The combination of a cold spring (less jogging outside), a research trip to London, and a short fun trip to Rome have necessitated a turn toward healthy lunches. It turns out that I like tabbouleh and fattoush, and because I couldn’t decide which I preferred I decided to mush the two recipes together. This is a very easy recipe, but it’ll take more time than you think it will because of all the chopping.
3 tablespoons bulgur wheat (fine is better but coarse worked okay for me)
5 roma tomatoes, seeded, diced, and drained
2 scallions, sliced thin
1 English cucumber, seeded and diced
The largest bunch of flat-leaf parsley you can find, washed, dried, and picked off all stems (this will take forever)
2 cups mint leaves, washed and dried
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice (I had no allspice so I combined ¼ tsp cloves with 1/8 tsp coriander and 1/8 tsp ginger)
1 teaspoon sumac (I couldn’t find it at the store and didn’t have the patience to order it online before making the salad. If you can find it, I’d probably decrease the lemon by a teaspoon or two)
1/4 teaspoon finely ground black pepper
2 small pitas
Dressing
Salt to taste
1 clove garlic, sliced thin
Juice of 1 lemon (I used a lemon and a half)
2/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
1. Combine the salt and the sliced garlic, and mash until a coarse paste forms. Add the lemon and olive oil and allow to sit while you put the rest of the ingredients together.
2. Heat oven to 400º. Slice pitas into strips, coat lightly with olive oil, and bake in oven for about 10 minutes, until crispy. Allow to cool, then break into small pieces. Set aside. Resist eating all pita chips.
3. Place bulgur in a bowl and pour boiling water over. Set aside until it’s tender but still has a bit of a chewy bite (5-10 minutes), then drain.
4. Chop parsley finely, and cut the mint into thin strips (you can do the parsley early on; the mint will turn black fairly quickly so wait until everything else is assembled).
5. Combine bulgur, tomatoes, scallions, cucumber, and spices. Add in parsley and mint. Pour dressing over. Add pita chips just before serving and toss.
I added goat cheese at the end, because I’m a cheese fiend. Some things can’t be helped.
(Sources: I fiddled with this Tabbouleh recipe on David Lebovitz’s blog, and this recipe for fattoush)
- Tabboush
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raherrmann- May 19th, 12:28
- Digging Out my Cannibal Girl Hat
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- raherrmann
- May 2nd, 14:28
So, funny story. When I first submitted my article on cannibalism and the Starving Time at Jamestown to the William and Mary Quarterly, the piece strongly argued against any occurrence of cannibalism. When I got my readers’ reports back, Editor Chris Grasso pointed out that I didn’t really have the evidence to convincingly make that claim. He said that he’d accept the article only if I agreed to temper the argument—which was really fine with me because the main point of the essay was to ask why the stories of cannibalism mattered, not to argue for or against the existence of cannibalism in colonial Virginia.
And yet. Even after publishing the article I remained a bit doubtful of the veracity of all those early reports of cannibalism. I came to the private conclusion that Jamestown colonists probably did eat the bodies of a dead Indian and those of hanged men, but to my mind the story of the salted wife seemed completely exaggerated.
Lo and behold, a slew of recent news articles have appeared following the discovery of a 14-year-old Virginia girl whose bones apparently “prove” the existence of cannibalism in Jamestown.
And here I am, still decidedly skeptical.
To be sure, some of these articles offer convincing evidence for cannibalism. The point that “Jane’s” bones were found in a trash pit along with the bones of snakes and horses is persuasive, especially because they are the first bones to appear alongside the refuse of other Starving Time-era edible items. I also agree with the idea that people would have viewed tongue and brains as perfectly tasty forms of offal insofar as animals were concerned, and don’t find it all that weird that people might’ve gravitated toward those portions of Jane’s body. The cuts on her skull (and especially on her tibia) and the way these pieces describe them try to make a strong case for the fact that people made them after Jane’s death.
Here’s the thing: I’m still not sure that any of these pieces successfully prove the existence of cannibalism.
