The Kansas Gold Rush

Dan Allosso

Map of Kansas and Nebraska Territories, 1854

Kansas! For most East and West-coasters, it’s one of those flyover states.  Even for Midwesterners like me, it’s most frequently remembered as a long flat stretch of driving, on the way to someplace else.  With apologies to Kansans, for many other Americans Kansas is either a band from the 70s (“Point of Know Return,” remember? “Dust in the Wind”?), the gray place Dorothy lived before being swept into Technicolor Oz, or the scene of an early, bloody civil war that helped push the nation over the brink between the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act and statehood in 1861.

So I was surprised today, when I discovered in a January, 1859 Ranney Letter that “more than two hundred persons in this county” in southern Michigan were planning to go to Kansas in search of gold the following summer.  It hadn’t occurred to me–maybe because I’m familiar with the flat, drive-through Kansas you can see on current maps–that the Nebraska and Kansas Territories extended to the Rocky Mountains and contained quite a bit of what is now Colorado and Wyoming, as well as a big section of the northern foothills (including the Black Hills) that in 1861 would become the Dakota Territory.

In other words, Gold Country.  Between 1854 and 1861, Kansas and Nebraska were part of The West in a way they no longer are.  Fort Laramie, the site of the 1868 Treaty between the U.S. and the Lakota, Dakota, and Arapaho nations, was originally in the Nebraska Territory.  Pikes Peak, now 100 miles south of Denver and 30 miles west of Colorado Springs, was in Kansas.

“How did I miss this?” I thought, with some alarm.  But when I flipped through the pages of books from the “Western” part of my library, such as Patricia Nelson Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest, I find a Kansas and Nebraska embroiled in Stephen Douglas’s expansionism.  Similarly, on my “Impending Crisis” shelf, David Potter’s book of that name devotes many pages to the 1854 Act and to the Lecompton Constitution.  But Lecompton is in the northeastern corner of present-day Kansas, and Stephen Douglas was from Illinois.  The free-state revolutionaries of Topeka and the Bleeding Kansas border war with Missouri were likewise situated on the eastern borders of the present state.

Published by Oliver Ditson, Boston, 1856

On the pages of the Kansas Historical Society’s website, I learned that the people of Kansas were apparently divided in 1859 over whether their state should be a “Big Kansas” including the western gold region, or a “Little Kansas” without it.  Kansas entered the Union in January, 1861, during the (extremely) lame-duck session between Abraham Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, with a population of 107,206.  William Seward had introduced a bill in the Senate in February, 1860, to admit “Little Kansas” under its free-state Wyandotte Constitution, which fixed the border at 102 degrees west longitude, excluding the Rockies.  The bill was defeated by Democrats who opposed Kansas as a free state; but they also objected to the “Little Kansas” borders, saying the Wyandotte convention had exceeded its authority in changing the territorial boundaries.  Were they afraid that the country around Pikes Peak would soon have sufficient population (the target was 93,000) to become yet another free state?

It just goes to show, I guess, how much complex and interesting detail lies just under the surface of the broad brushstrokes we use to integrate local and regional histories into American History.  The Kansas State Historical Society’s site includes a reprint of a 1967 article from their journal written by Calvin A. Gower of St. Cloud (MN) State University, titled “‘Big Kansas’ or ‘Little Kansas,’” which describes the Pikes Peak gold rush and the controversy over Kansas’ borders.  We’re lucky to have more and more of these resources online at our fingertips.  Does their availability obligate us to rethink the relationship between the broad strokes and the details–at least for the regions where we live, write, and teach?

Red Meat

Dan Allosso
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I was thinking about writing a short post about all the academic history I’ve been finding at the bottom of some pretty popular books recently.  Alfred Crosby’s ideas about the Colombian exchange in Charles Mann’s 1491, for example.  Or Vaclav Smil’s story of the Haber-Bosch process for fixing atmospheric nitrogen, from his Enriching the Earth, in Simon Fairlie’s 2010 book, Meat: A Benign Extravagance.  Maybe it’s no coincidence that these are both canonical environmental history texts (they were both on my field list, thanks to my EH advisor, Ted Melillo).  Perhaps because their interest is on the edge of science, readers of popular books on environmental issues are more open to the fairly dense technical arguments.  Maybe it’s easier to move ideas from academic books to popular.  But I’m not so sure.  Science writers often have a lot of skill taking excruciatingly complicated stuff and making it comprehensible to the rest of us.  Michio Kaku, Brian Greene, Matt Ridley, and Colin Tudge are just a few of the names that jump to mind.  Richard Dawkins was Oxford’s “Professor for Public Understanding of Science” until 2008.  We could probably learn a thing or two from these authors.

And Simon Fairlie’s book is part of this tradition.  Fairlie is a British farmer and writer, and a former editor of the British environmental journal The Ecologist.  His book about meat’s place in the food chain draws heavily on Vaclav Smil’s work on nitrogen fixation, and digs a little more deeply into the downside of the green revolution Smil describes.  But the thing that really jumped out at me as I read Meat was Fairlie’s response to the famous food-mile study that stunned us all a few years ago. 

You may recall the article “Food Miles and the RelativeClimate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States,” written by Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon for Environmental Science & Technology in 2008.  It made headlines outside of the science community because they concluded that “eating local” was not a very good way to reduce greenhouse gases.  Eliminating red meat from your diet one day a week, they said, would reduce your carbon footprint more than going 100% local.  This came as a shock to many people who had embraced local farms and markets as a way of living more sustainably.  I was TA-ing an Environmental History course when the article became a news item, so I had my students read it and discuss.

There are a number of possible responses to a claim like this, and the students were able to see many of them.  They pointed out the social benefits of farmers’ markets and local food, the fact that most Americans get their meat from feedlot-style animal husbandry*, and they concluded that they might get even better results if they did bothrather than choose to be local or to be part-time vegetarians.  Fairlie touches on each of these points, and then he drops his bomb.  What the study doesn’t deal with – what we overwhelmingly urban Americans routinely fail to see when we look at the local question – is on the back end.  The issue isn’t raising food and getting it to market.  The issue is, getting the waste back to the farm. 

Throughout history, there has been a rough symmetry between the input and output sides of agriculture and life.  Food came out of the earth; crop residues, manure, and even human waste went back in.  Then came the era of flush toilets, food miles, and landfills.  Industrial fertilizers now fill in for the nutrients that came from all that missing waste, but they cost a lot, they run off into our water, and they don’t keep the ground from compacting and eroding the way organic material does.  And assuming for a moment that either soaring global demand or peak oil is going to push the price of energy way up in the future, it’s easy to see that the days of cheap nitrogen may be numbered.  So Fairlie’s point is an important one: if we don’t account for getting waste back to the farm, we’re ignoring a big factor in the true cost equation.

