Harvard Faculty Research Articles

Attack by a Turkey: Learning to Write History from Bernard Bailyn

Attack by a Turkey: Learning to Write History from Bernard Bailyn

Bernard Bailyn on the Craft and Art of Historical Writing

Bernard Bailyn on the Craft and Art of Historical Writing

BENJAMIN SACHS INTERVIEWED BY MARTHA MINOW

BENJAMIN SACHS INTERVIEWED BY MARTHA MINOW

Object Lessons: The Bauhaus and Harvard ed. by Laura Muir

Reviewed by: Object Lessons: The Bauhaus and Harvard ed. by Laura Muir Kathleen James-Chakraborty Object Lessons: The Bauhaus and Harvard. Edited by Laura Muir. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums. Pp. 287. Cloth $45.00. ISBN 9780300254167. The centennial of the Bauhaus in 2019 was marked by a wide-ranging array of events that circled the globe and considered the experimental school of art, architecture, and design from almost every conceivable angle. Not surprisingly, Harvard University hosted an exhibition and related events, including tours and workshops, that introduced the Bauhaus and its premises to a new generation of Harvard students. In part because key figures associated with the Bauhaus, including its founding director Walter Gropius, eventually taught and also built at Harvard, the collections of its Busch-Riesinger Museum include the most impressive holdings of Bauhaus-related material located outside of Germany. The continued strength of Harvard as a center of Bauhaus-related research is on impressive display in Object Lessons: The Bauhaus and Harvard, which also documents many of the Bauhaus-related activities staged at the university across 2019. Art history and university publicity increasingly dovetail in inward-facing celebrations of the contribution a particular institution has made to an important historical [End Page 388] phenomenon, but Harvard can certainly be excused for gathering together its faculty, the staff of its museums, and those who have been affiliated with one or the other as doctoral students or curatorial fellows. This lavishly produced volume is much more than a tastefully designed object. In addition to the color plates documenting the extent of the 2019 programming as well as the breadth of the Busch-Reisinger Museum's holdings, thirteen essays explore those collections and the pedagogic uses to which current Harvard faculty put them in the anniversary year. The scholarly accounts reflect upon the role that the Bauhaus has played at Harvard, detail the conservation of the university's Bauhaus heritage, and reassess objects that are part of that heritage. An added plus is the recreation of the brochure published by the Harvard Society of Contemporary Art to accompany the Bauhaus exhibition it opened in December 1930, three years before the school closed and seven before Gropius accepted an appointment to teach at Harvard. In her opening essay, Laura Muir recounts Harvard's history of displaying and collecting Bauhaus material since this early and auspicious beginning. The challenges posed by aspects of that heritage are described by Robert Wiesenberger, Kate Smith, and Teri Tensick in essays that focus on Herbert Bayer's murals, which eventually had to be removed from the daily lives of the students living and eating in the Graduate Center, in order to conserve a rather unwieldy work of art. Unfortunately, the student dining hall turned out not to be the most appropriate setting for a major work of modern art! Harvard's formidable reputation as the incubator of some of the best current thinking about the Bauhaus is on display with thoughtful essays by Robin Schuldenfrei, Annie Bourneuf, Jordan Troeller, and Jeffrey Saletnik focusing on works with which they probably first became familiar as students. That three of these essays address the work of women—Lucia Moholy (wife of faculty member László Moholy-Nagy), Otti Berger (a Bauhaus student), and Ruth Asawa (a student of Josef Albers, who studied and taught at the Bauhaus)—demonstrates how far scholarship in the field has moved from its original focus on the school's masters. Nor are these the only contributions that, like much of the best recent Bauhaus-related scholarship, focus on women. The standout essay of the volume, by Kristie La, currently a doctoral student at Harvard, provides a thoughtful comparison of the way in which Hannah Höch, who did not study at the Bauhaus, and Marianne Brandt, who did, made use of African, Asian, and other "exotic" imagery in their photomontages. In a finely nuanced evaluation that also reminds us that the school was not consistently the most progressive locus of the German art world at the time, she argues "that Höch's and Brandt's montages diverge in their mobilization of popular photographic representations of women and the Other, and, as a result...