In the Jamestown Rediscovery Youtube video, Dr. Douglas Owsley suggests that the butchering marks were made after death. But the Smithsonian release clearly states that “cause of death could not be determined from the remains, estimated to be less than 10 percent of the complete skeleton.” From that assertion it seems just as reasonable to suggest that the marks could have been made during Jane’s life. Who knows? She was a high-born girl. Maybe like so many of the gentlemen at Jamestown, she was hoarding food, someone killed her to get it, and then that person unskillfully removed her face and dumped her in a trash pit to hide the body.
There are other points that give me pause, beyond the circumstances surrounding Jane’s death. Although all of these articles prove the removal of specific portions of Jane’s body, none of them convincingly demonstrate that people consumed those body parts. All the news reports I’ve seen mention the butchering of Jane’s tongue, brain, the skin around her face, and the area around her tibia—presumably her calf. The USA Today link asserts that skin was a traditional cuisine from the 17th century, and I just don’t see that argument translating to this particular case. Why eat the skin, or even choice bits like tongue and brains, when people had access to fattier, more nourishing portions? We’re not talking deep-fried foodie chicken skin here; we’re talking severe nutritional deficiencies, so why the focus on such measly parts? In this respect especially, I think I’d need to wait on further evidence regarding consumption of other parts of Jane’s body before I believe that people ate her.
In addition, why are there no primary sources that cite the cannibalization of this girl? She’s no salted wife, no dead Indian, and no hanged man. I’ve written a bit on how some colonists like John Smith and George Percy sensationalized such stories of cannibalism, and find it a bit odd that they wouldn’t have included the story of the cannibalization of a high-born girl. Wouldn’t that have been much more “lamentable” than the death of a lazy colonist (at least in Percy’s interpretation)? The future of the colony could have rested on Jane as well as other women’s capacity to bear children. There were, as these news stories all assert, myriad accounts of the Starving Time, and I’ve never seen any primary source account that even closely matches a description in keeping with what this anthropological find describes.
None of these speculations negate the severity of the Starving Time—but neither do they convince me that cannibalism took place.
Of course, one of the lovely things about being a historian is the forgivingness of the profession. We are allowed to say that we’ve been wrong. So maybe that’s that: maybe Jim Horn, Bill Kelso, and Douglas Owsley are right, and I’m wrong—but as of this moment, I’m not completely swayed.
Edit: You can hear me briefly talking about cannibalism on the BBC radio show World Have Your Say (the segment I'm on starts at 40:35)
- The Elusive Task of Tailoring
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- raherrmann
- April 22nd, 11:39
I wrote a fair number of cover letters while I was ABD this year. At the start of job season, I remember feeling particularly perplexed by the idea of tailoring my cover letters. How much was too much? Where in the letter was I supposed to do it? And where else could I insert tailoring into the remainder of my job materials?
I thought it might be helpful to write up a post describing the cover letter that I generally used, and to point out the spots where I tried to tailor. I started with Karen Kelsky’s cover letter template, but then I sent it on to history colleagues for discipline-specific feedback. After that, it went through a round of revisions before I asked my adviser to look it over. What follows is a cross between a cover letter template, and a discussion of how I drafted my letters. I hope it’s useful for those of you entering the market in the fall.
[letterhead: to avoid having to print and then scan all your letters, you can make a digital copy using this how-to over at ProfHacker. Or you can do what I did: 1) Scan page of institutional letterhead. 2) Save as JPEG. 3) Open in Paint and crop until just the letterhead part remains. 4) Open Word document and insert and draw textbox. 5) Paste letterhead inside. 6) Change formatting of text box so that the outline is invisible. 7) Move letterhead around until it looks like a reasonably close copy of original.]
