Katrina Gulliver

I finally recorded the first episode of my podcast series, Cities in History. You can subscribe to the feed here http://feeds.feedburner.com/citiesinhistory and I'll announce new episodes on twitter @citiesinhistory.

The first episode is just a brief introduction, and in the course of the series I plan to discuss various aspects of what it means to study urban history. I will also look at the histories of particular cities - and if you have any requests or suggestions, please send them along!

Being quite new at this, I hope I'll improve with practice when it comes to recording them!

 

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Here are a few more people you might like to follow on the twitter:

@jamessmithies
@EHChalus - Elaine Chalus
@AmericanHistFF
@elipousson
@wcaleb - Caleb McDaniel
@carolineld
@unmodern - E. Weiskott
@Mylynka
@GeorgianWomen
@puesoccurrences
@connecthistory
@earlymodernnow
@lincolnmullen
@materialculture
@stakats
@MedievalWorld
@seth_denbo
@zexypuff
@history_punk
@MedievalWall
@KathrynTomasek
@kel_hig

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This piece, from the Chronicle of Higher Education, discusses the pitfalls of being seen as too attractive, by students and colleagues. But I was most interested by the first comment underneath. In response to the suggestion that professors should wear a suit and heels, the commenter says they are "there to teach", not to "look hot", and that the suggestion is "just offensive to anybody who takes the life of the mind seriously". While I agree that professors' main aim should not be to serve as a decorative object in the classroom, I don't see why wearing a suit should be a problem. Indeed, this earlier article shows how one professor found benefits to wearing a suit daily. I'm very curious where this idea that dressing smartly is incompatible with "a life of the mind" has come from - as I mentioned in my post a few days ago. It's evidently a relatively recent step: photos of professors from the first half of the twentieth century show them dressed much as bankers or lawyers of the same period (possibly with more tweed in evidence!). Does anyone seriously think Wittgenstein wasn't leading a life of the mind because he was wearing a three-piece suit?

As well as student perceptions, the impression given to the public at large is something of which some academics seem to be oblivious. We roll our eyes at the "clueless" who think we only work 6 hours a week and have summers off, but if you're going to work in an outfit most professionals would wear on their days off, you might be contributing to the problem. I never cease to be amazed at academics' willingness to undermine themselves (and academe in general) by playing into public stereotypes of professors as layabouts who don't really earn their (in the public imagination) overinflated salaries. I appreciate that avoiding a corporate lifestyle is something that drew many of us into academia, but if you're complaining about university education being undervalued, then being seen to be in your office during business hours wearing something close to professional attire might not be such a bad place to start.

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I don't normally post reviews here, but I finished this book yesterday and felt I had to share. I had never read anything by Martha Sandweiss, until I saw a review of this book which also allowed me to download and read the introduction. I was hooked, and immediately ordered it from Amazon.

I also just discovered that Sandweiss wrote a few entries for Penguin's blog, which you can read here http://us.penguingroup.com/static/html/blogs/guest-author/passing-strange-mar...

Passing Strange is about racial passing, in a different direction from the one most historians will be familiar with. In this case, a white man passed as African American in order to marry a black woman. Clarence King's behaviour seems bizarre and incredible, as is the fact that no historian has lit onto this story before. What I admired about Sandweiss' writing was that she did not attempt to psychoanalyse King: she reported the facts as he and his friends recorded them in their (evidently copious) correspondences, without attempting to diagnose or pathologise his behaviour. This was refreshing, as another author could so easily have turned the story into an exploration of "multiple personality disorder" or other pop-psychology post-hoc diagnoses.

The detail with which she evokes not just King's well-documented life as a prominent scientist, but the world from which his Ada King came, made me think a lot about how I write history. I am not an Americanist, and I don't work on this period. But Sandweiss' literary style gave me much to ponder. I have often felt constrained in academic texts to write in a way that I feel is probably dull, but I have been so terrified of veering off the track into the pop-history style of "as he looked out the window, Charles Dickens coughed twice and thought about what he would have for breakfast" (etc), where the author claims inside knowledge of historical actors. As a reader, that kind of thing really annoys me, so my writing goes perhaps too far the other way, into empirical detachment. I engage with other academics about the subject, but don't enter so much into a conversation with the subject him- or her- self.