Economists have a word for this.  The things we ignore in our models and analyses are called “externalities.”  At first, they’re left out because they’re either difficult to price (like airport noise in the 1950s) or because they’re ubiquitous and “free” (like rivers and the ocean used as sewers in the 19th century).  Later, they’re ignored because they raise difficult questions about private ownership and public responsibility that free-market ideology would rather bypass.  And sometimes it takes someone like Fairlie, who lives on a farm, to remind the city-folk that just because you flushed your toilet or dragged your trash to the curb, the story isn’t over.  I personally suspect that all our problems arise from ignoring externalities.  Sounds like another book project . . .

But maybe you have to be 2/3 of the way through Fairlie’s book and already buying into his vision, for this to be a powerful “Aha!” moment.  I may not have done justice to it here.  Read the book as an example of how cutting-edge Environmental History can be turned into a best-seller, and you’ll also discover Fairlie’s answer to Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of theCommons.”  

_____________

* I asked the authors about grass-fed beef and other sources of “red” meat, and Weber responded to my email, saying that “other red meats than corn fed beef do have the same high emissions” because of the methane-producing effect of digesting grass and the typically longer lifetimes of sheep and goats.  So in the view of these scientists it’s not just a feedlot issue.

Blueberries

Dan Allosso

When I read old books, I’m always on the lookout for references to other old books, or to topics that were relevant when the book was written, but that may not be well known now.  These sometimes lead in new and surprising directions.  There were several things in Bolton Hall’s Three Acres and Liberty, the book that launched the back-to-the-land movement in 1907, that seemed to deserve more investigation.  The thing that really jumped out at me, though, was a passing remark he made about blueberries.

In spite of being a hardy native plant that the Indians had harvested from time immemorial, Hall says “with our present knowledge of the blueberry, it is doubtful if it can be made a commercially cultivated crop.”  This surprised me, since one of my family’s favorite activities when we lived out East was picking blueberries at a big berry farm in the shadow of Mount Monadnock.  But Bolton Hall was no dummy.  Three Acres and Liberty describes a variety of intensive gardening techniques that are popular today (and that many people think were invented by their current proponents), including the use of manure instead of commercial fertilizers; “super close culture,” where plants are set very close together to use the land and water efficiently and keep down weeds; “companion cropping” and “double cropping,” to extend the growing season; rotation to reduce the impact of pests; soil inoculation using nitrogen-fixing legumes (just recently discovered when he wrote); mulching to save water; raising chickens, ducks and rabbits to use waste and produce food and manure; canning and drying to preserve even small quantities of food; and even disposal of city sewage by using human waste on urban gardens.  So I had to believe he was right about blueberries not being commercially viable in 1907.  And of course, the obvious next question was, when did this change?

Apparently, Hall wrote those words just about as late as he could have.  Commercial blueberry production began in Maine in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, but the source of the berries were native plants that propagated themselves and spread as they had always done.  The only change was that growers removed the surrounding trees to give the blueberries more room and light.  However, in 1911 a New Jersey woman named Elizabeth Coleman White (1871-1954) read a USDA Bulletin about experiments in blueberry propagation.  She invited the bulletin’s author, botanist Frederick Colville, to the New Jersey pine barrens, where blueberries grew wild as they did in Maine.  White and Colville got the locals, who picked the wild berries regularly, to tag the bushes where they found the largest fruits.  They asked the local pickers questions about taste, time of ripening, plant vigor, and disease resistance, and brought the best plants back to the family’s farm in Whitesbog.  By 1916, White and Colville had created the “Tru-Blu-Berry,” America’s first commercial blueberry.  In 1927, White helped organize the New Jersey Blueberry Cooperative Association, which still exists today.

I’ve only scratched the surface of this story – there’s a lot that could be done with a topic like this! – but the thing I like most about it is that White and Colville were smart enough to use the expertise and local wisdom of the poor folk, the “pineys,” who went out into the barrens to pick wild fruit.  The Progressive Era is remembered as a time when top-down, expert-driven solutions became all the rage.  Often these scientific innovations were imposed on rural people without consultation, much less consent.  And often these changes were much less valuable and lasting than the experts promised.  So it’s great to find a story where the innovation came from a cooperative process, and led to a tangible and lasting improvement.  I’ll think of this next summer, when I pick the fruit from the eighteen blueberry plants of half a dozen varieties I planted this fall.

____________

Sources:  

Distinguished Women of Past and Present: http://www.distinguishedwomen.com/biographies/white-ec.html

USDA Technical Bulletin #275, 1932: http://organicroots.nal.usda.gov/download/CAT86200269/PDF (This is really cool! Did you know the USDA has an online National Agricultural Library with an “Organic Roots Digital Collection”?  I didn’t until today.  Here it is: http://organicroots.nal.usda.gov.)

The Ranney Letters Are Going Online

Dan Allosso

As I was doing research toward my dissertation in Ashfield, Massachusetts, last year, I came across a series of family letters written by a set of eight brothers (they had one sister, but she apparently wrote no letters).  The Ranney brothers were all born between 1812 and 1833 in Ashfield, but all of them except the third son Henry went west—some farther than others.  They wrote each other regularly for more than fifty years, and over a hundred of their letters are preserved at the Ashfield Historical Society.  The collection probably includes most of the letters Henry Sears Ranney  received from his brothers (he was apparently a very meticulous record-keeper, and served as Ashfield’s Town Clerk for fifty years!), but not all.  For example, there is no mention of the death at age 25 of younger brother Lyman, who was working for a merchant in Tahlequah and had written several letters home with interesting observations of the South and the Indian Nation.  And unfortunately the collection does not include copies of letters Henry wrote.  That’s unfortunate, but not unexpected.  Although blotter-books were widely used in this period to make copies of handwritten letters, this practice was usually reserved for business correspondence.

   

A collection of a hundred family letters spanning half a century is treasure for a historian interested in the lives of regular people.  Because the writers were all brothers, there is very little time wasted on empty formality—they get right to the point and write about what’s most important to the family.  Reading the letters, we get a rare glimpse at the interests and concerns of a fairly normal American family, as they experienced life in the nineteenth century.    

