National Endowment For The Humanities Research Articles

The World History Commons

The Journal of American History publishes regular reviews of digital history projects. The digital history reviews are edited by Jeffrey McClurken Please contact him at jmcclurk@umw.edu if you would like to suggest a digital history project for review or write a review. We also welcome comments on our review guidelines, which are available at http://jah.oah.org/submit/digital-history-reviews/. The World History Commons (Whc), funded from 2018 to 2021 by the National Endowment for the Humanities and a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant, includes long-running digital projects, many developed and launched by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media from 2003 to 2018. To sources from such instructional classics as “Making the History of 1989” and the “Amboyna Conspiracy Trial” have been added newly produced resources for instructors and students of world history. The principal investigators Kelly Schrum and Jessica Otis, both of George Mason University, also received expanded funding by the American Council of Learned Societies Digital Extension Grant (2020–2022) for “Expanding the Commons: Supporting Emerging World History Scholars and Community Colleges through the World History Commons.” Besides the principal investigators, the steering committee for the Whc includes Merry Wiesner-Hanks, professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Adam Clulow of the University of Texas at Austin, and Nate Sleeter of George Mason University.

Another reason academic libraries should love the NEH: Or what I did last summer

This essay is an implicit argument for academic librarians to seek out and participate in National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Seminars and Institutes for Academic Faculty. It takes the form of my account of the NEH Seminar that I attended for four weeks in July 2022. The seminar was called Printing and the Book During the Reformation: 1450–1650, and it was aimed at higher education faculty. Since attending my first NEH Summer Institute in 2007, I’ve felt like this is a scholarly activity that librarians have not pursued as readily as others in the academic community, almost certainly because of the amount of time it takes, which is admittedly a challenge. Nevertheless, the payoff is worth it for participants and their organizations, especially for the three reasons I mention at the end. This seminar took place at The Ohio State University and consisted of 16 participants from colleges and universities across the United States. With only a couple exceptions, all of our seminar activities took place in the Thompson Library and mostly in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library (RBML), or the glass-fronted classroom at the opposite end of the first floor.

Frederick Douglas Kelly Jr. (1934–2022)

Frederick Douglas Kelly Jr. (1934–2022) Wendy Pfeffer Douglas Kelly, the University of Wisconsin's Julian Harris Professor of Medieval French Emeritus, died on the morning of March 21, 2022 at the age of 87. In an email, Keith Busby described his late colleague as "one of the great medieval scholars of his generation." Kelly's research was devoted particularly to the topics of rhetoric and romance narrative of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Underlying all of his work is the notion that vernacular poetics were grounded in the Latin arts of poetry. Busby's encomium continued, "He was a great scholar and teacher and the best of men." Douglas received his BA, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Southern California (1956), his MA (1959) and Ph.D. (1962) from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Once in Madison, he never left—he taught French, Italian, medieval Occitan, and Medieval Studies there for forty-three years, leaving teaching as professor emeritus. In an email, Julia Nephew, a former student, called Douglas "an inspiring and empathetic mentor." In a different email, Suzanne Hagedorn spoke of Douglas's "unfailingly gracious presence, his insightful comments on conference papers, his erudition and kindness." Among his many honors, we can list: Fellow of the Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Wisconsin; Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America; and senior fellow for the Netherland Institute for Advanced Study. Douglas was a recipient of two significant University of Wisconsin recognitions: the Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award and the Hilldale Award for the Humanities. The French branch of the Société internationale arthurienne awarded him its Prix Excalibur in 1995. Over the course of his career, Douglas received extramural grant funding from Phi Beta Kappa, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. I knew him as a welcoming, warm, and humble individual, open to ideas from all sides, ever inquisitive. My last interaction with Douglas was in 2019, at Kalamazoo, where he regretted simply [End Page 277] that he was perhaps getting too old to participate as actively in the congress as he would have liked. Though Douglas was better known as an Old French scholar, Occitan literature did not escape his purview. He was a long-standing member of the Société Guilhem IX. He discussed Flamenca in his important book Medieval Imagination; considered Flamenca and Jaufre in "Exaggeration, Abrupt Conversion, and the Uses of Description"; included Raimon Vidal de Besalù in The Arts of Poetry and Prose; and examined fourteenth-century lyric poets At de Mons and Raimon de Cornet in "The Late Medieval Art of Poetry" and again in "Translatio Poetriae." He was also the man responsible for Occitan as an area editor for Oxford Bibliographies in Medieval Studies. It is a sad day when a great scholar and a genuinely warm human being leaves our company. He will be missed. Wendy Pfeffer University of Louisville University of Pennsylvania OCCITAN-RELATED WORKS CITED Kelly, Douglas. The Arts of Poetry and Prose. Typologie des sources du Moyen Âge occidental 59. Turnhout: Brepols, 1991. Google Scholar ———. "Exaggeration, Abrupt Conversion, and the Uses of Description in Jaufre and Flamenca." In Studia occitanica in memoriam Paul Remy. Edited by Hans-Erich Keller et al. 2 vols. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1987. 2: 107–119. Google Scholar ———. "The Late Medieval Art of Poetry: The Evidence from At de Mons and Raimon de Cornet." In Études de langue et de littérature médiévales offertes à Peter T. Ricketts. Edited by Dominique Billy and Ann Buckley. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. 681–692. Google Scholar ———. Medieval Imagination: Rhetoric and the Poetry of Courtly Love. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978. Google Scholar ———. "Translatio Poetriae: Occitan Apprenticeship from the Latin Classroom to the Vernacular Court." In Le Poetriae del medioevo latino: Modelli, fortuna, commenti. Edited by Gian Carlo Alessio and Domenico Losappio. Filologie medievali e moderne 15. Venice: Edizioni Ca' Foscari, 2018. 91–128. Google Scholar Copyright © 2023 Société Guilhem IX ...

