Homespun Radicalism
Jan. 23rd, 2013 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerIt is my duty and my pleasure as a grad student to complain about most of the books that I read for class – to bemoan the low quality of academic writing, to scourge irritating monographs on LJ, and to ruminate the grim possibility that I will spend years of my life writing a thing that no one will ever read.
But sometimes! Sometimes, gold rises above the dross. Here are a couple of books that I’ve read that are thoughtful and witty and fun.
First, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. I must confess that I haven’t read the whole book yet – we’re reading it for class, and I’ve found that specific details fade if I don’t read the chapters in the week they’re assigned. But on the basis of what I’ve read, I’m so confident in this book’s excellence that I recommend it to anyone who has any interest in colonial America, or trade relations (and, intimately related, cultural relations) between European settlers and Native Americans, or material culture in general.
Or indeed, anyone with a taste for nonfiction and also good books. Ulrich’s book reads, in the best way possible, like a novel: she weaves her extensive research together into a rich, fascinating tapestry of colonial and early republican America, much more complicated than the linear story related by history books. This is not a vision of history as a series of unfortunate events: this is history as a place where people lived.
Second, Christopher Lasch’s The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type, which was published in 1965 and is therefore probably very out of date, but never mind. I’m a historian, I don’t believe in out-of-dateness.
(Actually, I think contemporary historians are perhaps rather invested in the idea of out-of-dateness. Must contemplate this fact.)
Lasch’s book is worthwhile not so much for its purported subject matter, although his take on it is interesting and well-researched and, most importantly, well-written – I probably shouldn’t view “well-written” as the sine qua non for historical writing – but because his take on intellectual radicalism challenges the idea of the scholar-as-activist, which is so popular among my cohort.
This sounds, I realize, like Lasch is arguing that the scholar-activist ideal out to be abandoned like a sinking ship, but that’s not what I mean and I don’t think that’s what he meant. He is not arguing that scholars ought to give up on politics under the mistaken impression that knowledge ought to be pursued (and can be pursued) apolitically, but that we need to think more clearly about why we find it so enticing about the ideal of the scholar-activist and what we expect to be able to accomplish through this kind of activism.
After all, writing yet another Foucaultian monograph that will be read by no one but grad students is unlikely to shake the foundations of the kyriarchy. Think bigger, young activists!
But sometimes! Sometimes, gold rises above the dross. Here are a couple of books that I’ve read that are thoughtful and witty and fun.
First, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth. I must confess that I haven’t read the whole book yet – we’re reading it for class, and I’ve found that specific details fade if I don’t read the chapters in the week they’re assigned. But on the basis of what I’ve read, I’m so confident in this book’s excellence that I recommend it to anyone who has any interest in colonial America, or trade relations (and, intimately related, cultural relations) between European settlers and Native Americans, or material culture in general.
Or indeed, anyone with a taste for nonfiction and also good books. Ulrich’s book reads, in the best way possible, like a novel: she weaves her extensive research together into a rich, fascinating tapestry of colonial and early republican America, much more complicated than the linear story related by history books. This is not a vision of history as a series of unfortunate events: this is history as a place where people lived.
Second, Christopher Lasch’s The New Radicalism in America, 1889-1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type, which was published in 1965 and is therefore probably very out of date, but never mind. I’m a historian, I don’t believe in out-of-dateness.
(Actually, I think contemporary historians are perhaps rather invested in the idea of out-of-dateness. Must contemplate this fact.)
Lasch’s book is worthwhile not so much for its purported subject matter, although his take on it is interesting and well-researched and, most importantly, well-written – I probably shouldn’t view “well-written” as the sine qua non for historical writing – but because his take on intellectual radicalism challenges the idea of the scholar-as-activist, which is so popular among my cohort.
This sounds, I realize, like Lasch is arguing that the scholar-activist ideal out to be abandoned like a sinking ship, but that’s not what I mean and I don’t think that’s what he meant. He is not arguing that scholars ought to give up on politics under the mistaken impression that knowledge ought to be pursued (and can be pursued) apolitically, but that we need to think more clearly about why we find it so enticing about the ideal of the scholar-activist and what we expect to be able to accomplish through this kind of activism.
After all, writing yet another Foucaultian monograph that will be read by no one but grad students is unlikely to shake the foundations of the kyriarchy. Think bigger, young activists!