The Ashfield Historical Society has been great about letting me transcribe and post these letters, which I have begun to do at www.ranneyletters.com.  In the long run, I hope they can become a resource for teachers looking for primary material on the Yankee Migration to the northwest, and for anyone interested in the voices of regular Americans in the nineteenth century.  When I’ve completed the set (something over a hundred letters and several background essays on local history, research, etc.), I’m going to self-publish them into a paperback volume.  As I prepare the material, I’m hoping to get feedback from people on what is useful and interesting; I’ll use this when I prepare the final version for print.  So if you get a chance, please take a look or tell people you think may be interested.  And stay tuned, letters will be posted more or less daily. 

The story begins in May, 1839, with a three-page letter from twenty-four year old Lewis George Ranney to his younger brother Henry.   Lewis begins with the most important news: “our folks are well as usual.” Their parents had moved most of the family to Phelps New York in 1833.  Henry, sixteen at the time, had stayed behind in Ashfield.  In early 1838, George Ranney bought 105 acres in Phelps for $5,000; a year later he bought another hundred acres for $2,800.  Eldest son Alonzo Franklin Ranney had a two acre house lot in town, worth $500, and Lewis was living at home in 1839 when he wrote to Henry—but he had already decided by this time that he was going on to Michigan.  

The contents of the letter reveal the topics that interested Lewis, that he knew his brother would want to hear about.  First, news of both the immediate and extended family.  In response to Henry’s letter, Lewis lists the birth dates of all the siblings.  Their mother, Achsah Sears Ranney, had eleven children in the 21-year period between age 23 and 44, and then lived to age 80.  Nine of the children were alive in 1839.  Lewis goes on to mention a couple of Ashfield acquaintances, and then tells Henry that their father wants him to send money.  Funds will be tight in Phelps until the harvest, several months away, and their father “has had none from Michigan.”  This is a very interesting point, because it shows that the family is not only in contact over half the continent, but is financially connected as well.  Money and information (and, as we’ll see later, merchandise) flows in both directions between family members all over North America.  We’re mistaken if we assume that when people moved west, they cut their ties with family and went on their own.  This web of continuity and connection is one of the most interesting aspects of the collection.

Good Fences

Dan Allosso

Robert Frost famously epitomized New Englanders with the wry phrase, “Good fences make good neighbors.”  But even if your neighbors are far enough away for comfort and you like them, fences have their uses.  I’ve been thinking about these as I continue to work on 19th-century American history while starting up a small farm in the upper Midwest.  It’s interesting, because I suspect I’m living through a moment of historic change, and it’s all about fences.

In addition to influencing the relationships of neighbors, I’m learning fences have a number of other uses on the farm.  Of course, they help keep your animals where you want them.  And hopefully they help keep predators off your animals.  And they may keep wildlife off your vegetables, although hungry deer will jump any fence less than eight feet high.  Less obviously, though, fences define our relationship to the land and the uses we can put it to.

Most everyone is familiar with the story of the colonial split-rail fence.  There’s one on the cover of William Cronon’s Changes in the Land.  The rail fence, roughly cut from the timber settlers needed to clear in order to turn wild eastern forest into farmland, symbolizes European ideas of land use and ownership that settlers brought with them and imposed on the environment and the natives they found there.

This style of fencing was cheap and easy where settlers found trees needing to be cleared.  I took this photo at the Genesee Country Village and Museum in western New York.  This section of the museum represents life around the year 1800, when farming was a family enterprise done with ox, horse, and human power (I spent a 4th of July weekend in that cabin with my family as "The 1800 Farm Family").  An energetic farmer could clear about seven acres of land in a year, and often the family farmstead was split between a small cultivated field, a pasture for grazing animals, and a woodlot for fuel.  As families moved west, however, they discovered plains of prairie grasses that towered over the heads of children like Laura Ingalls.  The wooden fences of the East were impractical in many parts of the Midwest, where lumber came from far away at great expense, and was reserved for building things like houses, barns, churches and saloons.  And without internal combustion and irrigation, much of the land farther west was unfit for cultivation, but ideal for grazing if the animals could just be contained.

Joseph Glidden (1813-1906) was a New Englander who moved to Illinois in 1843.  He patented barbed wire in 1873 and died a millionaire.  Among his holdings were 335,000 acres in Texas: range land that his invention had allowed to be fenced.  The enclosure of the rangelands is one of the mythic moments in the story of the American West.  Through books and movies like The Virginian (1902), Oklahoma (1943), Shane (1953), Heaven’s Gate (1980), and Open Range (2003), it is as central to popular western history as Frederick Jackson Turner’s comments about the closing of the frontier are to the academic West.  Barbed wire fences dramatically expanded our ability to affordably control very large spaces.  Once again, Americans were able to impose our vision on the land (and also, once again, on the Indians).

Fences remain important to farmers, and their use is still a complicated affair.  Cattle and horses can be grazed on pasture enclosed by a few strands of barbed wire.  Sheep, with thick fleeces to protect them, will go through barbed wire.  Goats are even harder to contain – there’s an old saying that if your fence won’t hold water, it won’t hold goats.  And although chickens will usually come back home in the evening, there are a lot of varmints out there that will eat them in the meantime if they aren’t protected by a fence.  Farmers have used woven wire, hardware cloth, rigid panels, and electric wire to contain and protect animals.  Each comes at a price, and it adds up: a decent four-foot high sheep and goat fence will run you over a dollar a foot.  So these fences tended to be expensive and permanent.  Most small farmers use and endlessly reuse a variety of materials based on what they can get cheap, and hoard the bits they aren’t currently using.

As sustainability and soil depletion have come into sharper focus in recent years, innovative farmers have rediscovered what the old-timers knew before the age of chemical fertilizer: pastures will support a larger number of animals if they are grazed in succession.  Sheep and goats prefer to eat different plants than cows, so they can coexist with cattle on a pasture without competing.  And then the poultry can follow, eating bugs out of the droppings; which not only breaks up the fertilizer and spreads it over the fields, but also actually reduces the number of parasites and pathogens.  This is a win-win-win, the animals are better off, the farmer produces a larger quantity and wider variety of protein on a given plot of land, and the land itself is improved in the process.  The only catch is, you have to enclose and protect all these different types of creatures!  

That’s where the story gets interesting.  The cost of fencing has traditionally made it difficult for farmers to fence appropriately for intensive pasturing, and the effort involved in setting and moving fences has made land use inflexible.  But recently, battery-powered low-impedance fence chargers and moveable electric fences have changed the game again for small farms.  Deep-cycle batteries like the ones in your boat or RV can run miles of low-cost electric tape, twine or netting.  They can even be hooked to solar chargers.  And they’re easy to set up and move, allowing farmers to raise temporary paddocks and move animals as quickly or slowly as needed over the land.