Date [note: when January comes, don’t be an airhead like me and forget to switch the year]
Physical address with name of search chair if known
Dear Professor X [alternately: To the Selection Committee],
Please accept my application for [job title]. I am currently [your status—I listed myself as a PhD candidate, but I also gave my current affiliation as a fellow], where I am [identify the type of historian you are—I’d probably identify as an early Americanist specializing in food and race in the Revolutionary Atlantic. My adviser warned me not to change this summary line too much, so if you have to alter it significantly to justify applying for a job, maybe reconsider that application]. After [find a brief way to describe your progress on the dissertation, IE “after a year of writing, I have had a completed draft since May 2013” or “after visiting X number of archives, I have made significant progress outlining my dissertation, and”], I will defend my dissertation in [as early as your adviser will sign off on what you put in this letter].
My project, “[dissertation title],” [Describe your dissertation in the broadest strokes possible, including its main historiographic contributions].
[Longer paragraph on the diss, pitched to the non-specialist on the search committee. Lay out the contributions as clearly as possible—I think I used three points. I have a line in this paragraph about the interdisciplinary nature of the project, so if the job was for a specialized post (as opposed to just a first half of U.S. history survey job) I usually changed the wording here to explain how my work contributed to, say Native American or environmental historiography].
[Very short paragraph on the second project. You don’t need to be sold on carrying out the work for this project, but this paragraph needs to accomplish two things. 1) It needs to convince the search committee that you’re not a one-trick pony, and that the second project will grow organically from the dissertation without taking on the air of Dissertation, Volume II, and 2) It needs to convince the specialist on the search committee that you’re aware of the direction of your field. This second task is trickier, because you want your second project to sound current without sounding cliché. As far as tailoring goes, IF and ONLY if your second project relates to a center at the campus to which you are applying, mention it here—but don’t stretch the project to fit].
[The “Why I’m awesome” paragraph. This is the hardest part of the letter to write because you really have to sell yourself, and some people will say you don’t need it—but I disagree. I used this paragraph to summarize the high points of my CV, assuming that some selection committees would read my cover letter first. I included publications and major fellowships, as well as tentative publication plans for the dissertation and a couple articles. In most cases, the writing sample I sent was a draft of one of these two articles, so I mentioned that here (but I’m increasingly of the opinion that a published article that doesn’t relate to the dissertation is a better choice of writing sample simply because it’s published). I had a line about my writing for The Chronicle, but if you’re part of a big group blog, you could talk about that, too. I also included a line about service. Finally, I spotlighted some of the things I’ve done that might be considered part of the digital humanities. I did the latter because everyone department is interested in DH, and ESPECIALLY if the search is NOT a DH search, committees like to see that you’re aware of/contributing to the field.]
[The teaching paragraph. A few opportunities to tailor here. If you’re applying to a SLAC, this paragraph goes right after your first paragraph on the dissertation. If it’s a research school, the paragraph goes here. For the bigger schools you will need an extra line about teaching graduate students, so make sure you know whether the school offers an MA, a PhD, or both. If the application materials require a teaching philosophy, you can also tailor there by adding or removing a paragraph on how teaching graduate students is different from teaching undergrads. Because I didn’t have much experience, I tried to explain how the little experience I did have had yielded transferrable skills, and then I described several ideas in which I’d use food to teach early American history. If the job ad mentioned a certain kind of teaching, I included a line about how my teaching experience would enable me to teach that way at their institution.]
[The why I want to work in your department paragraph (for god’s sake, get the name of the school right—but if you don’t, know that I’ve also screwed this one up. It happens). People might disagree with me here, but I decided not to list the names of faculty in my cover letters. Instead, I opted to identify the department’s strengths, and to say that I wanted to work in a particular place by highlighting faculty interests that overlapped with mine. (Note that for bigger departments, finding out this information took about an hour to an hour and a half for each letter). Name the courses you are willing to teach, IN ADDITION to the ones mentioned in the job ad. Be strategic about this line; if there’s an established faculty member who teaches Native American history, maybe don’t mention that you will teach Native American history. If, however, you desperately want to teach Native American history, and said faculty member focuses on, say, the Ohio Valley, you could offer to teach a course on Southeastern Native American history. Next, do a bit more research on the school. I generally checked to see if a school had any food classes, early modern seminars, or race seminars that I could contribute to (CONTRIBUTE TO, not “participate” in—you’re a potential colleague, not a grad student). Find a way to describe your enthusiasm to make those connections. If it’s a small college, they might not have any such seminars—focus instead on how you will help history majors become part of a scholarly community and get jobs. If you have any training preparing students to think about history jobs that don’t require going to grad school (such as public history training), this is the place to say so—departments like being able to sell job security to their undergrads.]