Editorial Letter

Editorial| November 01 2022 Editorial Letter Paula J. Johnson Paula J. Johnson Paula J. Johnson is a curator and public historian at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History in Washington, DC. She directs the American Food History Project and serves as director and co-curator for the exhibition “FOOD: Transforming the American Table.” Johnson is a member of the Gastronomica Editorial Collective. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Gastronomica (2022) 22 (4): iv–ix. https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2022.22.4.iv Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Paula J. Johnson; Editorial Letter. Gastronomica 1 November 2022; 22 (4): iv–ix. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2022.22.4.iv Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentGastronomica Search “Decline, decline, decline. I’m sick of that word,” was the waterman’s gruff response to my question about the downward trend in annual oyster harvests. It was the early 1980s and I was interviewing a skipjack captain1 at a commercial landing as part of my first job in public history. Fresh out of grad school, I was leading a research and documentation project on the history of local fisheries at the Calvert Marine Museum, a regional maritime museum on the Chesapeake Bay, in Maryland. The project, funded by a generous grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, was designed to document the working lives of watermen, so-called because they “follow the water,” harvesting the seasonal round of resources in the bay and its complex network of tributaries.2 Called an “immense protein factory” by Baltimore writer H. L. Mencken,3 the Chesapeake’s long history of spectacular hauls of oysters,... You do not currently have access to this content.