This may not seem like such a big deal, but I think it may turn out to be.  The world’s food supply depends heavily on fossil fuels, both for transportation and for the production of synthetic fertilizers like anhydrous ammonia.  It currently takes fifteen calories of energy to put a calorie of food on your table.  If there’s any truth to either climate change or peak oil, multi-thousand acre cornfields and factory-style feedlots may turn out to be as much of a twentieth-century anomaly as McMansions and jet-setting to conferences.  But it has been suggested that the world’s food needs could be met by intensive techniques combining grazing with gardening.  Farmers like Joel Salatin claim that not only would intensive pasturing solve the world food problem, but “in fewer than ten years we would sequester all the atmospheric carbon generated since the beginning of the industrial age” (Folks, This Ain’t Normal, p. 195).  If true, this is a really big deal; and even if Salatin is not quite right about this, intensive pasturing still seems like a really good idea.  And these new fences make it possible.  That could be historic.

Knowlton’s Books

Dan Allosso

I recently made a trip over to the Franklin County Courthouse in Greenfield, Massachusetts, to see if they had any documents in their Probate Office on the families I’ve been researching.  I should have done this a long time ago, but I never managed to get around to it.  Now that I’m leaving the area, I had to get over there or lose the chance.  It was worth the trip.  I found wills and estate inventories for several of my people.  Most importantly, I found a huge folder for Dr. Charles Knowlton (1800-1850), including the will and inventory, an inventory of items sold in the estate sale (and who they were sold to!), and guardianship papers and accounts for the minor children Knowlton left behind.  You can learn a lot about your subject from these documents.  Who were his friends?  Who did he trust to look after his children?  Who owed him money?

One of the most interesting things for me, so far at least, has been the inventory.  It lists everything from horses and buggies (how did he get around when seeing patients?) to featherbeds and mustard spoons (what did the house and furnishings look like?).  The list of medical devices was surprising, and suggests (I’m going to check with a couple of historians of medicine to be sure) Knowlton was at the cutting edge of his profession.

And then there are the books.

By cross-referencing between the inventory and the estate sale documents, I think I’ve managed to identify nearly all of the books in Charles Knowlton’s library.  The majority of them are medical texts, as might be expected.  There are 72 titles I was able to identify, but many of them contained multiple volumes (largest being Braithwaite's Retrospect with 18 vols.), so the actual count was easily over a hundred books.  This seems like quite a large collection for a country doctor.  And interestingly, they aren’t all dated around the period when Knowlton was studying medicine (the mid-1820s).  Several of them were brand new at the time of his death (1850), which again validates the idea that Knowlton was trying to stay up to date on the very latest procedures and techniques.  In addition to the texts, he subscribed to several regional and national medical journals – one of which, The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, he was a regular contributor to.

I don’t know enough yet about these medical texts to say whether this collection represents a particular medical point of view, but I notice there are a lot of anatomy texts and a lot of texts on treating women.  This makes sense, given Knowlton’s interest in birth control, women’s health, and women’s rights in general.  Interestingly, one of the books in what I’m calling the Freethought section of his library is Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

Which brings us to the non-medical portion of the collection.  The general library contained 28 titles, many of which (such as Peregrine Pickle) were probably books used in the education of the Knowltons’ three children or for family entertainment.  The Freethought library, in contrast, contained 43 titles.  I’m making value judgments here, assigning texts to one category or another.  Clearly, Knowlton’s medicine was influenced by his philosophy.  And clearly, even a book like Noah Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language could be political.  But also obviously, the Thomas Paine texts belong in Freethought, as do the histories of religion (Knowlton liked to understand the other position, and anticipate his opponent’s argument in debate).  And I’ve also put Democracy in America and Weld’s American Slavery As it Is in this section, because I think Freethought was very political for Knowlton, and his ideas about America were tightly bound to this perspective.

Charles Knowlton died in 1850, so of course we don’t see one of the foundational texts of contemporary secularism, Darwin’s Origin of Species. Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of The Natural History of Creation, however, is right where it ought to be on Knowlton’s shelf.  This is remarkable, and it demonstrates not only Charles Knowlton’s incredible coolness, but that if anything, James Secord underestimated the importance of Chambers’s anticipation of Darwin’s theory of evolution in his book, Victorian Sensation.

To see the list of Knowlton’s books, complete with links to the Google or Archive.org viewable copies, check out to my post at here.

A Popular Portrait of Jefferson

Dan Allosso

In the spirit of the Historical Society's recent conference on talking to the general public about history, I thought I'd share some of my initial reactions to a recent popular biography: Christopher Hitchens's Thomas Jefferson: Author of America (Harper, 2009).  In a short volume that seems to have achieved both commercial success and good reviews, Hitchens portrays Jefferson as not only the author of America (writer of the Declaration and purchaser of Louisiana), but as a symbol of the conflicts that have always been close to the heart of the “republican experiment.”  Given Hitchens’s notoriety, it’s impossible to completely separate the author from the subject; so this is not really a standard biography.  It’s sort-of half biography and half Hitchens’s reflections and evaluations.  But in this critical role, Hitchens may be providing a useful corrective to the hagiographical (or anti-) chronicles of Jefferson’s life we’re more accustomed to reading.

Although Hitchens is not a historian, he does a pretty good job of inserting names, dates, and events that provide both context and a sense of the culture Jefferson involved himself in.  This is a short book (208 pages), so there’s a limit to the amount of detail that can be jammed in, but Hitchens chooses some elements that illuminate Jefferson’s character.  And he offers perspectives you wouldn’t normally get from a historian, such as when he observes that the fact Thomas and Martha delighted in reading passages from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy to each other suggests “we are studying a man with very little sense of humor.”

In another interesting moment, Hitchens describes Jefferson as the “republican equivalent of a philosopher king, who was coldly willing to sacrifice all principles and all allegiances to the one great aim of making America permanent”  (p. 14).  While this sense of a permanent guiding mission may be ahistorical (although we find it in some academic biography, too), Hitchens makes a strong case for long-term connections in Jefferson’s story.  At one point, he recounts Jefferson’s dismal performance as governor of Virginia during the Revolution, which he contrasts with Alexander Hamilton’s record.  Too frequently, we seem to lose sight of the ongoing political weight of issues like these – if only in the sheer volume of data coming at us in traditional biographies.  And when Jefferson wrote his famous Notes on the State of Virginia, Hitchens calls attention to the fact he was responding to a questionnaire sent him by Francois Barbé-Marbois, who not coincidentally was the future negotiator of the Louisiana Purchase.  The sense of continuity and relatedness of events Hitchens brings to such a short retelling of Jefferson’s life is really helpful.