[The sign-off paragraph. Say you’re attending AHA. If you’re presenting, even better. This line lets departments know that you will be there so they don’t have to wonder. If they haven’t asked for writing samples or syllabi and you still have room, offer to provide them. Thank them for considering your materials.]
[Signature]
All this needs to fit on two pages, which isn’t to say that I fit it all using 12-point Times New Roman. I opted to piss off older faculty members with poor eyesight by fiddling with fonts and margins, rather than break the “no cover letter should exceed two pages” rule.
Note that my version of a cover letter requires tailoring in several paragraphs, which can seem time-consuming compared to some. But once you have this letter prepped for a research school and a SLAC, you should still be able to copy and paste accordingly.
Disagreements? Comments? Additional advice for job-seekers? Have at it!
- England-bound
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- raherrmann
- April 1st, 19:15
Just about six years ago, I accepted an offer from the University of Texas at Austin to enter their graduate program in history. Shortly before I moved west to Texas to begin a new life, my friend Lila and I took a short trip to London.
It was my first time there, and I remember loving all of it. The feeling of the world’s most amazing nap after battling an afternoon of jet lag; the way you realize that you can find your way around if you can only remember the way the Thames curves; the various markets; the Great British Beer Festival and its attendant consequences the next morning (we were 22, after all).
As I began my graduate work at UT, I wasn’t entirely sure what I wanted to write about, but I quickly discovered just how much I liked manuscript research. As subsequent research trips took me back to London, I made an effort to chronicle them here.
This blog has remained almost entirely silent this year, for a couple of reasons. First, because I entered the home stretch of dissertation-writing (side note: it’s defended and submitted—hooray!), and couldn’t seem to muster any spare energy to write on things academic. Second, and more importantly, because I was on the job market.
When I let myself get really into it, I feel as if I could write something here every day, and I knew that I needed to resist that tendency while on the market. There are just too many things to impulsively react to: the submission of your first cover letter, the discovery of your first cover letter typo, the first wikijection, the first request for more materials, the phone/Skype interview, the AHA interview invitation, and so on. Not to mention the many, many, (many!) rejections.
I like to go back through this blog and re-read it sometimes. I didn’t really want to be able to re-live my time on the market. At least not in this venue (though I’m happy to talk about it with anyone entering the market in the fall). It’s not that it was an extended period of utter despair (though it was, for the last month or so); it’s just that at the end of it, I’d jumped through a lot of hoops that simply didn’t matter, and I didn’t see the point of recording my passage through each of them.
The main takeaway is that it’s over. In a move that feels very full-circle, I’ve accepted a job at the University of Southampton, in England, where I’ll be a lecturer—their equivalent of an assistant professor—in colonial American history. Marc has accepted a lectureship at the University of Exeter, so we will be 2.5 hours apart.
I am still stunned, overwhelmed, and relieved.
And I look forward to getting back into writing here as I embark on new adventures.
- Running the @SHEARites Twitter Feed on the Eve of #SHEAR12
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- raherrmann
- July 18th, 2012
I’ve been running the Twitter feed for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic since March, and now that the conference is about to kick off—and is including a Saturday session on SHEAR and Social Media, which I am sadly unable to attend—I thought I’d write up some brief thoughts about managing an institution’s Twitter feed.
In my mind, the point of getting SHEAR on Twitter was to establish a preliminary social media presence, and to provide a way of disseminating information about the organization, the conference, and the interests of its members as those interests related to the early American Republic.
