Added to Keychain

• Key to new office building.
• Key to new office.

By the way, the middle of nowhere isn't so bad. At least it is peaceful (if you don't count the crystal meth-related murder in the next town over). I even saw a deer in the parking lot yesterday, an actual live deer and not one of the hundreds of dead ones that were on the side of the road during my entire journey out here.

The work is much more satisfying already, which was the whole goal of the move in the first place. So, we will see...

Traffic to this 'blog from HNN is down already. I feel a bit less paranoid about what to write and can maybe elaborate later on why academics scare me.

Key Chain as Symbol

My key chain used to hold:

• My car key.
• The little remote control–thingy to lock and unlock the car.
• Flash drive.
• Key to apartment.
• Key to mailbox.
• Key to gate at work.
• Key to building at work.
• Key to office (not mine) where we stashed stuff overnight at work.
• Key to my Human’s car, put on my chain because I once locked us out.

My key chain now holds:

• My car key.
• The little remote control–thingy to lock and unlock the car.
• Flash drive.

Only Human’s key was difficult to give up.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Quite a surprise to wake up, check the SiteMeter (remember the attention whore thing) and find that 27 people have visited my site since yesterday. That’s many many more than have visited the site since I started it. I had to make sure I was checking my own SiteMeter account.

Why so many hits? Being naughty gets you lots of attention! “Naughty” must refer either to my “ambivalence” or to my gratuitous use of profanity (I once had a friend call me the Ph.D. of Profanity). Maybe it’s my fear of academics? (Would that be called “acaphobia?” "Academophobia?") Maybe it's my inability to proofread myself?

I make too much of silly things.

Thank you to those passing through from HNN…I think. “Hello” in any case. You know you can read more than just the "attention whore" and "fuck it" posts, right?

Thank you HNN for moving my listing to the “Many Things” blogs.

On Second Thought

Fuck it. I'll write what I write. This space is mine. Plus, as I think I have written before, even when I don't say anything, my every thought is obvious.

This public/private, personal/professional minefield is just full of grief, isn't it? Plus, academics just scare me on some primal level. Too many bad experiences, I guess.

Yeah. Fuck it.

Uh-oh

Clio Bluestocking Tales has been added to the Cliopatria blogroll at History News Network. (I have my suspicions how!) More frighteningly, according to SiteMeter, people have visited this ‘blog through that link. I’m not sure how I feel about that. I do know that I probably shouldn’t be listed as a historian of specifically "American History" since, although I do write about American history, I don't limit myself to that subject. I am more of a historian who writes about "Many Things." I also know that I am enough of an attention whore to want to keep the link anywhere that it might get traffic.

I am now much more painfully aware of an audience, which will most definitely affect some of what I write. For instance, my coiffure memoirs may not have any more installments for fear that people visiting from HNN will think it is too frivolous. Posts on my story about the child molester may stop because they are becoming more honest and personal. Posts like “Dread” and “Language of Love” may stop for the same reasons. All poetry will cease. I am afraid of using words like “I” and “feel” and anything else that might indicate a less-than-perfectly-rational-and-professional intellect behind their contents.

What links, what details, what particulars should be deleted and omitted, or included, to increase or decrease anonymity? The historian behind the “Clio Bluestocking” name wants credit for the historical posts (at least if they are respected), but doesn’t particularly care to have the historical profession bother with the rest (assuming that they bother at all). In fact, in reviewing some of my posts, I realize that maybe the historian behind "Clio Bluestocking" might not want to be recognized for some of the things she has said in regard to the historical profession, given that some of them might be categorized as using "strong language" and being very "opinionated." Others might get me barred from archives on general principles.

Thus far, only one person who knows me in person knows about this ‘blog. My parents, my friends, anyone who comes into my “real” life do not know. At best, they know that maybe I keep a ‘blog because I mentioned it in passing. Whenever I am tempted to tell someone because of one particular post, I remember that they might not be so thrilled about another particular post (especially if they appear in it).

