Copyright (c) 2009 University of Nebraska - Lincoln All rights reserved. http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub Recent documents in Faculty Publications, Department of History en-us Sun, 22 Nov 2009 03:25:37 PST 3600 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/106 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/106 Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:41:37 PST A rich historiography has accumulated regarding American Indian boarding schools and the experience of Indian children within them. Western women's historians have also studied many white women who were involved in efforts to advocate for American Indians. Yet, in general, these two historiographical tracks have developed along parallel lines without intersecting. This essay argues, however, that white women were integrally involved in the removal of American Indian children to boarding schools and that their involvement implicated them in one of the most cruel, yet largely unexamined, policies of colonialism within the American West. Through a politics of maternalism, many white women reformers claimed for themselves the role of a "Great White Mother" who would save her benighted Indian "daughters.'" Ironically, however, while these reformers venerated motherhood in their political discourse, they often failed to respect the actual mothering done by many native women. Instead, many reformers portrayed American Indian women as unfit mothers whose children had to be removed from their homes and communities to be raised properly by white women within institutions. And as white women articulated a sense of difference between themselves and native women as mothers, they helped to construct racial ideologies that deemed Indian peoples to be in need of "civilization" by their white benefactors. Thus, much of white women's advocacy for Indians in the West ultimately reinforced the very racial notions that contributed to the ongoing colonization of native peoples in the region. Margaret D. Jacobs http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/105 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/105 Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:22:29 PST This intriguing and soft-spoken documentary brings together scholars of Indigenous history from both North America and Australia to meet with Indigenous communities and their locally-based historians in the Northern Territory. In these encounters, it becomes clear that scholarly, academic approaches to history often clash with the ways that Indigenous communities and their historians tell their histories. This is not news to most readers of Aboriginal History; however, the film goes beyond this observation. It aims to show the possibilities for dialogue and fruitful exchange, as well as productive debate, when historians trained in different traditions of knowledge production meet and discuss their common passions for history. Rather than making grand claims about cultural breakthroughs, the film is quieter and more subtle, suggesting that this is only the beginning of a long conversation that must continue over many years. I want to discuss just two of the issues that the film raises: first, the stakes involved for Indigenous people versus academic historians in interpreting and conveying the history of colonialism, and second, the possibility of telling history in myriad ways. As many of the participants point out in the film, many Indigenous people use history to connect themselves to their land, and both land and history are crucial to creating their identities. For historians who work within their own Indigenous communities, the film suggests, the survival, healing, and recovery of their own people is their primary agenda. Margaret D. Jacobs http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/104 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/104 Tue, 10 Nov 2009 07:24:51 PST In the first decades of the twentieth century, many white Americans became involved in an effort to promote Indian arts and crafts, particularly in the Southwest and among the Pueblo Indians. Some scholars have placed this effort within the context of the larger arts and crafts movement in Britain and the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Historians have explained this movement as a reaction against industrial production and as a related search for authenticity. Believing that industrialization had produced a mass culture of imitation, destroyed communal bonds, and divested work of its inherent worth, arts and crafts movement supporters sought "authentic" objects and experience in preindustrial cultures and modes of production. Other scholars have argued that the white elites who patronized Indian arts consciously attempted to redefine the Southwestern identity and economy--to transform it from an area known primarily for ranching, agriculture, and extractive industries to a region known for its picturesque scenery and people. For all their insights, these explanations neglect two significant aspects of the Indian arts and crafts movement among the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico-its gendered nature and its heterogeneity. Margaret D. Jacobs http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/103 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/103 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 14:50:16 PST Dolls seem to be a ubiquitous feature of American girlhood, cherished objects played with by girls from many different cultures over many centuries. These three photos show American Indian girls playing with dolls in the early twentieth century. ... On the surface, we might think of dolls as innocent items meant to entertain children, typically (in our own era) girls. Don't parents give dolls to children simply to amuse them? And don't dollmakers construct dolls merely to fulfill a demand (and in the case of mass production, to turn a profit)? For many decades now, feminist scholars have