As one of America's leading atheists, Christopher Hitchens would of course be expected to show his interest in Jefferson as a prototype of the secular American, and he doesn’t disappoint.  But his coverage of Jefferson’s anticlericalism and “Enlightenment” orientation is much less strident than it might have been.  Hitchens does connect Jefferson with Edward Jenner and the cowpox vaccination, and he does point out that “Dr. Timothy Dwight, then president of Yale and to this day celebrated as an American divine, was sternly opposed to vaccination as a profane interference with God’s beneficent design” (p. 44).  But he also goes after Jefferson’s hypocritical attitudes about slavery and race.  “A bad conscience, evidenced by slovenly and contradictory argument, is apparent in almost every paragraph of his discourse on this subject,” Hitchens concludes (p. 48).  But he grants, quoting Jefferson, that a “The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances”
(p. 49).

Hitchens tells the story of Jefferson as a remarkable human being, who achieved incredible things while failing to completely transcend his nature as a male mammal living in the eighteenth century.  And he calls attention to parts of Jefferson’s historical role (in abandoning the Haitian Revolutionaries and in sending the Marines to North Africa) that it might be useful for us to remember.  In a passage that I found funny, Hitchens suggests that Dumas Malone (the ultimate academic biographer of Jefferson) “had great difficulty considering the question of carnal knowledge at all” (p. 61).  This seems a little harsh, until Hitchens reminds the reader that as late as 1985 Malone insisted that “for Madison Hemings to claim descent from his master was no better than ‘the pedigree printed on the numerous stud-horse bills that can be seen posted around during the Spring season’” (p. 65).  I appreciate the freedom Hitchens had as a non-academic author, to trash “Jefferson’s most revered biographer” in a way that clearly needed doing.

In the end, Hitchens’s conclusions about Jefferson match his understanding of his adopted nation.  “The truth is,” he says, “that America has committed gross wrongs and crimes, as well as upheld great values and principles” (p. 186).  Thomas Jefferson: Author of America is part of Harper-Collins’s “Eminent Lives” series for general readers, but it might be useful as a short, accessible supplementary text for high school and undergraduate students in a U.S. survey.  For that purpose, I think the author’s perspective as a non-academic and the fact that he has a clearly-stated position are among the book’s most valuable assets. 

The Past Is a Foreign Country

Dan Allosso

So I’m sitting in a Starbucks in Keene New Hampshire, writing a biography of freethinker Charles Knowlton.  I’m doing a chronological first draft; there’s plenty of detail, background, explanation, and interpretation that I’ll need to add to this, but I figured getting down the skeleton of the story is the first step.

Pun not intended, but there it is.  I’m writing about the first time Knowlton goes up to the “medical lectures” in Hanover (they formed the basis of what later became Dartmouth Medical School).  The fourteen-week lectures cost $50, which neither Knowlton nor his traveling companion Herman Partridge could scrape together.  So the two men decided to steal a body, since it was an open secret that Hanover paid $50 for “subjects” they could use in anatomy lectures.

This was probably Knowlton’s idea.  He had already stolen a body and gotten away with it by this time.  He was 22; his companion Partridge was 31.  Ironically, Partridge later became the Coroner of their home-town Templeton, Massachusetts.  They found one body, but it was badly decomposed when they got to it and only yielded a skeleton.  Then they heard of another burial, ten miles in the wrong direction.  Desperate (the lectures had already commenced and they were missing them!), they went out in the night and stole this body too.

Carrying the corpse into Keene, where I now sit writing about it, Partridge was sure they had been discovered.  Their wagon was old and their horse slow.  They had to get out and push when they went up hills.  Certainly there would be no chance of an escape, if they were caught.  Partridge’s panic, however, was premature.  They avoided the town and tavern, staying the night with a farmer who had lived in Templeton.  The eighty-mile trip took them three days, and when they arrived in Hanover, the corpse was unusable and the anatomy professor was not buying.  But he gave them $20 to dispose of the body.

As I write these events, I find myself trying to imagine what Keene looked like in 1822.  What it was like to drive an old wagon over country paths, taking three days to make a trip we can now accomplish in two hours.  And I hope that, since it’s interesting to me, it will be to my readers when I satisfy my own curiosity and fill in these details.

For every sentence of narrative, it seems as if there’s another sentence of explanation and context.  So it’s not just that these things happened in this particular sequence, but that they happened in this alien world where you can’t pass over the meaning of carrying a body through town at a snail’s pace.  The suspense would go on for a much longer time, if people on horseback or even running on foot could catch up to you.  The anxiety that someone was going to smell the foul thing decaying under the covers in the wagon must have built to an extreme level, when hours passed under the hot sun as the old horse trudged on.

But here I sit, in an air-conditioned café.  The past really is a foreign country . . .

Economics in the Age of Fracture

Dan Allosso

I’ve started re-reading Daniel T. Rodgers’ Age of Fracture.  I glanced at it in the final run-up to my PhD comps, but it didn’t make much of an impression.  Then Jane Kamensky mentioned it during her closing talk at the Historical Society’s recent conference, and I thought I ought to pick it up again.

This closer reading led me to a couple of thoughts.  First, that there’s probably a whole lot more in many of those books we powered through in grad school; it’s probably worth revisiting some of them and digesting them slowly.  Second, what doesn’t seem relevant when you’re under the gun and trying to absorb the historiography of a field may be really useful when you’re thinking about teaching or writing – especially for the public.

I’ve only scratched the surface of Age of Fracture so far, but it strikes me as a very interesting attempt to argue a complicated point for a more-or-less general audience.  This fascinates me, since I think historians really need to help us all understand how we got to where we are today.  I hope to pick up some ideas about how to do this, especially about where the boundary is between assertion and explication: how much of an argument you can carry with an authoritative voice and how much you need to demonstrate with evidence and analysis.  At one point, for example, Rodgers says, “What precipitates breaks and interruptions in social argument are not raw changes in social experience, which never translate automatically into mind. What matters are the processes by which the flux and tensions of experience are shaped into mental frames and pictures that, in the end, come to seem themselves natural and inevitable: ingrained in the very logic of things” (Kindle Locations 125-127).  This is an interesting claim; very close to the idea I just found in Giambattista Vico’s New Science (another book I picked up as a result of the conference), “Every epoch,” Vico wrote, “is dominated by a ‘spirit’, a genius, of its own. Novelty, like beauty, recommends certain faults which, after fashion changes, become glaringly apparent. Writers, wishing to reap a profit from their studies, follow the trend of their time” (quoted in Anthony Grafton’s Introduction).  It’s a provocative idea, and it obviously has a lineage – but is it true?  And can it be used to explain social change over time?