I noted Sandweiss' judicious use of "perhaps" and "might" - she didn't presume to tell readers what anyone was thinking or feeling, but to illustrate so carefully their world so that her suppositions seem logical, that any human being in such circumstances could plausibly feel or respond in such a way. I devoured this book, and highly recommend it to anyone with an interest in the past. For urban historians, this is also a great book for its treatment of life (at different social levels) in New York in the Gilded Age.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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This is based on my Field Notes. (I know, I know, I'm late to the game with the wordles - but I only used an ipod for the first time two weeks ago!)

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The issue of how far to stray from one's doctoral research (now known as my forthcoming book) is something I have given a lot of thought to. Partly because I chose to head off into a very different direction with my next (current) project.

A few historians, wiser than myself, have discussed the issue. This week Notorious, PhD brought in the Fox and Hedgehog analogy - parts 1 and 2. The idea is that the fox can do many things, while the hedgehog does one thing and does it well. The historical fox changes period, or region, as they move from project to project, while the hedgehog becomes a focused expert on one specific place in time.

For a variety of reasons, I (perhaps naively) never thought of my doctoral work as my magnum opus. Still less that I would be constrained to spend the rest of my career drilling ever deeper into one postage-stamp sized piece of global history. I thought of it more as an apprentice piece in historical training. Much as an apprentice furniture maker might make a beautifully turned chair as his or her apprentice piece, but this does not prevent him or her accepting a commission the following day to make a Welsh dresser.

So I have been impressed rather than skeptical when a big-name professor writes a book on a new field. Since we all originally wrote a dissertation from scratch in 3 years, why shouldn't someone who has completed that training be able to do it again in another area? (or indeed, take less than 3 years, since they have developed better research skills and possibly have access to research assistants). I rather take the view that any trained historian should be able to turn their focus to historical study of anything, at any time (the main limitation being language barriers).

But there is resistance from some quarters (at least in the English-speaking academic world) to people who seem to stray too far from what their PhD "allows" them to research. There are indeed people whose entire careers seem to be reiterations of their doctoral work, with their research on Silk Weavers in Podunk County, 1850-1855 being complemented by the later work, Silk Weavers in Podunk County, 1855-1860, and perhaps a broader study, like Silk Weavers in the Podunk Valley in the Nineteenth Century. This is contrasted by the expectation in Germany, where the habilitation (essentially, second PhD that qualifies someone for a university position) has to be on a markedly different area from the doctoral work.

My Masters research was on people going native, and their representations in culture. My PhD was about women in East Asia, and the nature of modernity. What I am looking at now still focuses on modernity, in the urban setting, and the nature of culture-genesis in colonial sites. I think of myself as a cultural historian, and one thing these projects clearly have in common is the idea of cultural exchange and influence. "Fusion" history, you might say! (unfortunately, not that many jobs seem to be going for professors of historical fusion...).

I am still too young in the game to know whether I made an inspired career choice or a colossal error in choosing the path I did. But I absolutely love what I am researching now, and it makes me happy. What has become most clear to me as I look through my research notes, and find myself using things I wrote down years ago - not because they were pertinent to the project at the time, but because somehow they seemed relevant and worth keeping - is that I am neither a hedgehog or a fox. I am a squirrel. I seem to have a habit of finding useful sources and connected ideas, and putting them somewhere safe for me to go back to in the winter.

This was me as a baby.

 (image from cuteoverload.com)

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Academic dress - or rather, the Bermuda triangle of style that is most faculty lounges. The other day I was speaking to Fellow Female Academic, and she told me that when she started out, she was trying NOT to look stylish, from the idea that she could come across as too frivolous, that she should be leading a serious, ascetic, life of the mind (this is not a view that FFA still holds, mind, and she is very elegant). But it intrigued me, as I had never thought that way myself - nor for a moment considered that the shabby folks I saw were consciously operating under such a belief.

From when I started my Masters (indeed, the latter stages of my undergrad) I tended to wear jackets and skirts to class, rather than jeans and t-shirts. During my PhD, when I had no classes to attend, I'll admit I didn't make too much of an effort to look fashion-forward just to get to the library. But I dressed for conferences. Once I landed a full-time job, I started wearing make-up daily. I would never teach a class, or present a conference paper, in jeans. I had always operated from the view that attitudes are very gendered, and as a young woman there is a greater risk of undermining oneself by appearing too casual (or indeed too young, dressing like a kid in ponytail, jeans and sneakers). As far as I am aware, I have never been judged frivolous for wearing lipstick or high heels to academic events (but I can't know for sure).