Mapping Nature across the Americas

Mapping Nature across the Americas is a collection of analytical essays developed during the 2014 summer institute of the same name for college and university professors held at the Newberry Library and sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. An introduction by the editors is followed by twelve chapters by separate authors, each exploring aspects of historical mapping of the Americas. The overarching theme is a close study of every aspect of historical maps: examining maps’ creators, the changes seen in maps over time, and the knowledge that can be derived from maps. Topics include examination of how European explorers incorporated Indigenous knowledge, languages, and visual symbols in developing their maps of the New World; the antebellum shellfish industry as a route to emancipation; the mapping challenges posed by the incompatibility of rigid political boundaries with shifting landscape along the U.S.-Mexico border; the historical development of graphical presentation of mountain ranges; Humboldt’s exploration of the Orinoco river; and more. Three chapters are of particular interest to the biologist. “Palms and Other Trees on Maps: Exoticism, Error, and Environment, from Old World to New” explores aspects of vegetation mapping, focusing particularly on depictions of palm trees on maps far outside the range of these species as “the archetypal foreign plant.” The chapter on mapping Canadian nature includes a detailed and interesting discussion of the history and challenges of early surveying and mapmaking, as well as a fascinating series of maps showing the shrinking “terra incognita” of North America as European explorers developed their knowledge of the continent. The final chapter on seeing forests as systems recognizes the incompatibility between static representations on maps with the dynamic reality of ecosystems. An epilogue (“The View from across the Pond”) and appendix offer useful tools for the educator interested in incorporating maps into teaching environmental history.As a biology teacher who has always sought to incorporate interdisciplinary study, emphasizing that the study of science exists within cultural and historical contexts, I found the concept of this volume very appealing. Several chapters were particularly interesting to the science student or teacher and accessible to a general reader. However, some of the writers present their ideas in layers of such erudite complexity that this reader was left wondering what, in fact, they were exactly saying. Interestingly, despite the title’s phrase “mapping nature” indicating a biological or ecological focus, most of the essays could be better described as examining maps as historical documentation of cultures, cultural interaction (particularly between Native peoples and European colonists and explorers), and cultural shifts. As such, many of the details in this text would be excellent reference points more for the student of American history than one of biology. The figures of maps throughout the text are largely disappointing and difficult to read; they could have been improved with zoomed-in depictions of the details discussed in the text. Despite these shortcomings, there are fascinating aspects to this text and a wide range of topics that are of broad potential interest, particularly for a reader interested in the interdisciplinary study of exploration across the Americas.

Swede Home Chicago: The Wallin's Svenska Records Story, 1923–27

According to the liner notes of this project, Chicago has the highest Swedish population of any city after Stockholm. Chicago is also “home to the first record label founded by a Nordic immigrant to the United States.” Archeophone Records’ compilation Swede Home Chicago: The Wallin's Svenska Records Story, 1923–27 tells the story of former crofter Gustaf Waldemar Wallin, founder of Wallin's Svenska Records, a record company that came into being as a subsidiary of Wallin's Music Shop. This company issued 56 tracks between 1923 and 1927. Swede Home Chicago encompasses the entire catalog and includes two discs, featuring 28 tracks each, and a robust 76-page CD booklet. The booklet includes introductory material, performers’ biographies, track notes, lyrics and translations, endnotes, and production credits, as well as a rich plethora of archival photos relating to the Wallin family, the record company, the performers, and more.Without any prior knowledge of the folklife of Swedish American immigrants, one can still appreciate the thought and care put into this project. The context provided by the CD booklet is absolutely unmatched by that of any other project I have engaged with, and was the highlight of reviewing this project. As a folklorist focusing on music, with an eye trained on accessibility and transparency, this is particularly meaningful. For a multiplicity of reasons, one cannot and should not separate music from its historical context. The music itself cannot provide this context, especially when songs are being sung in a language one does not understand. Luckily, folklorists Jim Leary and Marcus Cederström, along with Archeophone Records’ Richard Martin, have crafted a fulfilling and multifaceted narrative that includes detailed lyric translations and is guaranteed to address any questions or concerns the listener might have.The music itself—56 tracks spread out over two discs—features piano, piano accordion, violin, and vocals covering the entire spectrum of human emotion and artistic preference and encompassing “earthy comic songs,” “pious hymns and patriotic anthems,” “venerable folk tunes [intermingled] with hot jazz,” and more. It is striking that this collection is so musically diverse despite coming from one company; it utilizes almost every possible sonic avenue within the given musical heritage to create a truly dynamic and entertaining catalog. In a further testament to the importance of these recordings at the time they first appeared, it is worth noting that the 28 10-inch shellac discs originally issued by Wallin's Svenska Records were recorded by Homer Rodeheaver and Orlando Marsh, two venerable giants of the recording industry.Swede Home Chicago is a set that anyone who is interested in music and music history should own. Speaking as a “many-sectored” folklorist, I feel there is great potential for this collection. It is both deeply entertaining and richly engaging. This project could be used in Scandinavian, migration, and music studies courses as an educational tool. Given that the CD booklet is crucial to the understanding of the project as a whole, future creators of similar projects might look to Swede Home Chicago for guidance on creating something that is appropriately contextual. However, this project should not be construed as being solely historical in scope and content. This collection has implications for folkloristics as well. I was particularly struck by the last few words on the back cover asserting that Swede Home Chicago “[illuminates] a vibrant bygone musical scene that expands our understanding of America's perpetual musical pluralism.” This concept is a lesson for folklore as a discipline, not just for those of us who focus on American music.Just as these discs run the gamut musically despite coming from a singular cultural background, American music encompasses thousands of traditions that should be recognized as equally important parts of the whole. The parsing out of these threads is endless but worthy work that yields meaningful discoveries about American folklife. I send my thanks to Jim Leary, Marcus Cederström, Richard Martin, Archeophone Records, the Mills Music Library and the Center for the Study of Upper Midwestern Cultures at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and all other institutions and people involved in this project—a dynamic and powerful step forward in viewing folklife through a musical lens.

