itself, as well as those who took time to send me a note of gratitude or agreement, all the people who re-blogged it, tweeted it, shared it on their own Facebook feeds. And, after having some time to reflect on all of this, all I can say is: thank you.
Lest We Forget
November 11, 2014 § 1 Comment
One thing I have learned teaching history, of all varieties (World, Western Civ, American, Irish) is that human beings have long held a fascination with killing each other. Human beings have developed all kinds of methodologies and technologies dedicated to making murder easier and faster, from crucifixion, to Dr. Guillotine’s invention, to machine guns, tanks, bombers, etc. I may be a cynic, but I believe that a world without war is impossible, based on history. I’m reading Njal’s Saga, a Norse saga set in Iceland, amongst the Vikings, in the late 10th century. The violence just goes around in cycles, as a feud develops between two good friends, Njal and Gunnar.
And yet, today is Remembrance Day (or Veteran’s Day in the United States). On 11 November, every year, I think of several things. First, I think of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, and the sad, lonely death of Paul Bäumer, killed on the morning of 11 November 1918, amongst the last casualties of the Great War. I think of the Treaty of Versailles, and all the damage caused by France’s very understandable desire to punish Germany. I think of how the Germans were complicit in Hitler’s rise to power. I think of the Japanese imperial mandate and the horrors of its empire, and I think of the butchery of both World Wars. The Somme. The trenches. Dresden. The Blitz. Hiroshima. Nagasaki.
I also think of Dr. John McCrae’s poem, “In Flanders’ Field”:
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
When I was a kid in school back home in Canada, and I had to memorise this poem every November; it depressed me. It made me want to cry (I probably did cry a couple of times when I was really young). McCrae wrote this poem on 3 May 1915 after he presided over the funeral of his friend, Alexis Helmer, after the Second Battle of Ypres. McCrae himself met his end in the First World War, on 28 January 1918, of pneumonia, at the No. 3 Canadian General Hospital at Boulogne.
I also think of my own grandparents, Rodney Rupert Browne (1925-98) and Eleanor Shipman Browne (1918-2003). Rod and Eleanor, who didn’t yet know each other, served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. I don’t know when Eleanor joined, but I know that Rod enlisted when he was 17 in 1943, just before his 18th birthday. He served as a tail gunner. He never talked about what he saw or what he did during the war. And I knew better than to ask him. Same with Eleanor. Whilst she was obviously based in England, I know she saw horrors, of injured men, of German bombing blitzes. Rod came back to Montreal and married another woman, who bore him three children (two of whom, including my mother Carole Anne, and her brother, Russell, survived), and Eleanor went back to Ontario and married another man. Both ended up divorced, and they met in the 1960s and married. They remained together until Rod died of cancer on Christmas Day, 1998. Eleanor, who was a feisty old gal, held on until 2003, when she died that summer.
Rod is the reason I became an historian. One day in 1992, he met me in Montreal (I lived in Ottawa; he and Eleanor had retired to Gananoque, Ontario), and for some reason, he took me on a tour of his Montreal, showing me my family’s past, he inculcated in me that day a sense of my own history, my own past. And he and Eleanor nurtured it in me until the end of their lives. And they loved me and supported me unconditionally.
But the Second World War profoundly marked them. They both came home scarred by what they had seen. They both wandered in the wilderness for a couple of decades after 1945.
So, for them, I wore poppies every year in Canada, something I can no longer do in the United States. But, it is them I will be thinking of today (though I still miss them both every day), and all their comrades-in-arms, all those who did not come back (including the wars since 1945), those who came home troubled, damaged, and who have had to struggle to regain an equilibrium.
Lest we forget.
F-Bombs for Feminism
November 7, 2014 § 4 Comments
FCKH8.com, a website dedicated to eradicating hatred, posted this video a few weeks back. Not surprisingly, it caused a bit of a sensation
After all, we can’t have little kids swearing, can we? Never mind the fact that they’re noting the ridiculous gender imbalance in our world. Of course, that’s not shocking. Denise Balkissoon published this devastating opinion piece in the Toronto Globe and Mail today; she argues that the Jian Ghomeshi situation is not some magical watershed for violence against women, reciting a long litany of shocking moments that should’ve marshalled our collective anger to stop it. And this is just the Canadian context of violence against women.