The people who get away with being the worst dressed are generally both senior and male (although there are a few women who yield to nobody in their sloppy personal appearance). I'm not talking "somewhat dowdy", but the extreme of poor dressing that is achieved only by academics and the homeless. When I see someone show up at a seminar in torn clothing (!), dirty tracksuit pants, a nylon fleece...I do judge them, I admit it. I don't admire their disregard for material matters, but rather think they are pretty disrespectful to their colleagues to not dress a little better than they would to shamble down the road to Blockbuster (something tells me these people don't have much of a social life, either). FFA said that she changed her view based on the logic that you wouldn't trust a lawyer or a doctor who couldn't dress themselves, and academics should be no different. Looking shabby is not some badge of honour, it's a sign of laziness and incompetence.

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Last Thursday and Friday, I was co-organiser of a conference, "Cityscapes in History: Creating the Urban Experience". My colleague Heléna Tóth and I hosted 29 panelists plus 4 keynote speakers at the Center for Advanced Studies here in Munich. Having first had the idea for the conference last October, it has felt like a sprint to get everything organised, from the original CFP to the timing of the coffee breaks, and I'm still recovering!

We kicked off the event with a walking tour of the city last Wednesday afternoon, which we guided ourselves, and it was fun showing people around our new home, despite the rain.

The conference went better than I could have hoped, and our plans to generate interdisciplinary conversation seem to have succeeded. I learned a lot from all the presentations I saw, including Manan Ahmed (of Chapati Mystery) who spoke about digitising maps and retaining cultural information. So much was packed into the two days, I'm still marveling that we got so many great participants to come from all over the world. We even had the famous Lucy Inglis of Georgian London showing her work on where the different ethnic groups lived in the 1700s.

Our keynote speakers were very generous, Lizabeth Cohen spoke about being a historian who wanted to use architectural and landscape studies in her own work (which was particularly relevant and informative for me); Nicholas Temple spoke about religious space in all kinds of forms (with thought-provoking resonances); Richard Dennis captured the cultural relevance of modern urban life with the "architecture of hurry"; and Philip Ethington gave us a whirlwind history of Los Angeles, from megafauna to Richard Nixon, showing that perhaps some things do stay the same ;)

We are very grateful to Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and the CAS for their funding and support. We were particularly spoiled with the catering, which included hot food for lunch and plum cake for afternoon tea!

Heléna and I will be editing a volume based on the conference, and I'll update here with how that progresses.

 

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Back in the mists of time when I started a blog (long since gone), I was some kind of animal in an ecosystem (what happened to that, eh?) and there was a different culture. I have commented before that the disappearance of the easy trackback system from blogger seems to have been one instrument in killing the collegiality that seemed to exist (I have yet to figure out how to do trackback - if it's even possible from posterous - and going to everyone else's site and commenting "I added a link to you!!" is a bit laborious).

Laura McKenna summed up the process well in this post.

What has struck me recently is even how many well-known academic blogs have shuttered. So I decided to have a look back at the Cliopatria award winners. How many of them are still around?

Awards were first given for 2005, announced at the AHA in January 2006 (I got to collect the certificate on behalf of Frog in a Well - we were "best group blog").

Other winners that year were Blog Them Out of the Stone Age and BibliOdyssey, Old is the New New and Easily Distracted (all still going strong), and Rhine River, which became Europe Endless, and ceased updating in 2009.

Of the winners for 2006, Participant Historian seems to have folded in December of that year. AxisofEvelKnievel was last updated in 2008, William Turkel shuttered Digital History Hacks (with an explanation and link to his new site) the Civil Warriors are still going, and Chris Bray is still contributing to Cliopatria.

From 2007, Timothy Burke won again (for Easily Distracted), Steamboats are Ruining Everything is still going, Civil War Memory moved but is still alive, Religion in American History, yep, In the Middle yes, and Errol Morris won for a series in the New York Times - which, as of this writing, is still in publication.

From 2008, Wynken de Worde - not sure, dormant since January of this year. Zunguzungu, Edge of the American West and Walking the Berkshires are still active, as are two of my most favouritest blogs, Northwest History and Tenured Radical.

It seems a little early to prognosticate of the fate of the winners announced at the last AHA, who are listed here.