Remembering James A. Parr (1936–2022)

Remembering James A. Parr (1936–2022) Barbara Simerka (bio) In my first doctoral class with Jim, he didn’t bring a prepared syllabus. Instead he consulted with the seven of eight of us gathered in the seminar room: which comedias had we read recently or often, which did we want to brush up on, what topics did we want to explore when looking at lesser-known authors and plays? The resulting syllabus required us to prepare two plays and two critical essays each week, but no one complained because of this collaborative approach to designing the syllabus. In particular, we enjoyed that the carefully chosen texts and essays often contradicted each other, and provided a springboard for intense debates. The next semester, in the Don Quixote seminar, he assigned his own recently published masterwork, Anatomy of Subversive Discourse—but also essays that offered vastly different perspectives of Cervantine narrative structure. Four years later, Jim and I had lunch in order to discuss the turn towards ideological study that my dissertation had taken. Even though he was not a fan of cultural studies, he listened carefully as I provided the examples of close reading to back up my ideas. Then, even though Jim was gravely concerned that materialist frameworks would be harmful to the Humanities as an intellectual enterprise, he supported me completely with the other doubters on my dissertation committee. I observed similar examples of support for new approaches in Jim’s work with his other graduate students—my USC siblings. There are no “School of Parr” scholars precisely because he encouraged us to blaze our own trails, in fields as diverse as feminist, cognitive, and queer studies. This sense of openness marked my relationship with Jim over the following three decades and is also the hallmark of his contributions to the fields of comedia [End Page 9] and Quixote studies. Dating all the way back to 1974, his Hispania essay on the state of Golden Age studies encouraged comedia scholars to move beyond close reading and incorporate interdisciplinary and comparative approaches. Under his leadership as editor, Bulletin of the Comediantes solidified its position as a top tier journal that publishes forward-thinking essays; not seeking to claim the cutting edge, but publishing a steady stream of thoughtful studies that advanced our knowledge as the discipline evolved. Jim’s upbringing resembles that of our current students. He was a first-generation college student from a modest midwestern background, the local boy who succeeded. He served in the military after his high school graduation, then earned his doctorate from the University of Pittsburgh. In an astonishing leap, he was named full professor and head of the department of Murray State University by the age of twenty-seven. Even a cursory glance at the daunting record of achievements on his curriculum vitae reveals the depth and breadth of his scholarly endeavors. Jim published five books and more than sixty articles in highly respected journals, many in the era of typewriters and hard- bound copies of the MLA Bibliography. He was honored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Fulbright Foundation. The University of Alabama named him “Eminent Scholar” in 1994. He also served in countless professional organizations, including a term as president for the Cervantes Society of America. James Parr played an important role in the evolution of our discipline, one that should not be overlooked or forgotten, but celebrated. His ability to look beyond his personal perspective to support innovative and high-quality scholarship is a model for current and future scholars. [End Page 10] Barbara Simerka Queens College CUNY barbara.simerka@qc.cuny.edu Barbara Simerka Barbara Simerka is Professor of Spanish at Queens College/CUNY. She is author of Knowing Subjects (2013 Purdue UP) and Discourses of Empire (2003 Penn State UP) and has published numerous essays on early modern feminism, Don Quixote and postmodern film, and dramas de privanza. She is currently engaged in research on sociological studies of status as an identity category, and on pedagogical studies of addressing representations of violence and trauma in the classroom. Copyright © 2022 Cervantes Society of America

Literature and Medicine: The First Decade.