read more into the purpose of dolls. Some have critiqued doll culture for instilling restrictive gender roles or promoting unhealthy body images for girls. In these scholarly works, dolls lose their innocence; they become a primary way that parents socialize girls into expected gender roles and even discipline female bodies. As one scholar puts it, many "feminist scholars have interpreted dolls as agents of a hegemonic patriarchal culture in which girls were passive consumers." The Barbie doll and its mass marketing in the post-WWII era has particularly caught the attention of feminist researchers (and activists). Yet, more recently, other feminist scholars have argued that "if media advertising invades homes and shapes consumers by pushing products such as Barbies, consumers respond by reshaping mass-produced goods." Having charted the ways in which doll play and its meaning have changed in the U.S. from 1830-1930, historian Miriam Formanek-Brunell remarks that "while some girls played house in the ways their parents hoped they would, many others . . . challenged adult prescriptions for play as they determined the meaning of dolls in their own lives." Seen from these scholarly perspectives, how can we situate these photographs in time and place to gain a greater understanding of what this doll play meant among these Indian girls in the first decades of the twentieth century? Where did the American Indian girls in each of these photos get their dolls? Did their mothers or other relatives make them? Or did missionaries or teachers distribute them? What did these girls' educators--whether family members or missionaries and teachers--hope that the girls would learn from playing with dolls? What did the girls themselves take away from the experience? Margaret D. Jacobs http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/102 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/102 Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:57:46 PDT Johannes Brenz is known primarily as the organiser of the Württemberg Church and as one of the major figures in the development of Lutheran Christology. This book looks at another aspect of Brenz's career, his role as defender of Lutheran theology against challenges by Catholic theologians. In 1555 the Spanish Dominican Pedro de Soto published an attack on the Württemberg Confession, which had been written by Brenz and presented at the second session of the Council of Trent in 1552. This led Brenz to write a lengthy Apology of the Württemberg Confession that was published over the next four years in four parts : a prolegomena that was Brenz's overall response to de Soto and three pericopes concerned with de Soto's specific criticisms of the Confession. The Apology offers significant insights into the development of Brenz's theology during the crucial years following the Augsburg Interim and preceding his major Christological writings of the 1560s. Amy N. Burnett http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/101 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/101 Fri, 21 Aug 2009 09:39:29 PDT John Foxe's The Book of Martyrs had enormous impact in Elizabethan England. His presentation of women was an effective guide to women readers about appropriate behavior patterns. The ideals for women in the Renaissance were basically the passive Christian virtues such as modesty, humility, sweetness and piety. Foxe was certainly concerned with these Christian virtues for women; however, in certain ways his positive examples of strong women not only reinforced, but also modified this point of view. Carole Levin http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/100 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/100 Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:42:07 PDT The Ciris, a Latin epyllion of uncertain date and authorship, exemplifies the late-antique fascination with Vergilian imitation, as explored most thoroughly in the commentary by R. O. A. M. Lyne (1978). Verse by verse, Lyne indicates what he feels are direct verbal borrowings of verses, half-verses, and phrases from Vergil. Yet for all the care Lyne dedicates to this task, for the most part he limits himself to the verbal dimension of the borrowings. The borrowings have other dimensions as well, and it is the purpose of this paper to examine these allusions from a thematic perspective. The focus will be on explicating the factors that led the Ciris poet to imitate the particular passages that he did, and the use to which he put these imitations in order to enhance his own poem. In the second half of this paper, the insights gained from the exploration of the methods and aims of the poet will be used to support my identification of a previously-unobserved imitation of a famous passage in Vergil's Aeneid. The Ciris tells the story of Scylla and Nisus, best known to us from book 8 of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Nisus was the king of Megara, a city under siege by King Minos of Crete. The city was secure so long as the tuft of purple hair growing on the top of the head of Nisus remained unshorn. However Scylla, the daughter of Nisus, fell in love with Minos and, as a token of that love, betrayed her father and her city by cutting the lock of hair while Nisus slept. Instead of receiving a reward for her treason, she was repulsed by Minos, who dragged her through the sea behind his ship until Amphitrite took pity upon her and changed her into a sea bird, the ciris. Jupiter then transformed her father into a sea eagle so that he could avenge himself through continual attacks upon the smaller bird. Vanessa Gorman http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/99 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/99 Thu, 02 Jul 2009 14:36:45 PDT Most accounts of the eucharistic controversy assume that after the Swiss cities rejected the Wittenberg Concord, Martin Bucer had no more influence in Switzerland. In Bern, however, a party supporting Bucer's concord