But it’s not just violence. A couple of weeks ago in class, two of my female students commented on their own experiences. Both are incredibly intelligent young women, and both come from a place of privilege. They are white, and they come from relatively affluent backgrounds. Both grew up treated equally and fairly vis-à-vis the boys, but when it came time to graduate from high school and go to university, they discovered the world was not so fair. Both report they received diminished opportunities in comparison to the men they knew, in terms of their choices for university, the internships they received, the jobs they got. Why? Because they’re girls.
The Facebook post I first saw this FCK8 video on had a bunch of comments tut-tutting about the foul language of these little girls, not on the fact that what they were saying was true. And that is the entire point. If it takes a famous Canadian radio host beating his dates, a South African athlete killing his girlfriend, or little girls swearing to draw our attention to this general societal problem, we’ve failed.
On the New Racist Discourse in America
November 4, 2014 § 78 Comments
[Note: Comments have become out of control on this blog post, including some downright racist terminology that I have not allowed to be posted, as well as a few that include veiled, and occasionally direct, threats against me.]
So Ben Stein thinks that Obama is the most racist president in the history of this great republic. He thinks so because allegedly Obama “is purposely trying to use race to divide Americans,” and is using the ‘race card’ to convince all African Americans to vote for the Democratic Party. Ben Stein is wrong.
Obama is not the racist one, but Stein is tapping into a new discourse of racist ideology arising from the right in this country. In this discourse, anyone who mentions race as an issue in contemporary American life risks being called a racist. Anyone who points out racial inequality is at risk of being branded racist. In the mindset of those who trumpet this new discourse, we’re all equal, no matter our ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, or racial background. And any attempt to point out inequality is therefore racist/sexist/homophobic, etc, by definition.
But what this discursive technique does is to deny the experiences of women and minorities in our society. It says to those who have experiences different than white men that their experiences are invalid. In short, this new racist discourse is meant to work as shorthand for racist viewpoints. Thus, by claiming Obama is racist, Stein is both diverting attention from his own racism, and engaging in that very racism he blames on Obama.
More often than not, this discursive technique comes hand-in-hand with declarations of what is in the best interests of African Americans. And in this sense, we return to the paternal racism of slave owners in the pre-Civil War era. I’m not saying that Ben Stein = slave plantation owner. I’m saying the tricks of technique here are very similar. Last spring, we saw the Carolina Chocolate Drops up in Vermont. Towards the end of the show, Rhiannon Giddens, the frontwoman of the band, told us of her own explorations of American history, and a book she read on slave narratives in the post-Civil War era. One story in particular struck her, and she wrote the song “Julie” about it.
In the story, the mistress of the plantation is shocked at the fact that Julie, the former slave woman would have a will of her own. She thought that she knew best for Julie, as did slave owners in general in a paternalist racist system.
And every time a white man or woman purports to know what’s best for African Americans, or any other minority, they’re engaging in this kind of paternalistic racism, which appears to be part and parcel of this new racist discourse from certain sectors of the political right in the United States.
Anita Sarkeesian and Why I Got So Much Trouble on my Mind
October 16, 2014 § 7 Comments
I got so much trouble on my mind, like Chuck D. back in 1990. Anita Sarkeesian is a feminist gamer, and critic of gamer culture. I’m not a gamer, but I have female friends who are, and I have friends who design video games, including women. They all report a culture of wider misogyny. But I’m not here to lambaste gamers, I’m here to point out misogyny is a deep-seated cultural issue. It permeates every corner of our culture, it’s regarded as acceptable by far too many, both men and women. Too many of us stand around and watch it happen, and we do not call it out for what it is. We do not stand up.
Men have a particular moral imperative to stand up in the face of misogyny. Why? Because misogynists are also men. Men threaten women. Men rape women. Men kill women. And spare me the “men’s movement.” It’s nothing but a sad-sack attempt by a rearguard of men, upset that their access to patriarchal privilege is under threat. Of course, that threat is only in their tiny little minds.