Obviously, people's lives change, they move on (my theory of where all the bloggers went from 5-10 years ago was that they started having children...). In academia, people have become more conscious of what they post online, I think a few public cases have revealed that there is no real anonymity on the internet, so there are fewer no-holds-barred academic blogs than there used to be. Time was, that (some) people seemed to think of their site as somehow semi-private, and that it was immoral or snooping for, say, a Search Committee member to google a candidate or read their site. That attitude has faded away, and a recognition that you will be judged by your site I think led a number of people to just give it up all together. (In history there seems to be a digital divide, between those who see online presence as a useful asset for their careers, and those who can barely handle email).

Of all the bloggers I miss, I have lamented the absence of Invisible Adjunct. She never chose to reveal her true identity, but I hope she found success.

 

 

 

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The New York Times, in between giving advice on shopping for a vacation home in Croatia and pet furniture, held a debate on removing academic tenure.

Which prompted immediate responses. Dean Dad, at Confessions of a Community College Dean gets right to the point.

Meanwhile, over at the Atlantic, Megan McCardle thinks tenure was a good idea at one point, but can't be defended now. (Rebuttal from Jonathan Rees)

I can see some arguments on both sides. Tenure was established by, and for, white men who in many cases were perpetuating the kind of system that women and faculty members of colour were trying to break into (and which persists, in not-so-small pockets of academia too).

But the security of a tenure system is what allowed members of those groups to gain (and maintain) their foothold in academia. To some scholars of the old guard, tenuring women would have seemed an outrageous detournement!

In university systems where tenure does not exist (or the UK, which has had a "defacto" tenure system - see the discussions on recent dismissals - attempted an otherwise - of senior faculty at KCL for some views on how that's worked out), the culture is different. Better? worse? I don't know.

EDITED: after our comment exchange below, Heinrich forwarded me a link to Brian Leiter's take on the tenure issue. With this, I find myself in total agreement. Particularly with his two points about the current weaknesses of the US system: Inadequate protection and support for the untenured, and unwillingness to dismiss the tenured even for good reason.

This is a key point - the few academics, who are a minority but who make the news for outrageous behaviour end up swaying attitudes about the concept of tenure, and the public perception that it is a guaranteed job for life for people who behave like jackasses. Here some people seem to equate tenure with free speech, too - see Churchill, Ward. I have witnessed quite active debates over what "academic freedom" means; whether simply the right to research controversial topics, or the right to teach any subject matter, in any form, and speak out on any issue under the sun. Some clarification from the AAUP would really help - academic freedom should mean freedom to pursue academic research, not freedom to do absolutely anything because you are an academic.

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As we try to engage with the public and encourage greater interest in history, perhaps we need a new tv show: Top Historian

It could be like Top Chef, with each of the contestants given a number of manuscripts or objects, and they have a fixed amount of time to research them, and present an article or a museum display for the judges. 

Perhaps I should pitch this to The History Channel? What do you think?

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Thomas Bender has written a very instructive essay, Historians in Public. In it, he points out that academics used to be much better represented in mainstream publications, and more often wrote or presented to the general public than they do now. As he points out: "While the early graduate schools were committed to advanced research, they sought to educate civic leaders, not future academics", reminding us that both Woodrow Wilson and Henry Cabot Lodge held history doctorates. He also mentions something I hadn't known, that Frederick Jackson Turner first advanced his Frontier Thesis not in an academic essay but in a public address at the Chicago World's Fair. 

Bender further refers to William James' (strikingly prescient) concerns about the overspecialisation of academia. Over 100 years ago, when the degree was just starting to become common in English-speaking academia, James recognised the dangers of overvaluing the PhD, and overproducing them. Although his concern was primarily those who failed to pass the degree, a similar concern could be expressed today for many who pass but are unable to find academic employment:

We of the university faculties are responsible for deliberately creating this new class of American social failures, and heavy is the responsibility. We advertise our "schools" and send out our degree-requirements, knowing well that aspirants of all sorts will be attracted, and at the same time we set a standard which intends to pass no man who has not native intellectual distinction. We know that there is no test, however absurd, by which, if a title or decoration, a public badge or mark, were to be won by it, some weakly suggestible or hauntable persons would not feel challenged, and remain unhappy if they went without it. We dangle our three magic letters before the eyes of these predestined victims, and they swarm to us like moths to an electric light. They come at a time when failure can no longer be repaired easily and when the wounds it leaves are permanent; and we say deliberately that mere work faithfully performed, as they perform it, will not by itself save them, they must in addition put in evidence the one thing they have not got, namely this quality of intellectual distinction. Occasionally, out of sheer human pity, we ignore our high and mighty standard and pass them. Usually, however, the standard, and not the candidate, commands our fidelity. The result is caprice, majorities of one on the jury, and on the whole a confession that our pretensions about the degree cannot be lived up to consistently. Thus, partiality in the favored cases; in the unfavored, blood on our hands; and in both a bad conscience,--are the results of our administration.