Despairing of Despair, Living for Today and the Day after Tomorrow: Reflections on Naoko Saito'sAmerican Philosophy in Translation

Despairing of Despair, Living for Today and the Day after Tomorrow: Reflections on Naoko Saito's<i>American Philosophy in Translation</i>

The Myth of the Amateur: A History of College Athletic Scholarships

Amateurism in American college athletics never existed. From the earliest intercollegiate sports contests in the middle of the nineteenth century, athletes were compensated. The payment might have come as money, prizes, food, tuition, or in other forms, but it was always there. Within a decade of the initial competitions, coaches were paid to lead teams, often earning more for seasonal work than full-time professors or even college presidents made in a year. The myth of a pristine era when American college students played competitive sport for the sheer joy of participation never existed, but it did create an obvious discrepancy between that ideal and the professional reality that continues today.As with his other works, Ronald A. Smith exhibits mastery of the wonderful heritage and rich hypocrisy associated with the history of college sports. In The Myth of the Amateur, Smith uses an array of primary resources to trace the concept of amateurism on the American campus from its origins as an imitator of a faulty British model through more than a century and a half of often contradictory reform efforts. He organizes the book into seventeen chapters, addressing prominent issues of amateurism chronologically while placing topics within the broader context of subsequent events. Those topics include scholarships, training tables, athletic dorms, significant reports and meetings, women's sports, legal challenges, and others. Smith takes the reader from the earliest amateurism controversies of college sport in the middle of the nineteenth century to the name, image, and likeness (NIL) debates of the early decades of the twenty-first century.American colleges espousing amateurism while practicing professionalism is the foundation for the book. British upper classes created the notion of amateurism in the nineteenth century—essentially the idea that sport should be undertaken only for the love of the endeavor—because they did not want to participate with or compete against those considered socially beneath them. That this concept was attributed to a nonexistent ancient Greek ideal only made a dubious proposition worse because, as the gospel of so-called amateur sport spread, it assumed a moral superiority to professionalism in the minds of many. A parallel to the American college sports amateurism debate can be seen with the modern Olympic movement. Even if amateurism was historically held in higher esteem than professionalism, Smith points out that the aristocratic British model of sport had little chance of taking hold in a young America seething with the ideals of freedom and equality of opportunity. College leaders might preach the noble notion of sport for the sake of sport, but most also wanted to win, and they were usually willing to bend their principles in that pursuit.When Harvard rowed against Yale in 1852 at New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee in America's first intercollegiate athletic contest, the crew members were treated to an eight-day expenses-paid vacation for the event. Before the end of the Civil War, Yale students hired William Wood to coach their rowers in a successful effort to break Harvard's winning streak in the regatta. By 1905, Harvard was paying alum Bill Reid $7,000 to coach the Crimson football squad, a sum significantly higher than the salary of a US senator and twice what most Harvard faculty earned. Virtually every college compensated athletes, whether paying them directly, establishing training tables and dorms for athletes, or offering athletic scholarships.All those examples violated standards of amateurism, elicited consistently contradictory responses from college sport leaders, and created an atmosphere of reform that led to the formation of conferences and eventually a national governing body (NCAA) for big-time college sports. Smith's research shows that organized efforts to promote amateurism and constrain compensation have yielded mixed results at best.The chapter on summer baseball is telling. Starting in the 1870s and continuing well into the twentieth century, it was common for college athletes to earn money playing baseball in the summer. Some were paid outright, and others played at resorts for free room and board and a stipend. Either instance violated the code of amateurism, so players resorted to using fake names, which in turn led to frequent challenges to eligibility and charges of cheating. In a terrific overview that mentions prominent proponents of American amateur sport of the era, Smith summarizes the ineffectual efforts to curb summer baseball compensation. After decades of debate, the issue fizzled out in the late 1950s when the NCAA allowed participation in sanctioned leagues. The book is full of similar examples, told in compelling fashion.Ron Smith is a preeminent historian of American college sports, and The Myth of the Amateur should be an immediate read for any serious study of the topic.

Shattering Silences: Dictions, Contradictions, and Ethnic Studies at the Crossroads

The denial of tenure at Harvard to Lorgia García-Peña is a defeat for academic excellence and for social justice. Yet the mechanisms deployed to enact it are so transparently illegitimate that it holds the potential to be the kind of short-term defeat that points the way toward long-term victory in the future. The tenure denial is an insult and an injury that demands a collective response from antiracist and decolonial scholars. Turning indignation into action requires receiving the message sent by Harvard not as it was intended, as a warning to other scholars against walking down the trail blazed by García-Peña, but instead as a prompt toward the opposite conclusion, to choose to follow in her footsteps. Her dismissal from the Harvard faculty can be one of those moments in history when repression goes too far, becomes too transparent, compromises its own credibility, and comes back to haunt its perpetrators. This can become a watershed moment for the field of ethnic studies and the constituencies to which it is accountable if ethnic studies teachers and students analyze, interpret, and build on it in the right ways.