Sarkeesian was scheduled to give a talk on misogyny and gamer culture at the Utah State University. Then some pathetic little man emailed an anonymous threat promising a “Montreal-style massacre” if USU allowed her talk to go ahead. I’m not going to quote this pathetic little man’s threat here. But I will remind readers that on 6 December 1989, one misogynist opened fire at the École Polytechnique de Montréal and shot 27 people, killing 14. All of the dead were women. All of them. Why did he do this? Because he claimed that feminists had ‘ruined’ his life. So, too, did the anonymous man who threatened Sarkeesian at USU.
Sarkeesian wasn’t even told about the threat against her life by USU. She read about it after landing in Utah. Moreover, USU and the Utah police were unable to provide protection for her, as Utah is an open-carry state, meaning it is entirely legal to carry concealed weapons onto a university campus. To prevent weapons on campus, or to have people check their guns at the door would have violated their Second Amendment rights. I’m not sure that’s even true, but that’s an argument for another day. So Sarkeesian cancelled.
I can’t say I blame her. Who wants to be a martyr? Especially for something as basic and simple as civil and human rights and the right of women to be treated equally by society. But, this also lets the crazies win. This lets the misogynists win.
I have had death threats in the past, in response to articles I published on a now-defunct London-based magazine website. The threats against me were not credible, so I ignored them. I have had a variety of threats against my person and my employment on Twitter. But, again, they weren’t credible, so I ignored them. But this is what the bullies do. If they don’t like what you’re saying, they threaten you. If you’re a woman, they threaten to rape you. They threaten to kill you. The threats Sarkeesian felt was very real. Hell, she’s already been the target of some asshole’s idea of a joke with a video game that allows players the chance to punch her in the face over and over again.
We cannot let the crazies win. And Sarkeesian continues to speak out about the threat to her life. I applaud her. If the crazies win, we lose civilisation. Someone’s Second Amendment rights do NOT trump my First Amendment rights. And, arguably, USU, as a state institution, violated Sarkeesian’s First Amendment rights. There is a lot of talk about “rights” in the US, the rights guaranteed to us by the Bill of Rights. But nowhere does it say that anyone’s rights trump those of someone else’s. Not in the Bill of Rights, not in the voluminous jurisprudence that has developed surrounding the Constitution.
And yet, I haven’t seen a politician come out in support of Sarkeesian. Nor have I read a thing about an attempt to find the man who made this anonymous threat in the first place. He sent an email. It’s not that hard to trace it.
Welcome to the Terrordome indeed.
The Wisdom of Marc Bloch
October 8, 2014 § 5 Comments
Marc Bloch is one of the most influential historians ever. An historian of mostly medieval France, he, along with Lucien Febvre, founded the Annales school of historiography in the late 1920s. The Annalistes preferred examining history over the long durée, and across various periods of time. They also advocated a more complete history than one of generals, presidents, prime ministers, and other so-called Great Men.
Bloch met his end at the hands of the Gestapo on in Saint-Didier-des-Champs, in France, on 16 June 1944, ten days after D-Day, as the Nazis realised they were going to lose France. Bloch had been a member of the Résistance since 1942. He was captured by the Vichy police in March of that year and handed over to the Gestapo. He was interrogated by Klaus Barbie, and tortured. It was a sad end for a great man.
Bloch had served in the French Army during the First World War, and remained a member of the Army reserve in the interregnum between the two wars. He was called up into action during the Second World War and was on hand for the baffling collapse of France in the face of the Nazi blitzkrieg attack in May 1940. That summer, he wrote his blistering and searing account of the Fall of France, Strange Defeat, not knowing if his words would ever see the light of day. The book was published in 1948, four years after his murder, and three years after the war ended.
Bloch is unflinching in his critique of French High Command, and France in general, for the collapse of its Army in 1940. In part, he blames the High Command’s over reliance on a false reading of history, that led it into a state of pathetic stasis, incapable of recognising that 1939-40 was not 1918, and that the Second World War was a different war than the Great War. In this passage, he makes a passionate argument for what the study of History is.