GDP Growth, 1923-2008, (Source: wikimedia).

Another thing Rodgers does, in the early pages of Age of Fracture, is to provide a schematic for a “historiography” of the field of Economics.  Beginning with Alfred Marshall (Principles of Economics, 1890), Rodgers traces the development of economic thinking (and college economic teaching) through Paul Samuelson (Economics, 1948), and then into the variety of competing interpretations resulting from the failure of macro-economic prediction in the 1970s and 80s.  Along the way, Rodgers mentions many of the relevant texts in this development: popular texts such as Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom and F. A. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom as well as academic titles like Ronald Coase’s “The Problem of Social Cost” and Richard Posner’s Economic Analysis of Law.  It would be interesting to organize a syllabus around these titles, and read them one after another.  In addition to tracing the development of economic theory, the themes of such a class might be to examine whether theory or contingency really moved society, and more importantly to test the point made above by Rodgers and Vico: to see if the explanations offered by economists in their historical moments contain “faults which, after fashion changes, become glaringly apparent.”

Advice to Farmers

Dan Allosso

People have been giving advice to farmers throughout American history.  Sometimes farmers themselves have written about their favorite techniques or innovations, but often experts have tried to compile the “best practices” of the past and add new ideas developed by scientists and technologists.  The progressive era amped up this process, and turned the USDA and land grant “Agricultural and Technical” universities into big producers of information for rural people.

But that process is a story for another day.  Today, what caught my attention is an old (1880) book I found in the UMass library stacks, called Farming for Profit (online here).  Written by John Elliot Read (who claims in the introduction to be “a practical farmer, acquainted with the details of farm management, and thoroughly used to manual labor”), the book promises to show “How to Make Money and Secure Health and Happiness on the Farm.”  I think it’s interesting that even a volume designed to be an “Encyclopedic” and “Comprehensive” source of “Mechanics” and “Business Principles” in 1880 puts the rural lifestyle front and center.

Farming for Profit is a fascinating combination of late-nineteenth century technique and culture—both of which can be compared with what came after.  At some point, I’m going to make a more thorough study of how the two elements of farm tech and farm life changed over time.  For right now, I thought these items were interesting:

In the illustration at the top, across from the title-page of the book, we get a more or less classical view of farm life—not of technology.  There are no new machines in the picture, and the buildings don’t even seem to be in the best repair.  The impression I get is of an ancient and venerable way of life.  Peaceful, slow-moving, and dignified.  Later in the book, there are more practical illustrations, like this diagram of an ideal farmstead.  And in another illustration, we see more evidence of a transition in farming: the first view is of corn plants (old-fashioned ones, not the super-hybrids we're used to seeing today) that have been “drilled or planted,” while the second shows corn planted in hills.  Hill-planting was the old technique colonists learned from the Indians, so it’s interesting that it still finds its way into a manual from 1880.  That suggests that maybe the author was a practical farmer with lots of experience in the fields. 

Real-time

Dan Allosso

Boy oh boy, there are a lot of stories out there! It continues to amaze me, how everyplace I look, there's interesting, compelling history that could potentially turn into serious projects. Yes, okay, maybe I have a short attention span and maybe I need to complete some things (like my dissertation) before taking on any new projects. I’ll give you that.

So what I’m trying to do is get a little bit of info, when I find these topics, so I can get back to them later. In a sense, maybe this is how authors worked in the days when they were doing the final edits on one manuscript while writing the next, proposing the one after that, and looking for the projects after those. In the world of self-publishing, the steps are a little different, but maybe the principal is the same.

The one thing that has really struck me, as I’ve been getting down to writing one project that I’ve been thinking about for a couple years, is how wasteful it is to go over the same ground again and again simply because I didn’t complete the job earlier. I have file folders, backup hard drives, and memory sticks filled with documents. I’ve downloaded hundreds of pdfs from Google or the Internet Archive. I have a stack of index cards nearly four inches high, two partial bibliographies in Endnote and one in Sente. And I have a half dozen outlines and drafts.

It’s good that I’ve been thinking about this project as long as I have been, and it will probably be a better end product because of it. But next time, I’m going to try to be a little more careful about identifying the material I’m collecting, and writing about it as I’m collecting it. In real-time.

Maybe I thought I wasn’t ready to actually start writing this, or maybe I was just lazy – or too excited about the research. You know how it is: one link leads to another, and soon you’ve got gigabytes of great material. But now that it’s writing time, I need to go back over all this material, rediscovering the paths I followed that led me to these records and relearning how they all fit together. Makes me think if I could have been a little more detail-oriented on the front end.

So I’m trying to build a single bibliography for this new, potential project I’ve just discovered. I’m connecting the documents to the entries in Endnote, so I’ll know where they are (and I won’t have to wonder where the most recent ones are!) I’m writing little abstracts and synopses now, so when the time comes I’ll understand how it all fits together and where each record fits in the story. I’ve even got a timeline and a cast of characters, that I can add to anytime between now and whenever I really start this project.

Wish I would’ve started this sooner! The original project I came to grad school thinking about is still out there on a back burner. That folder on the backup drive measures about 29 gigabytes, and some of the files date back to 2006. It will be fun revisiting all that stuff someday. But very expensive.

Self-publishing Histories?

Dan Allosso

I’ve been pondering the idea of self-publishing history, and I think the time has nearly come.

Say self-published to anyone over about 30, and the first thought they’ll probably have is “vanity press.” It has always been possible to have a manuscript printed and bound, and there are plenty of examples of useful histories that have been produced this way. Nearly all the “Centennial” histories on display or for sale at small-town historical societies were written by local people, mostly without formal literary or historical training, and published in small lots by local printers or specialist publishers. There were once many more local printers willing to take on “octavo” printing and bookbinding. Dr. Charles Knowlton, for example, self-published his 500-page tome Elements of Modern Materialism using a small printer in Adams, Massachusetts, in 1828 (he bound the volumes in leather and stamped the spines with gilt ink himself), and his infamous birth control book, The Fruits of Philosophy was also produced at Knowlton’s own expense and sold by Knowlton out of his saddle-bags to his patients, until Abner Kneeland began advertising an expanded second edition in The Boston Investigator in 1833.