Literature and Medicine:The First Decade Anne Hudson Jones (bio) The first volume of Literature and Medicine, which appeared forty years ago in 1982, offers many answers to the important question, Why? Why did the unusual conjunction of these two disciplines merit starting a journal? Equally important at the time was the question, How? How does one start a journal, especially without the support of an institution or professional society or financial guarantor? The answers to these basic questions help explain some of the constraints and opportunities that shaped the journal in its first decade. They also offer an opportunity to recognize and thank those without whose help the journal might not have begun or been able to develop and flourish as it has during the past four decades. Kathryn Allen Rabuzzi, a feminist scholar and professor of English literature, religion, and humanities at the State University of New York's Upstate Medical Center, was the initiator. In 1978, she had organized a special session on literature and medicine for the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association (MLA), which attracted a surprisingly large audience. Joanne Trautmann, who had been teaching literature and medicine at Pennsylvania State University Medical Center in Hershey since 1972, was on the panel, along with Harold Gene Moss from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and James C. Cowan from the University of Arkansas.1 Having recently accepted a new position in literature and medicine at the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, I was an enthusiastic member of the audience, thrilled to see so much interest at the MLA in this new field. In answer to a question that evening about why she chose to work in medical education, Trautmann replied, "We are missionaries." Her comment surprised me at first, but I came to understand it as I learned more about the Society for Health and Human Values (SHHV) and the Institute on Human Values in Medicine (IHVM). Both had been [End Page 205] established "to explore creative methods to reintegrate the humanities into medical education."2 The goal was to help restore the important human relationships between caregivers and patients that had eroded even as scientific and technical advances provided ever more efficacious responses to bodily ills and malfunctions. Physicians, chaplains, and theologians at the forefront of the SHHV and the IHVM understood the important role literature could play in the education of health professionals by letting them hear fictional and autobiographical accounts of patients' experiences of illness and suffering, as well as the personal stories of fellow health professionals striving to care for patients, often against the odds. In the months that followed the MLA session, Rabuzzi, Trautmann, and I discussed the possibility of starting a journal. We enlarged our group, inviting D. Heyward Brock, Peter W. Graham, and William F. Claire to join our conversations and the cause. Brock, a professor of English literature and Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Delaware, was working at the intersection of literature, science, and medicine. Graham had recently taken a position in the English Department at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. Claire, then a lobbyist for the State University of New York System, was the only one of us who had experience as a founding editor of a literary journal. We agreed that each of us would try to secure a contract with a press to publish the journal and that whoever succeeded in doing so would become its first editor. The rest of us would serve as associate editors, and each of us would take responsibility for a thematic volume to take the journal through its first six years, at which point we would reassess. Rabuzzi and Claire were soon able to secure an agreement with the State University of New York (SUNY) Press at Albany to begin publishing the journal, with Rabuzzi as the first editor. The first volume built on the conversation that had begun at the 1978 MLA special session, taking as its theme Toward a New Discipline. In retrospect, that theme seems wrong to me because the volume's essays, long and short, point...

The State of the Humanities circa 2022

The State of the Humanities circa 2022

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Doran H. Ross: His Fabulous Fowler Years