Author rights and the Harvard open access policies: a response to Patrick Alexander

In his opinion piece criticizing the open access (OA) policies at Harvard University, Patrick Alexander makes several factual errors about the policies themselves and Harvard’s experience under them. In response, I discuss several relevant facts about Harvard OA policies, among them that the policies were adopted by faculty votes, not imposed by administrators; that under the policies, faculty only grant Harvard nonexclusive rights to new faculty articles, not exclusive rights or full copyright; that the policy-created Harvard OA license is merely a default that authors can easily waive for any given article; that the policies do not hinder Harvard faculty in publishing and do not limit their freedom to publish in the venues of their choice; and that the policies give Harvard faculty more rights, not fewer rights, over their own work than they typically get from their publishing contracts.

Conscription and the Color Line: Rawls, Race and Vietnam

This article revisits one of John Rawls's rare forays into activist politics, his proposal presented to the Harvard faculty, calling for a denunciation of the “2-S” system of student deferments from conscription. In little-studied archival papers, Rawls argued that the draft both exposed “background” structural racial injustice and constituted a burdening of black Americans that violated the norms of fair cooperation. Rather than obscuring racial injustice and focusing exclusively on economic inequality, as Charles Mills has claimed, Rawls rejected the ascendant conservative views that naturalized black poverty or else attributed it to cultural pathologies in black families. Thus Rawls found nothing illicit in taking the position of a disadvantaged racial group as a relevant comparison when applying his ideal theory to nonideal circumstances. However, I contend in this article that Rawls's account of political philosophy as an attempt to find a consensus may be similarly ideological, leading him to displace the reality of conflict through begging descriptions, expressivist formulations, and historical romanticism.

American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century by Ido Hartogsohn

Reviewed by: American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century by Ido Hartogsohn Devin Lander (bio) American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century By Ido Hartogsohn. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020. 432 pages, 6" x 9". $35.00 paper, $35.00 ebook. Ido Hartogsohn, assistant professor in the program for science, technology, and society at Bar Ilan University, has produced an expansive and well-documented historical overview of the cultural effects of psychedelic substances on the American society of the twentieth century. Hartogsohn's particular focus is on the concept of "set and setting" and how this theory relates both to the individual psychedelic experience and to the larger zeitgeist of mid-twentieth-century US culture. Hartogsohn defines the theory of set and setting as arguing that "psychedelic experiences are shaped, first and foremost, by the mind-set of an individual entering a psychedelic experience (set) and by the environment in which the experience takes place (setting)" and expands on this more clinical definition by concluding that "the character and content of a psychedelic experience … is not solely, or even predominately, determined by the drug itself" and is instead "primarily dictated by the personality, expectation, and intention (set), and the physical environment in which the experience takes place, including the people in the immediate vicinity and the broader sociocultural context (setting)" (1). It is on this broader sociocultural context that Hartogsohn stakes much of his argument. Hartogsohn's main thesis is that the reasons psychedelic substances became a major [End Page 422] cultural force in mid-twentieth-century America (and beyond) were as much a result of the collective sociocultural aspects of that particular time and place as the individual experiences created by psychedelics themselves. As such, Hartogsohn suggests that the "American Trip" referred to in the book's title is a "unique, culture-and time-dependent understanding and enactment of the psychedelic experience that emerged in mid-twentieth century America" (3–4). Illuminating on this theme by focusing on the research that began in earnest in the 1950s and reached a cultural pinnacle in the 1960s, Hartogsohn concludes that the "set and setting" of this particular era informed the conceptualization of what exactly a psychedelic experience is, or should be, and that this conceptualization exists to this day despite the fact that the time and place has changed. As a result, Hartogsohn notes that "Different societies at different points in history would have created different set and setting conditions, which would have shaped the character of the LSD (psychedelic) experience in entirely different ways" (208).1 In outlining this important and expansive theory, Hartogsohn organizes the book into ten chapters. In these chapters he traces the evolution of psychedelic research from the late 1940s through the 1960s and beyond by following five prominent psychedelic researchers and seven different, but at times overlapping, theories that existed as to what psychedelics were and how they could be used. The five researchers include German-born psychiatrist Max Rinkel, who was the first doctor in North America to work with LSD; Sidney Cohen, a psychiatrist at the UCLA School of Medicine who conducted experiments with a variety of substances, including LSD; Betty Eisner, a psychologist who worked with Cohen and went on to develop her own theories related to psychedelics; Timothy Leary, the psychologist and former Harvard faculty member who became the most visible advocate of the positive benefits of psychedelic use; and Myron Stolaroff, a former electrical engineer who helped introduce psychedelics to technological innovators in Silicon Valley. The seven theories and uses for psychedelics are woven throughout the book. Hartogsohn focuses them through the work of the five researchers, as well as other entities. Max Rinkel, for example, was an early proponent of psychotomimetic research, which was the theory that psychedelics mimicked psychosis and could be a useful way for researchers to learn more about that type of mental illness. Sidney Cohen, alternatively, was a prominent early supporter of using psychedelics as part of psychotherapy, while Betty Eisner would focus more on spirituality and Myron Stolaroff on the potential uses of psychedelics for creativity and innovation. Leary, meanwhile, quickly moved from the...