History is, in its essentials, the science of change. It knows and it teaches that is impossible to find two events that are ever exactly alike, because the conditions from which they spring are never identical…the lesson it teaches is not that what happened yesterday will necessarily happen to-morrow, or that the past will go on reproducing itself. By examining how and why yesterday differed from the day before, it can reach conclusions which will enable it to foresee how to-morrow will differ from yesterday. The traces left by past events never move in a straight line, but in a curve that can be extended into the future.
I assigned this book for my historiography class, and was deeply struck by this passage. I’ve re-read it four times now, it goes against what our culture thinks history is. Our culture thinks history is exactly what Bloch says it isn’t, that it can teach us to avoid the same mistakes over and over again.
I was thinking about this in light of my Irish history class dealing with The Liberator, Daniel O’Connell last week. O’Connell led the movement for Catholic Emancipation in Ireland, succeeding in 1829. He the turned his sights on the Repeal of the Act of Union (1800), which created the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In this, he failed. He failed because times had changed, and attitudes were different. In the early 19th century, many in Britain, and even some amongst the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, had come to the conclusion that the denial of civil rights for Catholics in Ireland was not a good thing, and that Emancipation was necessary. Three of the staunchest opponents of Emancipation came around to O’Connell’s way of thinking: Sir Robert Peel, the Home Secretary; The Duke of Wellington, the Prime Minister, and King George IV). In the 1840s, though, when O’Connell’s Repeal movement reached its apogee, he did not have a groundswell of support in Britain (or amongst the Protestant Ascendancy) for Repeal. Thus, he failed because O’Connell failed to learn the proper lessons of History.
We would do well to remember Bloch’s maxim. Even we historians.
Acura #Fail
October 6, 2014 § Leave a comment
Acura is a luxury car maker, owned by Honda Motor Company. It has a new ad on TV I’ve seen a few times, and every time I see it, I’m completely gobsmacked. The ad, which I’ve posted below, shows a generic luxury car, but it’s the music that shocks. That’s Sid Vicious, former “bassist” for the Sex Pistols, mangling “My Way,” Paul Anka’s song made famous by Frank Sinatra.
Vicious, real name John Simon Ritchie, wasn’t a musician. His bass was usually unplugged when the Pistols played live. He was a junkie and a general degenerate, what would today be called a ‘gutter punk.’ On 12 October 1978, Vicious killed his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, in a drug-stupor in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. He stabbed her once in the abdomen, and she bled to death. Vicious was arrested. He eventually died of a drug overdose on 2 February 1979. No major loss, really.
Aside from the fact that Acura has clearly missed the point of 1970s punk, a movement against corporate rock and other creeping commercialisation, Acura has completely lost the plot in casting a girlfriend-killing junkie’s music as a means of selling a car. This is a complete and utter disgrace and a #fail.
Historians Being Mean: A Glossary
October 4, 2014 § 4 Comments
[Note: This is not mine, my wife, Margo Shea, came up with this last week in prepping for the Historiography course she’s teaching. But, I think it’s brilliant, and kind funny, too, and worth sharing. I took this, with her permission, of course, directly from her blog. All credit goes to her, not me. I’m just married to a woman who’s smarter than me.]
Historians Being Mean : A Glossary
OK, I think back to graduate seminars and wonder if they may be sites of some of the most grievous crimes against reality when it comes to language usage. Pompousness galore! While aspirational erudition can be really annoying (see – told you!), there are instances in which the correct word matters, not the OK word or the more or less descriptive word. This, of course, is coming from the woman who, as a four year old, asked her mom if she could postpone her nap because she wasn’t currently tired. I used the perfectly appropriate word and got out of my nap. Life lesson learned. Check.
