In the wake of rising Covid-19 cases, Baltimore City has once again closed indoor dining and bars. I feel terrible about how this act might affect those in the service industry, but ultimately it seems like it was inevitable considering the failure of the federal government to act and the impulse among individual states to reopen well before caseloads had declined to the extent they have in other places in the world. While they may be open again by the time the semester starts, I’m also thankful because it means that students won’t be congregating in bars around the city.
Continue reading “Let Students Drink”Category: Uncategorized
Professional Update
Chalk this up to the disadvantages of the move to social media and away from the blog, but while I announced this a while ago on Twitter and Facebook, I neglected to note here that beginning next year I will begin as Assistant Professor of History at Loyola University, Maryland. I’ve valued my time here at the University of Southern Mississippi and will miss my friends and colleagues, but I am very excited about my new position and my move to Baltimore.
New Publication and a Blog
I neglected to note here that I recently co-authored a brief article the persecution of homosexuals at the University of Southern Mississippi during the late 1950s and early 1960s with my colleague Douglas Bristol. Douglas has also just begun a new blog documenting the lives of LGBTQ Mississippians, which is currently seeking contributors. Check it out!
Article in the Journal of the History of Sexuality
I’m very pleased to announce that I have an article in the most recent issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality titled “Serving Sex: Playing with Prostitution in the Brasseries à femmes of Late Nineteenth-Century Paris.” The article traces the emergence of “brasseries à femmes” — cafés that featured serving girls — as a target of moral disapproval in late nineteenth-century Paris. In particular, the servers were often accused of being prostitutes, an assumption that has also pervaded a good deal of historical work on them. I argue, however, that we shouldn’t take this association at face value. Rather, I follow art historians and literary critics who have shown that representations of serving girls emphasized their essential ambiguity: were they or weren’t they available for sex? [1] Using records drawn from the Archives de la Préfecture de Police alongside published moral commentary, I show that this ambiguity was not just an effect of male discourse, but was also a key strategy of the servers themselves. The servers were able to use the assumption that they were prostitutes to their advantage as they manipulated their customers into believing that they were available for sex, whether they actually were or not. Even as the association of serving with prostitution constrained these women, therefore, it also offered them a limited ability to shape their day-to-day lives.
[1]See for example Hollis Clayson, Painted Love: Prostitution in French Art of the Impressionist Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); Theresa Ann Gronberg, “Femmes de Brasserie,” Art History 7, no. 3 (1984): 336; Jessica Tanner, “Turning Tricks, Turning the Tables: Plotting the Brasserie à Femmes in Tabarant’s Virus d’amour,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies 41, nos. 3-4 (2013): 256.
Back to Life
After what was a rather stressful and busy semester (year?), I’m hoping to get this site back into shape and hopefully post something now and then. Consider this a placeholder/promise of that goal.
No, Civic Associations Don’t (Necessarily) Lead to Nazism
A student of mine sends along a link to Cass Sustein’s thoughts on a recent paper that shows a link between high participation within the Nazi Party and strong civic associations in 1920s and early 1930s Germany. I’ve downloaded the article itself and hope to get the chance to read it, but I thought it worth offering a few quick thoughts on Sustein’s presentation of this argument, especially since I see that a number of people have talked about it. First, its worth noting that although historians obviously continue to debate the rise of the Nazis, many have noted the link between political and civic organizations and the rise of the Nazi Party. Second, the examples Sustein provides simply show that people talk to one another about their beliefs and sometimes change their minds. And yes, that may even occur among extremists.
Third, and most importantly, Sustein simply emphasizes the coexistence of associations and high Nazi Party membership without underscoring why such a connection may have existed in the first place. Correlation is not causation. Historian Peter Fritzsche, for instance, once argued that the associations that flourished in Weimar Germany failed in their attempt to create the kind of social links Germans were seeking after World War I. In fact, it was the Nazi Party itself that managed to represent a form of community more attractive to a significant amount of Germans. In other words, the correlation between civic associations and Nazi Party membership may be an inverse one; the places where people most frequently encountered the failed promise of community by these groups, the more likely they were to turn to another option: the Nazis.
It’s worth underlining just how good the Nazis were at this type of thing. The above image is a fairly well-known picture of Goebbels and Hitler having a “one-pot meal.” These were encouraged during the winters of the 1930s all the way through the war as a way of reducing waste and expense; the extra money a family saved by having one was supposed to go to charity. The image demonstrates just one way the party strove to incorporate itself within the everyday life of communities. Hitler himself changed his mode of presentation depending on the audience, and Nazis did set up charitable, paramilitary, and, most famously, youth organizations themselves that all served to incorporate the party more fully into certain communities. All this is to say that the simple existence of civic associations and social networks can, in no sense, be said to be enough to explain the rise of the Nazi Party. To find a more convincing explanation you have to learn to ask better historical questions: How did the Nazis take advantage of this phenomenon to facilitate their rise to power? It did not just happen by accident after all.
The French Intervention in Mali in Context
Historian of eighteenth and early nineteenth-century France, David Bell, puts the French intervention in Mali into its historical and contemporary political contexts:
It remains to be seen whether France’s military intervention in Mali will be considered a military success, but it already seems possible to count it a political one. The war has earned support from across the French political spectrum, President François Hollande has garnered acclaim for his leadership, and the French public broadly supports the country’s stated humanitarian mission. The intervention recalls the days when “la grande nation” laid claim to an ambitious international role, particularly within its former colonial empire.
But in today’s France, this portrait of unity and resolve is actually something of an aberration. Far from expressing a confident sense of mission, the French public has recently been more inclined to a sense of decline, malaise, paralysis and crisis. And it is at least partially justified.
Via Arthur Goldhammer.
Blogging Interwar Europe
I may not be blogging at the moment, but some of my students are.
Teaching Carnival
Profhacker is hosting a new teaching carnival, with useful links for teachers and students alike.
Lessons of the Holocaust
Two of my courses are in the midst of World War II, a moment I mostly hate teaching, but will almost certainly find myself doing so for the rest of my life. I hate teaching it not simply because of the morbid fascination it always seems to evoke in people — and certainly not just in undergraduates — but because it’s so often cited as the reason to study history in the first place. Learn from the past, so we never repeat it. The Holocaust has come to stand in for the lessons of the past as a whole.
This conviction, propagated by memorials and memoirs, is one I try to challenge as I lecture and as we talk about the Holocaust. And it’s why I’ve assigned Ruth Kluger’s absolutely brutal Still Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered
When I tell people…that I feel no compunction about citing examples of my mother’s petty cruelties towards me, my hearers act surprised, assume a stance of virtuous indignation, and tell me that, given the hardships we had to endure during the Hitler period, the victims should have come closer together and formed strong bonds. Particularly young people should have done so, say the elderly. But this is sentimental rubbish and depends on a false concept of suffering as a source of moral education (52).
I hate teaching the Holocaust because every time I return to this beautifully, scandalously, brutal book, I can’t help but agree. Primo Levi depicted Auschwitz as a giant laboratory in which one could see how men and women functioned when placed in the most dire of situations. In doing so, he assumes that there is something, however, horrible to learn there. Kluger implies, as Lore Segal’s wonderful introduction notes, that in fact Levi “died of his knowledge” (10). I don’t think that the student of the Holocaust should come away with a newfound appreciation of the resiliency of the human spirit because doing so simply fits the event into a preconceived narrative that allows us to forget what the Holocaust actually was. Instead, the study of the Holocaust is an opportunity to question received ideas and ask whether we’ve been listening effectively to the voices of the past in the first place.