The first thing to consider was who to follow. In the interest of reaching a wide audience, I followed many of the historians and lit scholars that I follow from my personal Twitter feed, @Raherrmann. I also followed almost everyone who started following @SHEARites, with a few notable exceptions. @SHEARites does not follow you if 1) You have a private account, and 2) Your tweets, at a glance, have nothing to do with the early American Republic. I rationalized the first omission by arguing that the point of having an account was to create an online community of scholars. Although they may not realize it, people whose feeds are private, or “locked,” have made it so that no one can retweet their tweets. As far as I was concerned, that made it impossible for @SHEARites to forward along anything interesting that they tweeted about. The second exclusion is related to the first; if you’re not tweeting about the early American Republic, you’re not producing reproducible content for SHEAR and its followers. I’m thrilled that you’re following the account, but I don’t feel obligated to follow you.
I really hope that people at the social media session come prepared to talk about ideas for expanding on the things that I’ve done with Twitter, and what Mark Cheathen (@markcheathem) has done with the SHEAR Facebook page, as well as what the working group (which also includes Caleb McDaniel [@wcaleb] and Beth Salerno) proposed to SHEAR in the fall of 2011. In brief, here’s how I think @SHEARites has been and will be useful:
1. It’s fostered a pre-conference discussion so that people are informed and excited about upcoming events. I created a conference hashtag (#SHEAR12) to announce when the conference program went live, when pre-registration was closing, and when attendee @Sarahschuetze located a good last-minute conference rate.
2. During the conference, people can follow along with what’s going on, even if they’re stuck at home—or better yet, attending another panel. You can search Twitter for the hashtag in order to see what people are saying about the conference. As of today I’ve also created an archive of conference-related tweets. Attendees will have to worry less about overlapping panels, and although some people have argued that having a conference hashtag on Twitter decreases attendance, non-attendees from last year’s SHEAR conference said they were planning on coming to the Baltimore meeting after reading the tweets.
3. Other users have used the hashtag to ask who’s going to the conference, make airport-to-hotel transportation plans, and to set up meetings. Need a cab buddy from the airport? Check Twitter to see who’s recently landed. Also: network! So far, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and Pickering & Chatto have announced which editors will be available, and which books will be on sale at discounted rates. If that’s too much seriousness for you, @Mann_Horace has announced the location of the annual meeting of the SHEAR Anti-Temperance Society.
So these are just a few ruminations on how I think Twitter has been helpful—I hope others will contribute to the discussion in the comments, but especially at the special Saturday session. I’d say I’m sorry that I can’t attend, but I don’t really have to be sorry; I’m on Twitter, after all.
- In Which Things Have Happened
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- raherrmann
- June 17th, 2012
A couple weeks ago I turned in the first full draft of my dissertation, and promptly fell off the map. I didn’t disappear the way that the Rachel Herrmann of, say, 2007 might have vanished. I was not completely sleep-deprived, crazed, or suffering from the over-consumption of 1:30 a.m. grilled cheeses eaten each night after the library closed. No, the completion of the draft was sort of anticlimactic in the sense that I knew it wasn’t as polished or cogent as I wanted it to be; that I’d pick it up again in the near future; and that I’d done a good enough job for the present. The vacation I took was one away from the physical draft, from the dissertation chapters on my computer, and from the detritus of my office and the insides of my brain.
Still, I wouldn’t be a grad student if I wasn’t finding some way to do work. I drove to DC to pick up Marc, where we spent time researching at the Library of Congress. Obviously, delicious, delicious DC food made side appearances in the form of falafel, mussels, mini-raviolis baked with cheese, Thai, and Ethiopian, along with a whole lot of rhubarb snacking cake. Next we went to Richmond, where he went to the Policy History Conference, while I pretended to go to the Policy History Conference, but actually ended up fleeing to the Virginia Historical Society seeking the solace of eighteenth-century history. I managed to make it back to a pho place I liked, and we tried some of the newer, hipper Richmond restaurants. Finally, we made it out to the beach, where I commenced panicking about the job market between rainy jogs on the sand. Cover letters were drafted. Answers to the “So What?” question were condensed into pithy paragraphs of awesomeness. Passive voice was employed to emphasize ambivalence about the coming year of chaos.