theology dominated the church from the later 1530s through the 1540s. Although traditionally identified as Lutherans, the theological statements of this group demonstrate their loyalty to Bucer's "middle way" between Luther and Zwingli. The expulsion of this party from Bern in 1548 meant the end of Bucer's influence in western Switzerland, finalized by the Consensus Tigurinus, which carefully avoided any Buceran terminology. Amy N. Burnett http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/98 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/98 Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:47:40 PDT Both of us came into the history profession in the early 1990s and went through graduate school just before the remarkable emergence of the World Wide Web. Of course, we can see now that a communication revolution was taking place during those years and that it was changing the way we do historical scholarship and teaching. After the development of browsers like Mosaic Netscape and Netscape Navigator in 1994, the web grew at an astonishing rate into a global information network. Even at the early stages of the web's growth, history was all over the web. Amazingly, people rushed to put their own histories on the web and to create sites dedicated to their favorite subjects. Big organizations, such as the National Park Service and the Library of Congress, put up web sites on major historical places and topics. Eventually, new tools, such as JSTOR and ProQuest, opened up full-text facsimiles of journal articles and major newspapers. Research libraries took the lead in developing their catalogs and collections for online access. Teaching everything from the U.S. history survey to specialized research seminars became more dynamic and student-centered. The primary sources of the past were open for students in ways unimaginable only a decade earlier. But just as research techniques and tools were being transformed by the new media, would scholarship also change? If so, how, and in what ways? A whole new field opened up around the concept of digital history as historians tried to experiment with the new medium. They began using new tools that computational systems and networked information made available. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have become prominent because of the wide interest in more spatial approaches to the past, but a whole range of technologies proved useful: Flash animation, XML coding, digital video, blogs, and wikis. Because the medium is still so new in comparison to traditional modes of communication, and the technology is still rapidly changing, we historians have only just begun to explore what history looks like in the digital medium. Increasingly, university departments are seeking scholars to translate history into this fast-paced, widely accessible environment and to work in digital history; however, they have found that without well-defined examples of digital scholarship, established best practices, and, especially, clear standards of review for tenure, few scholars have fully engaged with the digital medium. So, what is digital history and how should we understand its characteristics? Douglas Seefeldt http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/97 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/historyfacpub/97 Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:44:28 PDT Scelerique nefando nomen erit virtus ("Virtue will be the name given to unspeakable crime," 1.667-68). This rhetorically- charged sententia does more than illustrate Lucan's penchant for impassioned embellishment. It also reflects a sophisticated critical structure that resolves an apparent contradiction of momentous importance in Lucan's poem. On the one hand, Lucan chooses to write on the subject of the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, a war that is scelus nefandum: it is more painful, more damaging, and more atrocious than any other Roman battle because it requires the shedding of kindred blood and results in tyranny. On the other, he decides to present that material as epic poetry, which genre traditionally focuses on the praise of virtus (arete), the performance of heroic acts--often at great personal cost--for the sake of homeland, family, and gods. Obviously, civil war cannot produce a hero in the conventional sense of the word because it pollutes both parties: aggressive action is moral depravity, but defensive resistance is little better since it too involves violence against fellow countrymen and thus participation in their crimen. Periere nocentes,/sed cum iam soli possent superesse nocentes ("The guilty died, but at a time when the only possible survivors are also guilty," 2.143-44). By choosing to express an account of civil war through the medium of epic poetry, Lucan mediates the extremes of virtus and scelus. He draws upon the literary tradition of epic, but ingeniously inverts that tradition by removing the individual heroes and concentrating instead on weapon and wound. As a result, he is able to establish that Caesar and Pompey have overturned virtus in favor of personal ambition and selfishness, and thus he condemns civil war. In addition, along the way he leaves hints that the only virtue to be found in such a war is obtained by refusing either to participate or to persevere: the true hero will take his own life to avoid immoral action. Lucan inverts the battlefield aristeia in order to condemn the combatants on both sides of the civil war. He uses the themes of anonymity and nonrecognition, weapon and wound, and the pollution of kindred blood to demonstrate his disapproval of a war waged by a civic body upon itself. Instead, persuaded by the ethical demands of Stoic doctrine, Lucan employs the conventions of epic to show that the only morally correct path to follow is the one trod by Cato: it is far better to take one's own life than to live under a tyrant and be implicated in his evil by cooperation in his rule. Vanessa Gorman