Doran H. Ross: His Fabulous Fowler Years

Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad ed. by Timothy D. Walker

Reviewed by: Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroaded. by Timothy D. Walker Brian Rouleau (bio) Underground Railroad, Fugitive slaves, Maritime history Sailing to Freedom: Maritime Dimensions of the Underground Railroad. Edited by Timothy D. Walker. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2021. Pp. 231. Paper, $27.95.) Of the roughly one hundred fugitive slave accounts published before 1865, over 70 percent describe oceangoing vessels as instrumental to the escape from bondage. Editor Timothy Walker uses this little known but deeply meaningful statistic to introduce a lively and engaging collection of essays on the maritime dimensions of the Underground Railroad. That clandestine network of abolitionist activists who ferried runaway slaves to freedom has typically been depicted as a terrestrial operation. But in so doing, historians have overlooked a critical dimension of the struggle over slavery: the saltwater Underground Railroad. These ten essays, written by a diverse group of scholars and museum professionals, should therefore be seen as a welcome corrective. Once their insights are integrated with the master narrative of antebellum abolitionism, we will gain a greater appreciation of the Underground Railroad's true scope. It was much bigger, more geographically expansive, and more thoroughly immersed in [End Page 159]the day-to-day operation of the country's commercial life than previously appreciated. So often did slaves follow a watery path to emancipation, in fact, that one is tempted to consider the term "railroad" a misnomer. The essays emerged out of a series of interdisciplinary workshops funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and hosted by the New Bedford Whaling Museum and the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. As such, they are a testament to the power of federal support for research, public history, and cross-institutional collaboration. Indeed, several of the book's chapters are noteworthy for their reflections on how scholarly findings can (and cannot) be translated into exhibits that more readily capture the imaginations of the public. Sailing to Freedomis impressive for its thoughtful ruminations on the ways that historians interpret sources and our obligation to make those interpretations more accessible. Here is a group of scholars who aspire to paradigm shifts in the more esoteric realm of academic debate but who also seek to inspire Americans more generally with tales of their forebears' heroism, courage, and perseverance. Naturally, then, storytelling is a major component of the contributors' efforts. Much of their work involved the painstaking task of combing through the archives in search of the oceanic Underground Railroad. It was not an easy thing to do, considering the network's illicit and secretive nature. But the authors' investigations produced some striking revelations and a few key insights. One is the high degree of organization and detailed knowledge exhibited by both fugitive slaves and their allies along the waterfront. Clear lines of communication connected port city activists in both the North and the South, while emancipatory currents emanating out of Haiti and the British Caribbean likewise called men and women to the cause. As several essays make clear, the maritime world proved naturally amenable to abolitionist agitation. Sailors had spent the preceding decades evading press gangs, dodging customs officers, and deserting ships. They were, in other words, practiced in the art of eluding authorities, and they often used those skills to assist runaway slaves. The multiracial character of the maritime workforce, meanwhile, provided an ideal environment into which Black fugitives could blend. Another critical point that multiple essays make is the incredibly diverse composition of the saltwater Underground Railroad. In seaports, swamps, eddies, and estuaries, a variety of people directed their efforts toward freedom. The volume includes a fascinating cast of characters who, given the maritime world's homosocial complexion, do tend to skew male. Protagonists featured in individual chapters include seafarers, [End Page 160]whalemen, fishermen, oystermen, wharfingers, harbor pilots, stevedores, shipbuilders, draymen, and stewards. These were the individuals who secreted escaping slaves at their southern points of departure, but, just as important, they were also the people who sought to settle them into the North's free communities of color. New York and onward to Canada (by way of the Erie Canal) appears to have been one critical pathway, but...

A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Atzlán to Amherst by Thomas Hallock

Reviewed by: A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Atzlán to Amherst by Thomas Hallock Robert S. Levine (bio) A Road Course in Early American Literature: Travel and Teaching from Atzlán to Amherst thomas hallock University of Alabama Press, 2021 206 pp. When I was asked to review Hallock's Road Course in Early American Literature, I leaped at the opportunity. After all, I had been basically trapped at home for over a year and thought it would be fun to read about the days when we could go from place to place and pay homage to authors. In other words, I thought Road Course would offer the vicarious fun of travel to Emily Dickinson's Amherst, with additional visits to such places as Philadelphia (for Franklin), Concord (for Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne), and Mexico (for the Aztecs). Hallock does describe some car trips, but, as the book's subtitle suggests, it more complexly engages interconnections between travel and teaching, and it conceives of travel in the broadest sense as through time, personal experience, physical place, and the reading of literature. The book elaborates on the challenges of teaching early American literature in a survey class at a time when administrators' commitment to STEM has rendered our work tertiary, and he situates his work as a scholar and teacher in relation to the challenges (and joys) of having a career in literary studies. In that sense, Hallock's conception of travel involves following his professional arc from getting the PhD in English at NYU, falling in love with and marrying a fellow NYU PhD in English, trying to develop a career in tandem with his wife, getting that elusive first job at Valdosta State University, adopting a son, moving to Florida and taking on adjunct jobs, and eventually landing a tenure-track position. These life events are presented as part of Hallock's "road course," and I have to say that I enjoyed reading about Hallock's interactions with [End Page 589] his wife (Julie Buckner Armstrong, known for her work on the literature of civil rights) almost as much as I enjoyed reading about how travel informs his teaching of early American literature. All of which is to say: the eleven essay-like chapters of the book, which follow Hallock over an approximately twenty-year period, are both entertaining and illuminating about teaching and life. I came away from the book wishing that, way back when, I'd had someone "real" like Hallock as a teacher. One of the book's best chapters, "Oro de Oaxaca" (named after a highalcohol Mexican mezcal), is representative of Hallock's writerly method. The year is 2012, and Hallock is participating in a six-week National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) seminar on literary and historical connections between Mesoamerica and the southwestern United States. The chapter begins in Mexico City with Hallock and other NEH participants viewing from their hotel balcony a political rally in the central square—Tenochtitlán—where Cortés met Moctezuma II in 1519. "Past is present in Tenochtitlán" (107), Hallock writes, as he takes in the political tensions between the two leading parties in Mexico and reflects on past conflicts. Over the next several weeks, as he visits key sites in Mexico with his fellow seminarians, he starts to feel untethered from his familiar ways of knowing historical chronology, viewing the geographical area of Mesoamerica as it might more readily be understood by Mexicans. In symbolic recognition of his revised perspective, he plots with a graduate student to smuggle back into the United States a bottle of mezcal from Oaxaca. (He would have preferred smuggling hallucinogens, but they're not so easily available.) As he crosses the border, Hallock contemplates the 1846–48 war with the United States from the new perspective derived from his experience in the seminar, which leads to a meditation on the defining character of borders and a consideration of Mexico's massive loss of land through the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This leads Hallock to raise questions about Whitman's imperialistic embrace of the war with Mexico, and to view northern Arizona and Santa Fe...