SAH/JSAH: Four Score and Counting

The American Society of Architectural Historians (ASAH)—as SAH was called until 1947—was formally established at the Harvard Faculty Club on a balmy late-July evening in 1940. Turpin Bannister, then teaching at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, was elected the Society's first president and tasked with editing the first issue of its journal. Appearing in January 1941, that issue was printed in purple ink on a spirit duplicator (or Ditto machine) and bound in orange construction paper. On its cover was a drawing of an ancient Roman brickyard stamp, in reference to the lone and otherwise unillustrated article inside: “The Roman Brick Industry and Its Relationship to Roman Architecture,” by Harvard classicist Herbert Bloch (Figure 1). The newly launched Journal of the ASAH was mailed to the Society's twenty-five founding members and to almost two hundred other scholars who, it was supposed, might want to join them. “Few of those who receive this first number of the Journal will know that ASAH exists,” read the issue's opening lines. “An introduction is in order.”1Introductions to SAH will no longer be necessary for most people reading this, but a reminder or two seem warranted. This summer marks the Society's eightieth anniversary, while next year will be the journal's. We observe these anniversaries every five or ten years, and while doing so may sometimes seem blandly formulaic, such recognition also imposes an order on time elapsed and encourages us to measure changes wrought. Much as physical landmarks mark meaningful places, authors Scott Stephens and Lisa A. Williams observe, anniversaries are “temporal landmarks demarcat[ing] meaningful junctures in time. They interpose themselves between the past and a hoped-for future … between our actuality and our potentiality.”2 The scope and scale of SAH and JSAH have broadened considerably since those early Ditto-machine days. Recent years have seen substantial and largely successful efforts to internationalize and otherwise diversify our membership and the issues we address, to support and encourage significant research and the participation of emerging and nontraditional scholars, to disseminate and expand our work through technologies both old and new, and to build and secure the resources and mechanisms that make so much of this activity possible.Because we are students of history, it is our practice and our inclination to look backward. The Society and its journal now have eighty years of their own to look back on, and in the coming months JSAH will be doing just that: calling out, with the assistance of our publisher, the University of California Press, significant examples of past scholarship and introducing them to contemporary readers through online open-access publication (along the lines of our recent “virtual issues” on the Bauhaus and skyscrapers). But as anyone reading this is well aware, history is not simply about looking backward. Among its many uses, both practical and idealistic, historical study helps us to better understand the nature and causes of change, enhancing our knowledge of ourselves and our present circumstances, as well as our efforts to plan and build for what we hope will be a better future.So, by all means, do look back on those eighty years behind us and take from them what you will. But take a moment, too, to think about the years ahead and the still-unrealized potential that they hold. In just twenty years the Society will mark its centennial. What can we do now to keep on building an organization whose first one hundred years we will then celebrate with pleasure, pride, and the possibility of an even brighter future ahead? I hope to see you then.

Diseases Have No Borders, Neither Should Research!

In response to recent anti-Chinese sentiment in the US, Sunney Xie uses his own experiences to assert that American ideals should not be replaced by nationalism and populism and that everybody wins in Sino-US scientific collaborations, contrary to what Americans are led to believe: that China is the sole beneficiary.