I have not clearly defined the purpose of this ‘blog in the several months that I have been posting. I’m still trying to figure out exactly why I write here. The only answer that I have so far is that I write to write. I write to keep in practice with the act of writing and with the act of formulating and arranging ideas. The fact that this is a somewhat public forum (more so now) drives this writing more than a journal or simply writing for myself does. The potential for an audience is a nice motivation, maybe more so than an actual audience.

Of course, I am overestimating the interest of this ‘blog to anyone outside of myself. Even I get bored by the posts. I’ll just have to see what happens, which was also part of the investigative mission of this venture in the first place.

The Case of the Missing Ferry

As I write this local history, I have become interested in the issue of transportation because much of the development of this town has hinged upon the location of roads and ferries. According to all of the secondary sources that I’ve found, the first ferry was located along the river near the interstate bridge. If you go to that spot today, the site seems perfectly logical because the river is very narrow at that point. Yet, if you look at the history of the roads and the settlement along the river, this site makes little sense. All settlement lay to the north and to the south of this location. The main road to the river ran north of this location. The next road built lay south of this location. No road ran to this spot until the 1960s, when the interstate was built three hundred years after the establishment of this ferry. Nevertheless, every single secondary source says that this was the spot of the ferry. The ferry house, some secondary sources say, was moved southward into town. One even gives a specific address.

Now, any historian will notice that the sources I have repeatedly qualified these sources as “secondary,” meaning that they are not documents or records of the actual ferry site. These are sources produced by later writers, reporting on their research, much like this ‘blog entry. Any historian will ask, “What do the primary sources say? What contemporary documentation (or archeological evidence) exists for this site?” Therein lies the problem.

The only primary source for this ferry simply says that Mr. B received a monopoly to build and run this ferry for the benefit of the colony. The location, as in many colonial sources, is defined in such a way that several points could fit the description. No other contemporary mention is made of this ferry that I can find. The next documentation of a ferry along this river places it further south, at the end of a road that led directly to the river and in the middle of a small settlement. Again, any historian will ask, “what did the secondary sources say in their footnotes?” Well, the secondary sources do not provide footnotes. At best, they cite “experts” or “local authorities” or “curators at the local historical society” who “say” that this is the location. The work of “experts,” “local historians,” and “the local historical society” do not indicate the documents or even the collections where this information can be found. When asked directly, these same people will refer to one another or say that they “can’t remember the exact source” but they do know that it exists.

If this were a court of law, I do believe most of the evidence in the case of this ferry’s location would be dismissed as “hearsay.” Local tradition and oral history are all tools of historians. The history of many people who were not literate or for events that were not recorded often relies heavily upon these tools; but the tools must be used wisely. No oral history exists of anyone who remembers anything about the location of this ferry. “Tradition” in the shape of the local historical experts seems to “say” that this ferry lay at this point on the river. Yet, evidence does not prove this tradition.

The problem in locating the site of this ferry is only one small example of the problems that I am encountering in basing this local history on factual evidence. More importantly, the continued, unsubstantiated repetition of the location of this ferry by the local historical experts also suggests a huge problem in the field of local history.*

Secondary sources should point the way to primary sources; but these do not. If a historian takes on the task of mining the local repositories for the accurate information, they run into yet another set of problems in that many of the local historical societies do not have the resources to provide adequate access to their collections. Collections must be called from storage, but researchers must know what they are looking for to know which collections to call. Libraries do not tend to have the staff to pull out all of their collections, nor do they have the desire to let outside researchers browse through the collections. Finding aids are inadequate or archaic, and not available to outside researchers. Researchers must rely upon the memory of the librarians and curators, as well as upon their time and ability to search their collections for you for the relevant information. Then, they will point you to the secondary sources and their authors for more help. Research becomes a vicious cycle of this historical hearsay. History is no longer the presentation and interpretation of facts, but the creation and recitation of locale lore and myth.