- William James, "The PhD Octopus", Harvard Monthly, March 1903. Full text

But Bender's thoughts on public engagement are particularly relevant at a time when academics everywhere are having to defend themselves against funding cuts and more often demonstrate the "relevance" or "impact" of their research to the general economy. 

I can see two factors (at least) that have conspired to create the current situation. The first is a valuing of obscurantism in academic writing (which makes it unmarketable to the lay reader), and an academic reward system that does not value that type of public outreach, and indeed disdains those who write "mass market" work. The second is perhaps a reaction to the first, and that is that editors of mainstream publications will visibly shudder when offered an article "based on PhD research" - several have told me quite frankly that they don't want to look at submissions from academics because they tend to be unreadable. If we have become so rarified in our specialisations, can we be surprised if our role of communicating history to the public has been usurped by journalists? 

While I can think of a number of high-profile historians who write for mainstream publications - Jill Lepore, Simon Schama, Victor Davis Hanson, Gil Troy, among others - the vast majority don't. Have we lost sight of the public as an audience as we focus our research? It does seem to be the case that the "educated layman" is a market not always covered in the current media, but with the branching out of digital opportunities, there should be avenues for interested readers and historians to connect. I hope so. 

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From An historical and statistical account of New South Wales By John Dunmore Lang (1852)

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Then you are not alone. While you wait, read this piece where Brad Lawrence talks about "Book Proposals, Agents, and the Art of Not Sitting on Your Ass Waiting for the Phone to Ring". 

(watch the video, it's amusing)

 

 

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A few years ago, I participated in the Small World experiment being conducted online by Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz. I did not succeed in reaching my targets, although I made a sincere effort. It was around the time that I was a member of an early social networking site called sixdegrees, which unfortunately became extinct after a short time (I bet they’re looking at facebook now and kicking themselves....).

I was wondering if anyone had tried running such an experiment since the advent of twitter? The targets wouldn’t have to be twitter users, but I think it could help people get through several of the steps faster (particularly with others retweeting the message). Do my connexions on twitter count, for the purposes of the Small Word thesis? I don’t know - to be sure, most of my Twitter list are people I have not met in real life, but is that different from other forms of social networking online? Of course it’s not the same as a close friendship, but are these connexions less “real” than having spoken for five minutes and exchanged business cards at a cocktail party - the kind of loose links that by my understanding the Six Degrees concept depends on?

Then I started thinking about applying the Six Degrees concept in history. Could it be valid, for instance, in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world? Or the nineteenth-century British empire? There’s been research on kinship networks, particularly among trade families across the Atlantic, and Benjamin Franklin’s diaries demonstrated the links among Americans in London. However, there also seems to be a sense in which affective community links are perceived as, if not entirely imaginary, then at least somewhat invented. The fact that they were in some cases not reciprocated is another element: French colonists in Louisiana wrote many more letters “home” than they received back; and while a colonist would read a Metropolitan newspaper (in fact they hungered for regular updates of goings-on in the capital), the reverse was unlikely to be true.[1]

Many of you are no doubt familiar with Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. He describes the development of nationalism, and a sense of community sympathy among otherwise disparate groups who shared a written language. Indeed, it was through written communication (and receipt of newspapers, magazines, etc) that people in colonial sites still felt connected to not only the metropole but other sites in the empire. As Kirsten McKenzie has shown, those networks were often strengthened by the transfer of colonial administrators between different locations, meaning that these communities were not entirely “imagined” either: officials in the Cape Colony, or Jamaica, or New South Wales, or Nova Scotia knew each other personally.[2]

Obviously the notion of our networked connectedness came out of 1920s social theory, and it’s hard to believe that people a hundred years prior necessarily conceived of things in that way. On the other hand, a world in which personal letters of introduction were commonly used when someone travelled to a new place meant that such networks obviously did exist (and this is leaving aside the institutional networks of trust that allowed such financial instruments as letters of credit to work internationally).

While I look at the development of community identity in my current research, I would be interested to hear suggestions or thoughts on the applicability of the small world ideas to earlier periods. 