Hyung Il Pai 裵炯逸 (14 June 1958 – 28 May 2018)

Hyung Il Pai 裵炯逸 (14 June 1958 – 28 May 2018) Lothar Von Falkenhausen Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Hyung Il Pai (Photograph courtesy of Alex José) [End Page 209] Hyung Il ("Lee") Pai 裵炯逸 and I became friends from the moment we met for the first time at Harvard in September 1981. As beginning graduate students and fellow advisees of the late Kwang-chih Chang 張光直 (1931–2001), we spent a large part of the following three years in each other's company. It was an intense and exhilarating time. Hyung Il had graduated from the prestigious Ewha Girls' High School梨花女子 高等學校and obtained her B.A. in Korean history from Sŏgang University 西江大 學校, an academically rigorous Jesuit-run institution in Seoul. Having lived in Malaysia and Denver for several years in her teens—her father was a medical doctor attached to the Korean communities there—she was comfortable in English, familiar with negotiating cultural differences, and curious about conceptualizing them theoretically through the lens of anthropology. She had little trouble adjusting to American ways. In this respect she was quite different from the other Korean students at Harvard, many of whom were men and (due to military-service requirements) older than her; they were nice people, interesting and fun to be with, but often astonishingly conservative in their attitudes. Socially as well as academically, Harvard, with its diverse international constellation of highly driven graduate students, was the right place for her. Had she stayed in Korea, then still under a repressive military dictatorship, her outspokenness would likely have gotten her into trouble sooner or later. She sometimes shared stories of student demonstrations during her college days, from which some of her fellow students had emerged crippled for life due to police brutality. I never asked her why she had chosen to switch fields from history to anthropology, though one reason may have been that anthropology at the time was being regarded (all too briefly, as it turned out) as a kind of hegemonic super-discipline that would eventually imprint itself upon the totality of the Humanities and Social Sciences. More pragmatically, I believe, Hyung Il was looking for new, untapped bodies of evidence and more rigorous—or perhaps just different—methods of analysis that would help her develop a broader perspective on early Korea than she had hitherto encountered. In particular, she was obviously seeking to escape from the doctrinaire nationalism that then pervaded Korean academia. Even though anthropology was completely new to her, she took to it like a fish to water. Together, we broke our teeth on archaeological method and theory under the late Stephen Williams (1926–2017); suffered valiantly through Erik Trinkaus's (b. 1948) osteology class, which was mandatory for archaeology students; and struggled to hold our own in the formidable Gordon R. Willey's (1913–2002) seminar on the Early Classic Maya. No one on the Harvard faculty at the time knew much about Korean archaeology as such, but K. C. Chang was the most supportive advisor imaginable. He gave Hyung Il completely free rein to develop her expertise, insisting only that she master Japanese and Chinese, which she did. Probably, the Harvard anthropologist who came to exert the strongest intellectual influence on Hyung Il was Peter S. Wells (b. 1948), whose sophisticated anthropological modeling of the nature and effects of contacts between late prehistoric Central Europe and the Mediterranean world provided her with an excellent framework for conceptualizing early Korea-China interactions. For her first summer in Graduate School, Harvard's Anthropology Department sent her to the University of Arizona's long-running archaeological field school at Grasshopper Pueblo, where she acquired first-hand acquaintance with the realities of archaeological fieldwork. Hyung Il's influence on me during those years was considerable. She was almost single-handedly responsible for kindling my fascination with Korea. In the summer of [End Page 210] 1983, she persuaded me to accept an invitation from our older fellow student Choi Mong Lyong 崔夢龍 (b. 1946) from Seoul National University, who was then just finishing his Ph.D. at Harvard, to join his archaeological field project in Korea. I was hooked. I returned to Korea the following summer and even...