Unfortunately, the nature of the press for which I am working requires me to contribute to this problem. This is a popular press, and the book is for a popular audience. Footnotes, citations, even a full bibliography take away space from the text and become a financial liability in producing the book. The projected audience sees the footnotes as, to quote a non-academic friend, “this boring shit that gets in the way and that no one reads anyway.” I cannot tell if this attitude is accurate or selling the public short on its ability to learn about the real work of history and to understand the foundation upon which an understanding of history rests. As authors, especially as authors for an audience wider than our own profession, shouldn’t historians (and, by extension, their publishers) have an obligation to their audience to credit them with the ability to understand that the narrative being read is based upon a set of documents stored in a particular location?

Temporarily, I am trying to keep myself honest as a historian by keeping track of my sources and citations as if this were an academic work. I try to indicate in the text whether or not the information is legitimately documented, or based on “tradition.” This does not solve the larger problem, but it does allow me to salve my conscience. I also am finding that I have to tread lightly so as not to alienate the local audience and experts, who could easily pan the book publicly and keep the information from circulating. Remember, I am the carpetbagger and cannot possibly understand the history of the town because I am an outsider, at least as far as the local experts are concerned. These last points, however, should be subjects for a later post.


*Perhaps I should be clear about my classification of "local historians" here, since many academic historians write about local history under the dictum that "all history is local history." By "local historians" or "local historical experts," I mean the non-academic people to whom I referred in my last post on the subject. They are untrained in academic history, tend to be volunteers who have an interest in history, and tend to be uncritical toward most source material. Some are trained in a field related to history, such as museum studies or library science, but those disciplines have differnent issues and different purposes than the historical discipline.

Too Precious By Half; or, Upon Moving at Thanksgiving

My first address in New England was on Pilgrim Road. I am now leaving New England on a Mayflower, at Thanksgiving.

Actually, my stuff is leaving on a Mayflower. I’m leaving on a Mazda. The Mazda is packed as tightly as a Conestoga.

Do movers hate academics more than their usual customers? The sheer number of books and notes seemed to strain their tolerance. Most of my neighbors seem to have a bed, a big t.v., an easy chair or two, and a sofa. I don't have a sofa or a big t.v. I do have fifty boxes of books and six of notes.

This is my fifth move in as many years, my second with movers. My last move took place in a snow storm with only my Human and me for labor. He pressed the neighbors into helping. I haven't seen them but once in the past nine months, although I've heard them behind their door. My last cross-country was done with my arm in a cast. That was my first broken bone ever, earned on my birthday, two weeks before the move. The previous cross-country move and last with movers coincided with torrential rains, flooding, and terrorist attack. I’m thinking of moving into a mobile home in the new place. It seems more fitting. A tornado can take care of the next move.

Maybe I shouldn't joke about the tornado.

How to Write

1. Get caffeine
2. ABC (Apply Butt to Chair)
3. Turn off the t.v..
4. Turn off the music (Chant or anything instrumental excepted)
5. Put a sentence on the page.*
6. Read notes.
7. Put down that novel!
8. No, no e-mail.
9. No internet either.
10. Keep butt on chair.

*The sentence doesn’t have to be good, just there. You can fix it once it is there.

Carpetbagging at the History Mercantile

Some of the problem with the proprietary and mercantilist attitude towards the local history, I think, stems from an unsophisticated view of the discipline. Most of the people I have encountered are not scholars in the academic sense. They would not think of history as a “discipline.” Many are fabulous researchers, able to track down obscure details with dogged determination. All are well versed in the chronology of the region. One or two tell quite good stories, while the others make up for artistry by including encyclopedic amounts of information.