Enmeshing Selves, Words and Media, or Two Life Writers in One Family Talk about Art and Disability

Two life writers in the same family--one neurotypical, one autistic—converse about the mountain of material they’ve produced: poems, memoir, essays, scholarship, and documentary film. Preferring to conceive of their work as interdependent and enmeshed, not bound by the strictures of identity politics and thus separate or conflicting, they advance a neurocosmopolitan and rhizomatous understanding of the self in words. David James “DJ” Savarese is an artful activist, writer, teacher, and Co-Chair of The Alliance for Citizen-Directed Supports. An OSF Human Rights Initiative Youth Fellow (2017-19) and co-producer, narrator, and star of the Peabody award-winning documentary Deej: Inclusion Shouldn’t Be a Lottery, he publishes poems, creative nonfiction, and scholarly essays. Ralph James Savarese has authored five books and co-edited three collections, including the first on neurodiversity. He has received awards from the Herman Melville Society, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation, which funded a neurohumanities fellowship at Duke University’s Institute for Brain Sciences. He teaches at Grinnell College.

Multimedia

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Contributing Authors

Dr. Mary Frances Berry, professor of history and Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of twelve books, including History Teaches Us to Resist (2018). From 1980 to 2004, she was a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and from 1993–2004 served as chair. Between 1977 and 1980, Dr. Berry served as the assistant secretary for education in the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. She has also served as provost of the University of Maryland and chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder. In recognition of her scholarship and public service, Professor Berry has received 35 honorary doctoral degrees and many awards.Brandon James Render is a PhD candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include twentieth-century United States social and intellectual history, post-1945 social movements and “the culture wars,” and public policy. His dissertation, “Colorblind University,” traces the intellectual genealogy of race-neutral policies and practices in higher education through admissions policies, departmental structure, and curriculum design. In addition to service as a graduate research fellow at the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy in 2018–19, he is the 2021–22 Mitchem Dissertation Fellow at Marquette University.Lee Sartain is a senior lecturer in American history at the University of Portsmouth, England. His research focuses primarily on the NAACP and civil rights activism from the 1910s to the 1970s. His first book, Invisible Activists: Women of the Louisiana NAACP and the Struggle for Civil Rights, 1915–1945 (2007) won the Landry Prize for best book on a southern topic. He has also published Borders of Equality: The NAACP and the Baltimore Civil Rights Struggle, 1914–1970 (2013) and coedited Long Is the Way: One Hundred Years of the NAACP (2009). Recent articles have focused on the NAACP and the Great War and on youth movements and the NAACP in New Mexico. He has also written various encyclopedia entries on the NAACP. He is a member of the Royal Historical Society.Matthew Shannon is associate professor of history at Emory & Henry College. He is the author of Losing Hearts and Minds: American–Iranian Relations and International Education during the Cold War (2017). Dr. Shannon's research has been published in Iranian Studies, Diplomatic History, International History Review, and The Sixties. He is the editor of American–Iranian Dialogues: From Constitution to White Revolution, c. 1890s–1960s (2021), and the coeditor of 9/11 and the Academy: Responses in the Liberal Arts and the 21st-Century World (2019).Quito Swan is professor of African American and African diaspora studies at Indiana University Bloomington. A historian of Black internationalism, he is the author of Pauulu's Diaspora: Black Internationalism and Environmental Justice (2021), Black Power in Bermuda (2010), and the forthcoming Pasifika Black: Black Internationalism in Oceania. Swan has garnered several major awards for his research, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute, Australia's University of Queensland, and, most recently, Pennsylvania State's Humanities Institute.Dr. Rhonda Y. Williams, professor and John L. Seigenthaler Chair in American History at Vanderbilt University, is the author of the award-winning The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality (2004) and Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (2005). She is also the coeditor of the award-winning book series “Justice, Power, and Politics” from the University of North Carolina Press. During her tenure at Case Western Reserve University, she founded and directed the Social Justice Institute, as well as the postdoctoral fellowship in African American studies.