Adventures of a Ballad Hunter by John A. Lomax

Reviewed by: Adventures of a Ballad Hunter by John A. Lomax Michael Lee Adventures of a Ballad Hunter. By John A. Lomax. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017. ix + 275 pp. Illustrations, index. $18.95 paper. Enthusiasts of the American folksong owe a heavy debt to John A. Lomax (1867–1948), who devoted his formidable energies crisscrossing the country recording people singing folk-songs. [End Page 218] His labors culminated in folding nearly 10,000 recordings he made between 1908 and 1942 into the Archive of American Folksongs at the Library of Congress. In 1947 Lomax wrote his memoir, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter. This important account of his efforts has been out of print since 1972. The University of Texas Press now offers it in a handsome new paperback edition. The first half of the book offers a detailed and engaging account of Lomax’s work largely spent in the Great Plains. His story begins in the Bosque Valley, Texas, where the author grew up. Lomax initially describes the songs he learned as a small child from passing cowboys encamped near his home, at revival meetings, and informally taught to him by Nat, a formerly enslaved youth who was employed by Lomax’s father. Lomax “came to love Nat with the fierce strength and loyalty of youth.” Yet one page later, the reader learns rumors of Nat’s murder at age twenty-one. Such vivid characters appear, sing, and then disappear on every page of this memoir. Some of Lomax’s encounters are heartbreaking, many are funny, and all invest Lomax’s memoir with a wealth of humanity. Lomax shares the gradual professionalization of his work from early rejection by indifferent English professors to his amateur efforts at song collection leading to his embrace by influential Harvard faculty who supported his work financially. Throughout Lomax’s chronicle, a tone of amateur enthusiasm prevails. His account of how he popularized the song “Home on the Range” best illustrates this quality of the book. Lomax’s travels took him to San Antonio in 1908 where he consulted with a former trail cook turned saloonkeeper only after the man had a day to sober up. Upon sobriety’s return, the man sang this Great Plains classic beneath a mesquite tree as Lomax made a cylinder recording. Eventually Lomax’s memoir takes him to the American South with special emphasis on segregated prisons where his African American sources, most notably Lead Belly, provide Lomax with a wealth of important folksong material. Lomax preserved the voices of Americans from fading and along the way captures a bygone era when Americans sang for one another and for themselves. This memoir illustrates the urgency of songs in the lives of a diverse people. Michael Lee Musicology Department University of Oklahoma Copyright © 2019 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

English

The CEIBS-Harvard Executive Program celebrated its 2nd Edition with the slogan: Move your business forward with Harvard. Executives can move their businesses forward through this annual executive program. The program took place from July 21st to 27th, 2018, at the Harvard Faculty Club in the prestigious city of Cambridge, Massachusetts. &nbsp

Alice Hamilton and the FBI.

Dr. Alice Hamilton (1869–1970) was a legendary figure in occupational medicine in the United States (US), author of many articles and texts, and the first woman on the Harvard faculty (1919). Her f...

Religion, Spirituality, and the Hidden Curriculum: Medical Student and Faculty Reflections

ContextReligion and spirituality play an important role in physicians’ medical practice, but little research has examined their influence within the socialization of medical trainees and the hidden curriculum. ObjectivesThe objective is to explore the role of religion and spirituality as they intersect with aspects of medicine's hidden curriculum. MethodsSemiscripted, one-on-one interviews and focus groups (n = 33 respondents) were conducted to assess Harvard Medical School student and faculty experiences of religion/spirituality and the professionalization process during medical training. Using grounded theory, theme extraction was performed with interdisciplinary input (medicine, sociology, and theology), yielding a high inter-rater reliability score (kappa = 0.75). ResultsThree domains emerged where religion and spirituality appear as a factor in medical training. First, religion/spirituality may present unique challenges and benefits in relation to the hidden curriculum. Religious/spiritual respondents more often reported to struggle with issues of personal identity, increased self-doubt, and perceived medical knowledge inadequacy. However, religious/spiritual participants less often described relationship conflicts within the medical team, work-life imbalance, and emotional stress arising from patient suffering. Second, religion/spirituality may influence coping strategies during encounters with patient suffering. Religious/spiritual trainees described using prayer, faith, and compassion as means for coping whereas nonreligious/nonspiritual trainees discussed compartmentalization and emotional repression. Third, levels of religion/spirituality appear to fluctuate in relation to medical training, with many trainees experiencing an increase in religiousness/spirituality during training. ConclusionReligion/spirituality has a largely unstudied but possibly influential role in medical student socialization. Future study is needed to characterize its function within the hidden curriculum.

The Costs and Benefits of "Open Access" Scholarship

The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences recently joined the “open access” movement, urging its professors to post their research on an open access Harvard Web site. This movement may well ensure that scholars prominent in the world of knowledge remain a dominant force, while recognition of the work of others may prove to be more difficult. Traditional scholarly journal uses a means of selection, the peer-review system, which has served as the quality control, though this system also is imperfect. Open access, while it seems like an easy panacea, has problems that deserve careful consideration.