At the same time, they fail in two very important respects that define academic work, and that enable a historical subject to remain fresh regardless of how many times it is revised and retold. The first is known among academics as "transparency," and is what most people refer to as the footnotes, endnotes, and bibliographies. The boring things that few recreational readers bother to notice except as a nuisance. These details, however, bring readers into the work of history. They allow readers to see the evidence, or at least the specific reference to the evidence, on which the historian bases her argument and narrative. They allow the interested to go find these sources and read them for themselves. They grant legitimacy to the author's story.

The second respect is analysis, interpretation, or what the layman usually refers to rather snidely as "revision." This involves the way in which a historian looks at the material. A historian can look at a specific aspect of the economy of a region, such as the historian that I cited who looks at the maritime economy of this town. She can look at a particular group of people, or a particular period of time. She can consider the history from a Marxist standpoint, seeing events as a competition between economic classes, or from a Whiggish standpoint, seeing events as a progression toward a better world. A historian can bring a new understanding or new ideas to the same material from one period of time to another, or carry the existing stories forward to periods of time not yet covered.

More importantly, the analytical aspect of writing history provides a shape to the existing stories. As I mentioned, many of the local historians tell small stories about a particular event or person, or to answer a simple question. For instance, "were there any Chinese people in this town back then?" (Also begging the question of when was "back then"?). They tend to focus on events that happened over 100 years ago. These stories exist in a vacuum, without any context of the events in the town or in the nation at the time, and without any context of the events that happened before or after. Analytical history will connect all of these stories together and describe a "big picture," a pattern of behavior into which this particular story fits.

Academic historians learn how to identify these pattern, and how and why to cite sources. This is part of the grunt work of graduate school. Most local historians are not academics. They are regular people who have an interest in history, and have pursued that interest and accumulated masses of knowledge. Yet, without the awareness that the history is not limited to a list of events and facts, without the awareness that the important part of the craft of history is its interpretation, then this information that they accumulate becomes that limited commodity that must be guarded.

Carpetbagging

“It’s probably better that you aren’t working here when your book comes out,” the Licensing and Reproductions manager told me. I have no idea what she meant by that (actually, I came up with a few theories throughout the day, but they reflect badly upon me). My book is about the town, not the museum; and, other people who work at the museum have published books about both the town and the museum. Also, her opinion that my status as an outsider is actually preferable represents a slight revision from an earlier stance in which she said, “I really didn’t think an outsider should be writing this book.” The issue here that both fascinates and frustrates me is this sense of proprietorship over the history of this particular town.

About four months ago, I seized the opportunity to write a non-scholarly survey history of the small New England town in which I live. I was bored, and overwhelmed with the feeling that my education, career, life and brain were being wasted as a glorified file clerk. A call for book proposals came over one of the listservs to which I subscribe. In a fit of desperation, I replied. Perhaps “desperation” misrepresents the case. I had wanted to write a general history of the town since I first spent a summer here back in 2001. I had also wanted to try writing a popular history book, to see if I could bring academic historical interpretation and shape to the hundreds of stories evident in the landscape of the town. Finally, I had wanted to include the stories that were conspicuously absent from the landscape.

My experience as a historian in relation to other historians up to this point has been fortunate. The communities in which I have found myself have always been helpful to one another. We have suggested resources, discussed ideas, collaborated, and relied upon one another for feedback. Believe it or not, this all took place in academia, the place where “the fights are so vicious because the stakes are so low.” Perhaps naively, I hoped for the same sort of attitude when I began this project. My friends in academia have all given me great suggestions. Some of the repositories here, too, have been incredibly helpful. The others, who form the majority, are what interest me here.

In my previous expereiences, everyone involved was working on different, well-defined topics, even when the subject matter overlapped. For instance, one friend might be working on the union activity in south Texas oil refineries, while another might be looking at the technological developments of those same refineries, while a third might be looking at the transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy in the very same place. No one thought of the other as encroaching on claimed territory.

Here, people seem to define the history of the area as one thing, a whole item, over which only certain people are allowed control. One historian specializes in the nineteenth century maritime history, another has unearthed a wealth of small stories from throughout the area, a third focuses on family histories. Yet, all of these are seen as producing the exact same thing, rather than facets or ways of looking at something much larger.