 

[1]Shannon Lee Dawdy, Building the Devil’s Empire, (Chicago: 2008)

[2]Kirsten McKenzie, Scandal in the Colonies: Sydney and Cape Town, 1800-1850, (Melbourne: 2004); see also David Lambert and Alan Lester, Colonial Lives Across the British Empire: Imperial Careering in the Long Nineteenth Century, (Cambridge: 2006).

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I've scooped up a few more twitterstorians, follow them!

@inactinique - Frédéric Clavert

@historyagenda

@drnaomi - Naomi Parry

@twaklin

@vdhanson - Victor Davis Hanson

@sommecourt - Paul Reed

@historyinanhour - Rupert Colley

@jordanmposs - Jordan Poss

@guillaumeratel - Guillaume Ratel

 

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Scuttlebutt, bush telegraph, radio bemba, the rumour mill: this tends to be how we hear first that someone is leaving, or has been hired by another university. That would make sense for friends and close colleagues, but even for people at great distance, we end up getting third hand information about who is going where, and why. Unless you are close enough to someone to have seen their facebook updates, or in the department doing the hiring, you're unlikely to otherwise have a clue about who is moving departments next year.

Those of you who have braved the academic job market in recent years will be familiar with the various job wikis (many hosted at http://academicjobs.wikia.com/ - a lot scattered elsewhere on the web).These are examples of crowdsourcing, where many participants add to the pool of information. Of course, there is sometimes disinformation broadcast on the wiki - whether malicious or mistaken.The general cloak of secrecy allows a lot of disinformation to flourish, as incorrect assertions are rarely corrected - and almost never by anyone speaking with authority (the candidate in question, or a member of the search committee).

In the UK, where the period from application deadline to hire is often something like a month (with the job offer coming within 24 hours of the interview), there is not a long time in which people are required (or try) to keep a lid on the process. Not to mention that it's common to meet the other candidates at the interview - there is no expectation that one's job search is confidential, from the other applicants or anyone else. In North America and elsewhere, where a search can lurch on for months - that's a lot of time for dust to be kicked up and gossip to swirl among it. In Germany, it is common for people to advertise not only the new job they have accepted, but offers that they declined. I'm not sure that level of transparency would take off in the English-speaking world, but it's an interesting comparator to have when examining the manic paranoia that seems to accompany the job market in some places.

While some universities make announcements about new hires (in history, ads are placed in Perspectives), most don't. Big splash announcements tend to be limited to senior hires, and even then will sometimes only show up on institutional websites months after the fact - and that's at the hiring end. The departed department often retains faculty profiles on their site for those long gone, and not just those who took jobs elsewhere. I learned never to rely on a faculty directory for up to date information after the mortifying experience of writing to a scholar and receiving a very sweet note from his widow, telling me he had passed away years before...!

For philosophy, the Leiter Report does a good job of keeping the community up to date with moves. But I'm not aware of anything like that in history or other humanities. (It depends on first having a website that a critical mass of people in the field visit, and I'm not sure we do). This also offers a service for PhD students in throwing a little daylight into the shadows of placement rates, which are typically vague and anecdotal otherwise.

Now, you may be asking why you should care. Currently, few historians have a personal web page. When I search for someone online, I am lucky if the first result is their departmental website. But frequently the departmental site that comes up is the one of their grad school, in which they are still listed as a PhD student despite graduating five years ago, or the school where they spent a year as a VAP some time in the 1990s. And of course the listed email addresses are long since out of service. We all know the departmental pages that list someone's book as "forthcoming for 1998", and faculty info is no more likely to be current. How hard should it be to find other academics - perhaps to suggest a collaboration, or invite them to participate in a symposium? If you find you are hidden under the weeds and rocks of the google pond, make your profile shiny so we can see you!

Back to the transfers - unlike the Major League draft, there is no wholesale publicity of who is going where (although I bet that would lift viewership on historians.tv!). I was recently introduced to this section of Inside HigherEd which is a directory of people changing jobs. It seems to be little-used, and mostly by those being promoted within the same institution. Perhaps History News Network could start keeping track of historians on the move? They're the only site I can think of with the visitor volume that might be able to manage it.

 

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These gems are from this slideshow of vintage advertising. The final frame is disturbingly paedophilic, and through the others a general theme of women belong in the kitchen, women can't drive, etc, prevails. But these two struck me as particularly outrageous, even for back then.

Upset your husband (by not testing the coffee?) and he'll discipline you...

And this - what the hell? I don't even understand what's going on (or how it was supposed to sell a product).

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