Timothy Burke provides would-be critics of Black Studies with a required reading list. Only required for those wishing to keep their day jobs at the Chronicle of Higher of Education.
Author: aiross
Use Scrible to Grade Web Based Assignments
I wish I had known about this when one of my classes was putting up their Wikipedia pages this semester, but in the course of searching for a better way of grading my blogging assignment for Modern Europe, I came across a nifty tool called Scrible. Scrible allows you to annotate webpages without converting them to a clunky pdf version (I tried to do this using Adobe Acrobat Pro and the resulting file was just huge). Basic annotation tools — notes, highlights, you can even change the text formatting — are all I need for grading, though the alignment between a note and its relevant text on the page could use some work. Scrible is in beta and comes with a free library of 125 MB for storing marked up pages, which is perfect for saving graded blogs to e-mail to students once they’re all done (which you can do straight from the Scrible toolbar). For any more research-oriented needs, Instapaper (for ease of access on the go) and Evernote (for keeping everything in one place) are clearly better solutions, but for this particular purpose it’s everything I could ask for.
Integrating IPad PDF Annotation with Zotero
Although I continue to advocate storing pretty much everything in Evernote — alongside efficient tagging and organization — I still really wanted to find a way to integrate annotating PDFs directly into my favored citation manager, Zotero. I’m hoping that I’ve hit on a solution.
1) I use the Zotero extension Zotfile to organize and rename attachments to Zotero entries into a folder on my desktop. The attachments are therefore links to local files, not files stored in the Zotero servers.
2) That folder is synced to the cloud — and my office PC — using SugarSync.
3) I open and annotate the PDF using GoodReader, which will then automatically sync the annotations with the files linked to the Zotero entry.
I had been using ZotFile’s “send to tablet” function, alongside iAnnotatePDF’s Aji Reader Service to push files back and forth from my tablet to my PC and then to both Zotero and the cloud. This new method avoids a number of problems that method entailed. First, everything is done without having to download individual files via the web or selecting individual files to sync and instead is done automatically. This ensures that I always have access to the files without worrying about finding the most recent version. It also means that I don’t have to be on my home network to update my files. Second, the files remain on my desktop in addition to the cloud and are automatically organized. Third, I avoid quickly exceeding Zotero’s limited free storage space.
I still also e-mail the annotated files to Evernote, since I also want to have all my notes in one place. But until Zotero includes a more robust note taking system, an integrated PDF viewer and/or an iPad app, this method seems to be the best way I’ve found to link annotated articles directly to their metadata.
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.
Blogging History
My Modern Europe students begin blogging history using historical newspapers and periodicals today. A list of topics and links to their pseudonymous blogs can be found here: http://aiross.wordpress.com/teaching/modern-europe-winter-2012/modern-europe-winter-2012-student-blogs/.
Interpreting 1848
I decided to try something a bit different with my Modern Europe course this semester by assigning three different surveys (Charles Breunig and Matthew Levinger’s The Revolutionary Era
This week we’re studying the 1848 Revolutions and our two textbook readings provide a really great moment of conflict that will open our discussion on Friday. Both Breunig and Levinger and Hobsbawm open their examination of 1848 with the same speech Alexis de Tocqueville delivered to the Chamber of Deputies on January 29, 1848.
Hobsbawm quotes a small bit of the speech: “We are sleeping on a volcano…Do you not see that the earth trembles anew? A wind blows, the storm is on the horizon.” Hobsbawm takes Tocqueville’s warning as representative of the thoughts of his compatriots. Tocqueville, he argues, “rose in the Chamber of Deputies to express sentiments which most Europeans shared.” European society realized that its foundation was readying to explode.
Even in that brief statement, however, Tocqueville’s question (“Do you not see…”) implies an exhortation to open the eyes. “You do not see,” Tocqueville indicates, “so let me show you.” The longer quote provided by Breunig and Levinger provide us with greater context and highlights the fact that Tocqueville spoke to convince others to his point of view, not to simply represent the common wisdom of the day:
I am told that there is no danger because there are no riots; I am told that, because there is no visible disorder on the surface of society, there is no revolution at hand. Gentlemen, permit me to say that I believe you are mistaken. True, there is no actual disorder; but it has entered deeply into men’s minds. See what is preparing itself amongst the working classes, who, I grant are at present quiet. No doubt they are not disturbed by political passions, properly so called, to the same extent that they have been — but can you not see that their passions, instead of political, have become social? Do you not see that they are gradually forming opinions and ideas which are destined not only to upset this or that law, ministry, or even form of government, but society itself, until it totters upon the foundations on which it rests today?…This, gentlemen, is my profound conviction: I believe that we are at this moment sleeping on a volcano. I am profoundly convinced of it… (Breunig and Levinger 270).