Everytime someone writes a book or an article, that piece of work is seen as being something that the others are no longer able to study or analyze. History becomes a limited commodity, and the attitude seems to be that the more that people write about the history, the less history there is to write about. Thus, only privileged people are permitted to comment or engage with the history as historians, everyone else should be a passive consumer of this history. These people have a literal genetic connection to the region. Outsiders should go elsewhere. This is a very mercantilist attitude toward history, in addition to being proprietary.

I am an outsider and, to make matters worse, a southerner. I have lived here for only slightly more than a year, and most of that not consecutively. I hold (or, now, held) a lowly position of employment. I am now leaving. To many of the people involved with the history here, I am exploiting one of their main resources, then moving on.

I am a reverse carpetbagger of history.

Last Day of Work

Yesterday was my last day at my job in the museum library. The day was so lovely, one of those crystal days of blue skies and glowing autumn leaves, with warm sunshine and cool breeze. I spent all morning walking around the museum grounds, taking a last look at something that I still do love and saying goodbye to the people who I did like. I got Steve the Gardener to sign his book for me. I said goodbye to Jerry the Security Guard. I said goodbye to Bernie the Volunteer and to Ernie the Groundskeeper. They were all so kind and friendly to me. I even decided to put water under the bridge, or lay to rest resentments, or let bygones be bygones, or forgive, or just put myself in the way of a train wreck and make sure that I ran into someone who had turned out not to be so nice (but that is another story for another time) and make my peace there.

To add something bitchy, on my little walk I learned something interesting from three different sources, one friendly to the other party, one not so friendly, and one relatively neutral. One of my supervisors has, in fact, been very threatened by me since I arrived here. She has worked there fifteen years and fancies herself an intellectual. Then, someone with intellectual credentials shows up with the qualifications and the ability to be fairly useful to the library, and who also lands herself a book deal within six months.

So, she seized the first opportunity to limit me, and continued to do so from then on, as well as harshly judge what little she knows of my work. She's the reason my job was turned into a glorified file clerk position that now doesn't even require a bachelor's degree or any experience in libraries (that's what the job notice for my replacement says). The title now goes from "Manuscripts Assistant" to "Library Technician." That I found upsetting at first, but now I find it piteous.

This person is insecure and wracked with status anxiety. She made a place for herself, I came along and presented a potential threat, the general economic insecurity of all museum employees makes her future uncertain, the attitude of this museum to squander its talented employees makes her future uncertain, and she does not want or cannot imagine a life in another place. I can forgive this. Her behavior was nothing personal against me, and I had already decided that I didn't want to pursue the archives career path anyway.

As I drifted away from the job mentally, I found that I could remember what I do love about the museum and the town, what attracted and held me here, what led me to write a book about the place, and what I will miss with my whole heart. Leaving makes me so sad and regretful, but I think the sadness is necessary because it pushes away some of the anger and bitterness. I don't want to be bitter. I would rather just feel the grief of losing the good things than hold them off with bitterness about the bad things.

My morning helped me to isolate the bad things; and those bad things turned out to be one situation in one place The bad thing was a job that could not even fulfill the most basic requirement of a job, which is allowing me to make a living. I can like the rest of place, and also leave this bad part behind as a small pond with people all fighting to be the biggest fish. I can leave knowing that I'm going to be a player in a bigger pond and that other ponds actually do exist. I can be sad to be leaving the good parts, I can be happy that I'm leaving behind something good (my book) and that I'm going on to bigger things, and I can feel a little sorry for the petty people that I'm leaving behind and forgive them for being so bitchy to me.

So, grief at the loss of the place, at the loss of the good people that I did know, at the loss of some comforting illusions that I held for far too long, has replaced bitterness and anger. As unpleasant and viscerally painful as grief may be, I prefer grief to anger.