So. The coming year. I suppose that now is as good a time as any to share the fact that I will be in New Haven come September, as a Smith Richardson fellow at Yale’s International Security Studies. Apparently I have convinced those fine policy-minded folks that eighteenth-century food diplomacy has enough to say to their ideas about diplomacy. I think it will be challenging and a bit scary, and really good, in a way, to have to explain my work to people who don’t automatically assume that early American studies is important (see “Answers to the ‘So What?’ question,” above).
Between now and September I’m finishing up in Philly, going to NYC for the ASFS conference, and going to SHAFR in Hartford. And then, because I missed cross-country driving (?!), I am headed to Austin for the summer before I drive back to the East Coast for the year. As a side note, if anyone knows of any New Haven sublets, do be kind and get in touch. It’d give me one less thing to panic about. And we all know that I could handle striking a few items off of the list.
- In Which I am Not a Pantser
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- raherrmann
- April 14th, 2012
Every time that I write a piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education, I read the comments pretty closely. Perhaps because most of my previous columns have been on light, funny stuff, the comments have never climbed higher than the low teens, and most of them have been neutral to positive. Writing about writing, it turns out, seems to provoke a lot more people.
Now, I know that the commenters on the Chronicle site can be a cantankerous bunch, and for the most part I wasn’t bothered by the snark. What shocked me, though, was how many people thought that they knew my writing style, simply because I’d written about some of the writer’s block that comes with writing a dissertation. One comment in particular proclaimed that fiction writers “divide themselves into two camps—‘plotters’ and ‘pantsers.’ Plotters come up with the plot first, equivalent to writing from an outline; pantsers ‘fly by the seat of their pants.’” “Rachel Herrmann is obviously a ‘pantser,’” this commenter concluded (as an aside, she gets a million and a half points for spelling my name right).
Although I do sometimes feel as if I’m wandering through a dense fog while writing my chapters, I write from an outline nearly all of the time. Each chapter gets its own set of 400-500 index cards, which then get organized into a chronological, and then a chronological-thematic outline of 3-6 pages. It was interesting to see how many people weighed in on whether or not they thought I wrote from an outline, and then to read about what people do for their own work.
And that got me thinking about how historians write dissertations. We probably are divided into two camps, though I’d never call us plotters and pantsers. There are those of us who feel that they must know all of the secondary literature before they begin researching. They wade into the archives with an idea of an argument in mind, and stand ankle-deep in sources, skimming the ones they need from the top. Then, there are those of us who dive head first into the primary sources, open our arms wide, and sort through it all once we resurface. Oh dear. It seems I have inadvertently come up with a swimming metaphor. Let’s run with it for a moment.
I am a diver, and I think this has to do with the fact that I study food and the Revolution at a time when most historians are moving back toward the Seven Years’ War or ahead to the War of 1812, and most food studies people are interested in present-day issues of food security and regulation. Which is to say that there were very few books on Native American and African foodways during and after the American Revolution at the time I was reading for comps. To clarify: there were plenty of books, but food studies was at a point where many of these books were descriptive rather than argument-driven. I could have read as many monographs as I wanted on tomatoes or beans or fish or salt, and still been ill-prepared to tackle the archives with an argument in mind. I ran into the opposite problem with history books from my time period: far too many with no one book focusing on food in a way that was going to help me form an archival plan of attack.
So I dove in. And that part of the research process was indeed messy and disorganized. Maybe if I hadn’t been lucky enough to get the McNeil Center fellowship this year, I would have been more familiar with the secondary literature before I started writing. Although I will have my first full draft written by May, I’m still working out my argument for each of my chapters, and that feels worrisome. On the other hand, I think I've already shown that food is important and has been neglected. I know that in my revisions I need to pay more mind to why it's more important than X, Y, and Z, and to think about how it speaks to all the historiography I am still trying to juggle.
So I guess what I’m saying is that I’m looking forward to taking a breath or two in May, but am also excited about the chance to take another gulp of air, put my head down, and keep on swimming.