There are a number of companies specializing in reprinting out-of-copyright books, and many old town histories are for sale at historical societies in these reprint formats. But there are many more stories at these repositories than made it into those old histories, and there are often local historians who work for years at these societies, digging up material on particular families, or on political and social movements that interest them. The market for their stories may be very specific (as in the case of town or regional history), diffuse (as in the case of genealogy), or may be too small to be economically feasible for a standard publisher. This is where self-publishing can change the game.

I’ve been watching the self-publishing industry for several years, and it has changed dramatically. When I wrote my first novel, companies like iUniverse were just beginning to offer self-publishing packages online. These companies used the newly-developed print on demand technology that companies like Amazon and Ingram were adopting to produce mainstream titles just-in-time, to print their clients’ work. They offered editorial services, marketing packages, and bare-bones “publishing,” if you wanted to do those other things yourself. For a little over a thousand dollars, you could get your book into print.

The objection to vanity publishing has always been that it’s trash. If you couldn’t get a publisher interested in your book, the wisdom held, it did not deserve to see the light of day. There’s some truth to this argument, but I think it was much more valid when the book trade was big, profitable for small publishers, and the business was widely distributed among thousands of firms. Nowadays, a small number of media giants control nearly all of the titles that “move,” as well as most of the backlists that fill the rest of the shelves in bookstores. These companies, studies and anecdotal accounts suggest, are becoming ever more conservative. The costs of launching a commercial title are so high for them that they would much prefer to get a new book from an established author than to take a risk.

But wait a minute. The major publishers, just like iUniverse, Amazon, and Ingram, print on demand. So, where are the costs? Hint: they’re not in the royalties. The real expenses are pre-production costs and distribution, and overwhelmingly, marketing. This is partly because the publishers’ economic model is still based on bookstores, and the need to put thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of physical copies on shelves around the world. But what about those regional, special-interest, niche-market titles?

There are a number of new small publishers catering to niches. Combustion Books for anarchist steam-punk titles and Chelsea Green for sustainable living and farming titles like Harvey Ussery’s brilliant The Small-Scale Poultry Flock, for example. But I chose in 2007 to buy the bare-bones package and self-publish. I lined up my own editing (author Terry Davis, whose workshop I was attending, for story; my Dad, a master teacher of language and literature, for line-editing), sent in my file and my check, and they printed my book. That was just the beginning. I quickly learned that having a title, even on Amazon, does not make the registers ring. Marketing, getting the word out, getting people to look for it, took some real effort. Luckily, the internet offers people in niches an incredible opportunity to find kindred spirits, wherever they may be. I found teen-review websites where I could have my young adult novel read and reviewed by actual teens (they liked it), and I found a contest I could enter my book in (which it won). It’s still selling well, five years later.

But back to history. I had a delightful conversation this week with a woman in Maine who has written a memoir that should be published. It has humor, conflict, suspense, local flavor, and incredible human interest. But how to get it into print? Well, the good news is that, since I tried it in 2007, the self-publishing industry has gone through another generation of change. You can now publish on Amazon, Lulu, and a variety of other platforms, with much more format-flexibility than was available a few years ago and completely free of charge. And they pay much better than they used to back in the early days. Much better on a per-unit basis, in fact, than traditional publishers. If you know what you want to say, if you’re comfortable with the technical end of putting a book together (I like to remind myself that Knowlton and many of the people who published books in the past didn’t have a professional editor, either), and especially if you know who will want the book and how to reach them, self-publishing might be something to consider.

(For Historical Society members going to the conference this Spring, I notice there isn’t a formal session about publishing options. Maybe we can get an informal thing going, or talk about it over lunch if anyone’s interested . . .)

Capitalism and Colonialism

Dan Allosso

When I was reading for my US History oral exams, one of the historiographical arguments that really got my attention was the long-running debate over the market transition. The question of when America made the turn from being an agrarian, egalitarian society to becoming a commercial, class society fascinated me; and so did the heated disagreements of eminent historians. As I read more, I realized that a lot of the argument really had to do with the definition and grouping of these terms (as Michael Merrill brilliantly pointed out in a 1995 article called “Putting Capitalism in its Place”). Were Joyce Appleby and Christopher Clark (not to mention Allan Kulikoff or Winifred Rothenberg!) even talking about the same thing when they used the words capitalism, market, commerce, and agrarian? Did “agrarian” naturally line up against “commerce,” and did either side really own the moral high ground?

Now I’m teaching Honors US History to undergrads. Clearly it wouldn’t be appropriate to expose them to the full glare of this debate. It would not only take too long to do, but it would be drilling too deep in even an Honors general education class for non-history majors. But I don’t want to cruise through this moment in history without mentioning it – I’m trying to challenge these students to think critically, so it’s my job to bring up the complex issues the textbook buries.

I had them read a couple of chapters of Matthew Parker’s 2011 book The Sugar Barons. Parker writes about Barbados in the early decades of its sugar revolution, the 1630s and 40s. He includes a detailed description of the introduction of slaves into the British sugar economy, through an interesting series of highly conflicted excerpts from the memoirs of English observers. A really valuable addition, from my perspective, was Parker’s extensive use of letters between several Barbados planters and merchants and John Winthrop, Governor of the City on the Hill.

The direct connection between Boston and the West Indies is useful, I think. Unlike Virginia or the New Netherlands or the Spanish colonies, which are usually presented to students as business ventures, the New England colonies are often portrayed as the seat of . . . something different. Something exceptional. The early link between Boston and Barbados, the Winthrop family’s business interests in the Caribbean, and the close connection that developed during the English Civil War, when Barbados became a principal market for New England produce, are all important challenges to the idea that there was ever a clean separation between commerce and colonies.

This is not to say that the type of agrarian anti-capitalism described by historians like Kulikoff never existed. But perhaps it suggests that when such sentiments developed, they were reactions to a colonial system built on a very problematic type of commerce rather than attempts to claim that a naïve, pre-commercial yeomanry had ever existed in America. From this perspective, even the earliest “agrarian” documents like Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia seem to share something with writings of back-to-the-land idealists of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

American Pre-history

Dan Allosso
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I thought I’d try something different this fall, to add an element of perspective and Big History to the beginning of my US History survey.