In no particular order, then, here are a few of the most commonly used words historians sling at each other and what they mean. Followed by what they really mean
Unsubstantiated. Obvious and unequivocal, this means you just don’t have the evidence to make the claim. You rarely see the “unsubstantiated argument” in print as a response to an entire article or text, because it’s the baseline for the profession and most research that can’t pass muster on the whole ‘evidence’ thing doesn’t get published. If seen, it is usually applied to one aspect of the research, sometimes because the reviewer can’t think of anything else to criticize. More likely to be heard at conferences, occasionally seen in print records of scholarly roundtables. In which case it means, “I just don’t like you at all and I don’t care who knows it” or “You are getting way too close to my research topic.” Implied insult: You didn’t do your homework. (Alternate reading: Your sweeping, elegiac study kind of blows my mind, so instead of feeling unworthy of you, I’ll just hang out over here and quibble over details in this one subsection of this one chapter, OK?).
Overdetermined. In layman’s terms, this means that an argument about cause or motivation attributes way too much significance to one criterion or set of criteria amongst a much larger pool of possible causes or motivations. The interpretation doesn’t leave enough room for alternate readings. This critique can be lodged in a few different circumstances and can be related either to the argument itself or to the person presenting the argument. Sometimes it is just a fancy way of saying, “Hey there, you’re right on the verge of manipulating your sources to your own dastardly ends.” Also, scholars opposed to the ideologies espoused explicitly by an author or implied in the context of the historical work may use overdetermination as a stand-in for “interested.” (See below.) Implied insult: Your interpretation is about as subtle as two dogs sniffing each other’s nether regions.
Lost in the Structure/Agency Corn Maze. Anyone writing about what people did and why people did what they did, especially if they happen to occupy subaltern status vis á vis a dominant power structure, has to grapple with the whole agency thing. To what extent do individual actors and groups exert personal and collective choice propelling them to act or not act, to speak, to be silent, etc? And to what extent do the forces that structure their society influence and shape the boundaries of what is possible? (Marx’s superstructure, Bourdieu’s field, etc.) It is easy to get lost in this maze and critics are unfortunately somewhere looking down watching you bounce off dried husks. Implied Insult: Seriously, who really cares about what ordinary people did or why?
*Special thanks to Lara Kelland, who cares deeply about ordinary people who create social change, for this one.
Methods-Fetishistic. This basically red-flags an obsessive fascination with methods or methodology, a blind or perhaps naïve faith in methodology as the key to unveiling hitherto opaque historical truths. Historians who rely on quantitative, computational, data-mining methodologies fall under this scrutiny on the grounds that statistics don’t speak for themselves. Implied insult: Got analysis?
Essentialist/Essentializing. Basically, an essentialist argument applies an indispensable set of characteristics to any group of people, set of events or places or things. Over generalization but more than that – it often but not always involves negative judgment. All Irish people are alcoholic-soaked pugilists. All middle class women whose primary work is in the home in the 1950s were sexually repressed. It projects the characteristics of a few onto an entire group. Making data/evidence about a small number of historical actors apply to the whole. Treating as representative the actions, performance, rhetoric of a few. Implying connections between actions and subject positions without a lot of evidence. Implied insult: The trees aren’t the forest, sweetie. And btw, there are a LOT of shades of green.
Teleological. A teleological argument ignores contingencies that make historical change happen and basically suggest a certain inevitability of events. It is the classic “all roads led to here” argument. Basically, a teleological argument looks at the present scenario and structures evidence about the past in such a way as to explain smoothly and coherently how A led to Z. And occasionally you might get really lucky and be get told that you are “reifying a teleology.” Historical scholarship as means to end. Implied insult: Go back to grad school, Marxist.
Interested/Present-minded. These are teleological’s pesky little brothers. It is a somewhat less harsh way of saying much the same thing. You are hereby convicted of reading the past through a set of political, social or cultural interests and commitments or are looking at present circumstances and making assumptions about how historical actors might have responded to the same kinds of circumstances or how historical processes might have operated, etc. Plus, you aren’t even badass enough for me to throw teleology at you. Implied insult: Go to American Studies or Performance Studies or somewhere, you contemporary person, you. You don’t belong here.
Whiggish. Present-Minded + Pollyanna. Herbert Butterfield published The Whig Interpretation of History in 1931. “The Whig interpretation of history,” he said, was “the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.” Things are always getting better. Progress is inevitable. History is a straight line towards awesome. Implied insult: If you love the system so much, maybe you should have just gone to business school.
Matthew Barlow 