- The Conference with the Ice Cream Sundae Bar
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- raherrmann
- February 27th, 2012
It’s now been two years since I was writing grant proposals for dissertation research, reading for comps, and ruminating on why I think that the study of food is a whole lot more than something fun to do. And yet somehow, this weekend was the first time I’ve made it to a conference focused solely on food. In a moment I’ll get to why it was a serious, engaging, and thought-provoking conference. But for a moment, I want you to close your eyes (read the next few lines first, obviously), and picture this:
Mid-afternoon on the final day of a two-day conference, and a speaker is in the middle of a sentence when the sound of a squeaky cart interrupts her thoughts.
“Well, it looks like the ice cream is here,” she laughs.
“ICE CREAM?” I think to myself. “Surely not. That seems...well that seems delicious, but they wouldn’t really be feeding us ice cream...would they?”
Luckily we just had the remaining Q&A to power through before attendees discovered that, true to organizer Robyn Metcalfe’s promises, there was ice cream at this conference. And not just ice cream, but a full-stop ice cream bar.
Imagine academics in sweater vests and suits, stockings and heels, gleefully pouring caramel and fudge sauce onto generous scoops of chocolate and vanilla ice cream. See the sprinkles, chopped peanuts, and crushed Oreos laid out in deep white bowls. Try to envision the man with a tie going in for two, three, four maraschino cherries, and a second dollop of whipped cream. Marvel at the line that stretches all the way around the ice cream table and out the door. It was fantastic, and I’ve concluded that all conferences stand in dire need of ice cream bars. The sugar rush during the final roundtable was incredible.
That said, Food and the City itself was wonderful. I’m used to having to spend the first forty-five seconds of every conference paper explaining why I study food and why historians should pay more attention to it. I didn’t have to do that here because the importance of food was assumed, and instead it was a time for paying close attention to how people are using different methodologies and approaches for studying their subject matter.
I took different things away from the various panels, though I’ll only go into some of them here. Ken Albala’s keynote was a good example in giving a jam-packed, scholarly, and engaging talk that covered a lot of chronological ground in talking about the push and pull between fancy and rustic cooking (Rachel Greenberger’s talk was the counterpart—a self-proclaimed “non-academic,” she managed to really convey her enthusiasm for food reform, and the urgency she feels is necessary to get people involved). I also liked that Ken’s talk didn’t need to point out that using cookbooks to describe what people ate in the past can be a dangerous historical practice; most people seem by now to know how to use cookbook sources in their analyses. For example, he talked about how he could say that he thought one seventeenth-century (?) farmer/gardener/cook definitely tried the recipes he wrote about because of the detail the author used in his descriptions. Cookbooks and how-to manuals can be great sources, but they need to be used judiciously in our scholarship.
I thought that Chrissie Reilly’s talk on the cheesesteak in Philadelphia was probably the most entertaining of the conference, and it was a good reminder that it’s important to stay engaged with the humor inherent in some of our research. At the same time, I still stand by my assertion that I don’t want to produce single-commodity studies. Maybe I’m just that much of an old-fashioned stickler of a historian who can’t find the answer to the “So What?” question when asked “Why do cheesesteaks matter?” I suppose that the answer might be “Why do we need a ‘So What?’ question to study the things that amuse us?” But for my part, I will continue to start with the questions that historians ask about the American Revolution, and try to see how food fits in. In a way I thought that Rajbir Purewal Hazelwood’s talk on food and the London Punjabi community paired really well with Reilly’s talk, because she was bemoaning how curry has become a blanket food for describing the absorption of Indian foodways in London. She suggested that Indian food in London was and continues to be very regional, and that Chicken Tikka Masala doesn’t (and shouldn’t) represent the Indian diaspora in the UK.
The conference got me thinking about the methods I use and the type of historian I am—I suppose the type of scholar I am, since this conference was comprised of more than historians. I’m a hardcore cultural historian, I think. I love a good representative quote, and I have stacks and stacks of index cards with primary sources, but I have no database. I have no charts, no graphs, no maps, no numbers. People at this conference had gone to remarkable lengths to accomplish the building of these tools, and I was duly impressed. Chin Jou’s work on post-WWII Jim Crow New York described a meticulous combing through the NAACP’s records of dining experiments and statistics. Julie Smith had clearly spent hours putting together her maps of markets. So the digital humanities were present, too, mostly in the form of people using Geo Mapping in their research to chart the growth of urban markets, and in some cases, distribution routes. I’m sure Joe Adelman will be sad to hear that none of the presenters got questions about their maps during their Q&A sessions, either. But it did make me think more about how to incorporate these devices, if not in the dissertation, at least in the second project.