Although the rest of the Chamber may not believe it, the social order of the mid- nineteenth century stood on the precipice of disaster. “Tocqueville’s speech,” Breunig and Levinger explain, “was greeted with ironical cheers from the majority; no one took seriously his prophecy of catastrophe.” Early in 1848, Tocqueville’s warning went unheeded.
So either “everyone” was aware that Europe stood on the brink, or people were so unaware that they laughed when someone broached the issue. On Friday, we’ll try to figure out who’s argument is, in the end, more convincing.
Adam Smith on the Social Contract
Although they had read the exact same text I had, my students in Modern Europe seemed skeptical about my interpretation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Smith’s notion of the “Invisible Hand” of the market may be his most famous contribution to modern economic thought, but he also elaborates a role for the state in providing the necessary conditions for those free markets to emerge. In order to bring the point to our own time, I related what he said in our excerpt (from our primary source reader Perspectives from the Past
Smith:
The expence [sic] of defending the society, and that of supporting the dignity of the chief magistrate, are both laid out for the general benefit of the whole society. It is reasonable, therefore, that they should be defrayed by the general contribution of the whole society, all the different members contributing, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities (425).
Warren:
There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there – good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory… Now look. You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea – God Bless! Keep a Big Hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.
Smith actually mentions everything Warren does, but, then again, Adam Smith was a well known socialist.
P.S. Students, by the by, should feel free to comment.
Using Evernote with Kindle Books
Via CNet, I received $10 to use on Kindle books. I immediately realized that I could use a copy of Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Russian Revolution 
Productivity Helpers
I’ve recently started reading both ProfHacker and GradHacker because I’m obsessed with trying out new digital research tools (a tendency not actually good for productivity, it should be said). Today, Gradhacker provides a list of productivity helpers. I’m particularly glad I checked out the post since, after clicking on the “Surviving the Lit Review” link (I thought it may be useful for the course I’m teaching this year requiring undergraduates to write a short review essay themselves, I cam across this fantastic post explaining how one can use Skim, a pdf annotator and viewer, with Scrivener, a writing program. I have only recently started using both programs; both are excellent and I’m excited to try out a method of using them together.
Lessons from the History of Sexuality
Timothy Burke at Swarthmore shows why the history of sexuality is relevant to understanding the flaws contemporary political discourse on gay marriage. He focuses on man of the hour Rick Santorum as a proxy for culturally conservative arguments, but it’s worthing noting that many gay marriage proponents make similarly ahistorical claims about the universality of monogamous marriage, sometimes reifying it into a type of biological need every person must indeed feel. For instance, Andrew Sullivan not only rhetorically eliminates any future for the marriageless, but associates the desire to join the institution with the onset of puberty:
As a child, when I thought of the future, all I could see was black. I wasn’t miserable or depressed. I was a cheerful boy, as happy playing with my posse of male friends in elementary school as I was when I would occasionally take a day by myself in the woodlands that surrounded the small town I grew up in. But when I thought of the distant future, of what I would do and be as a grown-up, there was a blank. I simply didn’t know how I would live, where I would live, who I could live with. I knew one thing only: I couldn’t be like my dad. For some reason, I knew somewhere deep down that I couldn’t have a marriage like my parents…
And when puberty struck and I realized I might be “one of them,” I turned inward. It was a strange feeling—both the exhilaration of sexual desire and the simultaneous, soul-splintering panic that I was going to have to live alone my whole life, lying or euphemizing, concocting some public veneer to hide a private shame.
For Sullivan, sexuality and marriage are intimately linked because one can only fully appreciate and accept the former so long as one has access to the latter. Such arguments in favor of gay marriage are just as one dimensional as those against it because they ascribe marriage to an essentialist urge that ignores the processes through which the institution developed as well as the social, political, and cultural pressures that made it seem so central and eternal in the first place.