Advancing Preservation for Archives and Manuscripts

Advancing Preservation for Archives and Manuscripts

Leza, Sungu, and Samba: Digital Humanities and Early Bantu History

AbstractIn 2016, with the support of a three-year National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Collaborative Research Grant to research and write a precolonial African history of family, generations, and gender, we began building the Bantu Ancestral Roots Database (BARD). BARD is a digital repository of word-roots related to gender and life stage practices from over sixty Bantu languages. We developed it to assist us in our analysis of this large corpus of data that we used to write histories of people’s material and ideological inventions that cover thelongue duréeacross multiple regions. BARD allows researchers with internet access to search for terms by entering at least three consecutive phonemes. If phonemes exist in that sequence in any of the 64 Bantu languages that BARD holds, those words and their meanings appear as results. In this article, we discuss the usefulness and complexities of Digital Humanities (DH) as research tools. We explain our methodology and research process using three reconstructed word-roots pertinent to our research on family and generations. The three word-roots we examine invite scholars to probe how to recover deep connections and linkages between people’s pasts in Africa and its Diasporas, particularly in ways that move beyond histories of the slave trade and enslavement. As we developed our open-access website African Social History and Data Across Bantu Matrilineal Communities (ASH-DABMC) and our database, BARD, we gained greater insight into the meanings encoded in our data even as we faced challenges. We hope the discussion of our experiences will provide an intellectual framework and inspire others considering digital projects.

Dig That Lick (DTL): Analyzing Large-Scale Data for Melodic Patterns in Jazz Performances

Dig That Lick (DTL): Analyzing Large-Scale Data for Melodic Patterns in Jazz Performances

Preserving Human Perspectives in Cultural Heritage Acoustics: Distance Cues and Proxemics in Aural Heritage Fieldwork

We examine the praxis implications of our working definition of aural heritage: spatial acoustics as physically experienced by humans in cultural contexts; aligned with the aims of anthropological archaeology (the study of human life from materials). Here we report on human-centered acoustical data collection strategies from our project “Digital Preservation and Access to Aural Heritage via a Scalable, Extensible Method,” supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in the USA. The documentation and accurate translation of human sensory perspectives is fundamental to the ecological validity of cultural heritage fieldwork and the preservation of heritage acoustics. Auditory distance cues, which enable and constrain sonic communication, relate to proxemics, contextualized understandings of distance relationships that are fundamental to human social interactions. We propose that source–receiver locations in aural heritage measurements should be selected to represent a comprehensive range of proxemics according to site-contextualized spatial-use scenarios, and we identify and compare acoustical metrics for auditory distance cues from acoustical fieldwork we conducted using this strategy in three contrasting case-study heritage sites. This conceptual shift from architectural acoustical sampling to aural heritage sampling prioritizes culturally and physically plausible human auditory/sound-sensing perspectives and relates them to spatial proxemics as scaled architecturally.