Stanley Hoffmann. In memoriam

Stanley Hoffmann, the Paul and Catherine Buttenwieser University Professor emeritus at Harvard, died at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 12 after a long illness. In his fifty-eight years on the Harvard faculty, he introduced hundreds of students to the study of French and European politics and international relations. François Furet called him “one of the great professors of the twentieth century.”

Carl Bridenbaugh, American Colonial History and Academic Antisemitism: The Paths to the ‘Great Mutation’

Carl Bridenbaugh, American Colonial History and Academic Antisemitism: The Paths to the ‘Great Mutation’ William Palmer (bio) On the evening of December 29, 1962, many of those attending the annual meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA) in Chicago gathered in the main ballroom of the Hilton Hotel to hear the annual presidential address. The address would be delivered by Carl Bridenbaugh, the outgoing AHA president, University Professor of History at Brown University and a distinguished historian of colonial America. AHA presidential addresses, like those of other learned societies, were often boilerplate affairs, although sometimes an outgoing president would use the occasion to rattle the cages of the association’s membership.1 Bridenbaugh’s speech fell into the second category. Entitled “The Great Mutation,” it remains perhaps the most controversial AHA address ever delivered. Bridenbaugh began by recalling his idyllic boyhood on the outskirts of Philadelphia. He mourned the passage of a pastoral society and its replacement by a modern, urban culture, a process he called “the Great Mutation.” There was nothing controversial about that idea, but he subsequently launched into a jeremiad. The younger generation of “urban-bred historians,” Bridenbaugh contended, would find it impossible to recapture this culture, since they had no experience in it. Worse still, he said, these new historians were “products of lower-middle-class or foreign origins, and their emotions frequently get in the way of historical reconstructions. They find themselves, in a very real way, outsiders in our past . . . [and] they have no experience to assist them.”2 Bridenbaugh’s use of such phrases as “urban-bred historians” and “products of lower-middle- class or foreign origins” appeared to be coded language for “Jews.” But, despite its antisemitic overtones, the speech, at least initially, elicited a generally positive response. Several prominent [End Page 153] historians wrote Bridenbaugh to compliment him on his speech. Catherine Drinker Bowen, the author of several popular historical biographies, told Bridenbaugh that he had said “many of the things [she had] wanted to say, and said them forcefully and wittily.” Arthur Meier Schlesinger who had directed Bridenbaugh’s doctoral dissertation at Harvard University, called the speech “an eloquent and acute critique.” Marshall Smelser, a historian of the American colonies at the University of Notre Dame, also commented on the speech, telling Bridenbaugh, “[I]t was true, it was beautiful, and it was good.”3 An understanding of intellectual history sometimes requires the study of bad ideas, and, despite the celebratory letters Bridenbaugh received from his colleagues, his speech raises a question: What had led an educated and cultured man to make such assertions? Little is known concerning Bridenbaugh’s treatment of Jews in his personal life, and the two episodes that are known are contradictory and ultimately inconclusive. The first occurred in 1938, when Bridenbaugh helped the unemployed J.H. Hexter, who was Jewish, to find a job at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Hexter, who, like Bridenbaugh, held a doctorate from Harvard, had experienced such difficulty finding a job that Crane Brinton, a member of the Harvard faculty who had made a valiant effort on Hexter’s behalf, feared that he might be “unemployable.”4 The second episode came in the mid-1950s, after Bridenbaugh had been appointed the Margaret Byrne Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley. Kenneth Stampp, a colleague at Berkeley, recalled that Bridenbaugh had once asked him if he had noticed that Joseph Levenson, a Jewish member of the history department, had supported only Jewish candidates for faculty positions. Stampp replied that he had not noticed this, and, upon reflection, he did not think that it was true.5 As time has passed, historians have paid closer attention to Bridenbaugh’s speech, and they have justly cited it as one of the most blatant [End Page 154] examples of the antisemitism that lingered in American academic life even after World War II.6 But historians have not fully explored the other components of the speech, nor have they searched for the deeper sources of Bridenbaugh’s views beyond a generalized antisemitism. Several other lines of inquiry are worth pursuing. First, Bridenbaugh’s expressed fear that urban-bred scholars would not...