And I suppose the final take-away was the modern-day connections, which I still feel woefully uninformed about. In partial remedy for this problem, I am delighted to say that I won a book in the book raffle, and will be reading Jennifer Cockrall-King’s Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution sometime in the near future. But what I didn’t know was partially filled in by the conference’s final roundtable. Brandy H.M. Brooks (@bhmbrooks) did a far better job than I did in tweeting about that roundtable, so her tweets will suffice here.
Brooks covered Sarah Phillips’s talk about Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, and pointed out that “Sinclair's utopia was not back to the land, but highly mech[a]nized, large-scale farms giving unlimited food supply.” Phillips was essentially asking, “do we pursue the local, community ag vision or the human-labor-free machine farm to feed the future?” Those participants’ conclusion seemed to be that although reformers may bemoan the food industry, it’s here to stay for some time yet. Perhaps the road to reform, they argued, needn’t be paved with this people vs. machines debate. Organic isn’t always better, and industrial farms (such as those depicted in Upton Sinclair’s final, utopian vision at the end of The Jungle), aren’t always evil.
Food for thought (groan), indeed. In case you’re interested, I’ve compiled a spreadsheet of the tweets from the conference using this handy template and how-to.
- My Triumph over the Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Chapter
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- raherrmann
- February 13th, 2012
Okay, so let’s not get ahead of ourselves and call this chapter a “triumph.” A triumph it is not. My success here has to do with pulling myself out of the deep dark hole of writer’s block. Back up again. Not writer’s block, but the feeling that everything I was writing was terrible. No good. Very bad, even.
The above paragraph is an example of the writing process I went through with this last chapter. I had to state what my argument wasn’t about. Then, I had to find my argument. And then, I had to revise it into something that resembled acceptable prose. At this stage the chapter is no longer a terrible, no good, very bad chapter, but it’s not a great chapter. The chapter is good enough, for now. And by “good enough” I mean that I’ve sent it off to my adviser so that she can return it to me with lots of tracked changes. Sometimes, I need to get rid of something for a while; I’m just glad that I’ve finally reached the point of being able to do so with slippery Chapter 4.
At the same time, it’s nice to discover that I do go through a writing pattern—that I have to start out writing those shitty sentences before I figure out what the hell it is I’m trying to say, and that eventually, it becomes fun again as I weed through the nonsense and pick out the sentences that do what I want them to do. This chapter was especially frustrating to write because it took me a lot longer to get to that last part (until yesterday afternoon, in fact). I’d like to have a little more time fiddling with the chapter, but I also think some distance will be good. And, you know, there are ten million other things on my to-do list. Still, it’s nice to know that the writing process still works the same way, even if that process unfolds along a different timeline depending on the chapter at hand.
So for now, I will close my eyes and metaphorically run up the steps of the Art Museum, waving my hands in celebration of my triumph over ugly paragraphs.
- A sonnet for my unborn dissertation, written on the occasion of a bout with Writer’s Block
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- raherrmann
- January 24th, 2012
I first conceived you in a panicked night,
With papers, books, and apps strewn on my floor.
The notion of you bloomed, to my delight,
Then said I, “Self, procrastinate, no more!”
I dreamt a dream of artful, crafted prose
That grew into a stunning monograph.
Yet then I slept no more, and terror rose:
The Cord of Life now strangles, stunts your path.
Your prose is dense, the chapters long indeed,
But I must persevere, however slow.
I’ll slog through murky sources as I breed;
Today, perhaps, I’ll grow your pinky toe.
And to ensure I birth my chapters fine,
Away I’ll go, to nourish you with wine.