So I pulled some of the latest ideas from genetics-enhanced archaeology from books I’ve read recently, including Clive Finlayson’s The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died Out and How We Survived, Colin Tudge’s Neanderthals, Bandits and Farmers: How Agriculture Really Began, and David J. Meltzer’s First Peoples in a New World: Colonizing Ice Age America. Although most textbooks nowadays briefly mention pre-Columbian America, the impression you get is of a pre-history that is vaguely understood, remote, and largely irrelevant to American history. By starting my syllabus at 36,000 BP rather than 1492 and devoting my first lecture to “Pre-history,” I tried to suggest to the students that the pre-Columbian American past is interesting and relevant.

Of course, you’d be interested in pre-Columbian Americans if you carried their blood, and I thought my students might be interested to know that outside the U.S., the majority of Americans are partly descended from the people who were here when the Europeans arrived. Norteamericanos are unique in the degree to which we didn’t mix, although the Mexicans and even the Canadians did much better than those of us living in the middle third of our continent. And I thought my students ought to understand that three out of the five most important staple crops in the modern world (maize, potatoes, and cassava – the other two are rice and wheat) were developed by early American farmers. Even the 2010 textbook I’m using fails to escape the gravity-well of the master narrative, repeating the myth that Indians were poor farmers and that agriculture was invented in the eastern Mediterranean and later in China.

Finally, I was really fascinated (and I hope some of my students were as well) by the recent developments in theories of migration. Although anthropologists are not yet unanimous on the issue, there is growing support for the theory that most of the people alive today are principally descended from an ancestral population of plains hunter-gatherers who migrated from Africa between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago and settled on the steppe north of the Black Sea. When the last ice age began, steppe and tundra environments spread across Eurasia from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and these people followed the herds of caribou, mammoth, and wooly rhinoceros. The plains hunters prospered as earlier human populations and their temperate forest habitats dwindled. By about 30,000 to 26,000 years ago, some of these plains hunters had spread westward into Europe (where based on genetic evidence they mixed with some older groups, including Neanderthals), while others had covered the entire breadth of Siberian and arrived at Beringia, their gateway to the Americas.

Most of my students seemed vaguely aware that the first Americans migrated from Asia across a “land bridge.” I tried to impress on them that Beringia, which lasted for 16,000 years and was 1,100 kilometers wide, was really not a “bridge,” and the people who crossed it weren’t “migrating.” They were living in Beringia and northwestern Alaska, just as they had done for hundreds of generations. But I think the most important element of this story is that it helps the students recognize that Native Americans and the Europeans they encountered in the Caribbean in 1492 were cousins who had expanded in different directions from the same ancestor population. The differences between them were extremely recent – as is recorded history.

As a final example of this recent rapid change, I talked a little about milk. Most people in the world cannot digest milk after childhood. The ability of Europeans to synthesize lactase and digest lactose is a recent mutation, dating to about 10,000 years ago. It corresponds with the domestication of the aurochs into the modern cow (several African groups like the Masai share this trait, but scientists believe they developed it and domesticated cattle independently), and the mutation probably spread rapidly because it gave its bearers a tremendous nutritional advantage in times of famine. This rapid spread of a biological change, I hope, will suggest other ways that Europeans and Native Americans diverged from their shared ancestry, while at the same time reminding my students of this shared heritage.

“No More Plan B”—Apocalypse or Opportunity?

Dan Allosso

Graduate students in the humanities are well aware that, in the words of Inside Higher Ed this week, many of our disciplines have promoted alternate career paths outside the academy while at the same time encouraging us to hold onto the hope that although others might need them, we won’t. Now, however, the president of the American Historical Association (AHA) has apparently committed his organization to admitting to history grad students that there are not enough jobs to go around, and the situation is not getting better.

These sentiments appear in a statement issued by Anthony Grafton, president of the AHA, and James Grossman, its executive director. The essay, titled “No More Plan B” and posted on the AHA website on September 26th, criticizes the traditional department’s approach to grad students on the grounds that it “ignores the facts of academic employment . . . it pushes talented scholars into narrow channels, and makes it less likely that they will take schooled historical thinking with them into a wide range of employment sectors.”

Now it would be easy to blame faculty for candy-coating both the overall change in the academy (or at least, in the humanities), and for making their program seem like one where these issues need not concern grad students. Would we be angry to find how few people our department has placed into significant, tenure-track positions in the last five years? But we’re all adults: why didn’t we know this going in?

Or—and this is where it gets interesting—if we really did suspect that the old center would not hold, why did we come anyway? Forgetting about the traditional academy and its appointment with oblivion, and remembering what we each, individually love about our discipline and subjects might be the key to personal solutions that will change not only our own outcomes, but the academy itself.

Yes, departments that can’t place PhDs should probably stop producing them. But what if this apocalypse for the academy liberates us, the grad students, and forces us to refocus? What do we hope to achieve by our work? What difference do we want to make in the world? Do we see ourselves teaching undergraduates in ten years, opening young people’s minds to creative, critical thinking; sharpening their analytical and interpretive skills; helping them learn to read, write, and speak effectively? If this is our core mission, does it matter whether the students are sitting in front of us in a lecture hall or convening in an online forum? On the other hand, if our main interest is research, or writing—either for expert audiences or for the general public—then perhaps the breakdown of the traditional professional model offers us a chance to focus on what we are really good at, and leave the rest behind.

The scary part is, we’ll have to really be good at it. The authors of “No More Plan B” hint that there’s something wrong with the idea that “the life of scholarship” protects us from “impure motives and bitter competition.” We shouldn’t see non-tenure track employment, they tell us, as a fall from “the light of humanistic inquiry into the darkness of grubby capitalism.” But it goes beyond simply embracing the market or awakening from a dream of the idealized, highly compensated academic life. The academy, after all, exists within society and the market, and responds—albeit slowly—to the needs and desires of students.

The rest of society has been struggling for a generation with many of the issues now facing the academy. Technology has been replacing humans on assembly lines, in service professions, and even in “Knowledge” work for decades. Globalization, outsourcing, and new media have changed or obsoleted entire industries. Along the way, the two questions that have been continually asked of each individual are, “what are your specific responsibilities?” and “what is your value-add?”

Steve Jobs was famous for promoting a corporate culture at Apple centered on the idea of the “DRI,” or directly responsible individual. Unlike many people at other companies (especially in Silicon Valley!) who rarely achieved anything from one staff meeting to the next, Apple workers got used to seeing a DRI name next to every task and action item. Individual responsibility helped the bottom line, of course; but it also gave people a way to say “I did that,” and know what they had contributed.

I’m not arguing that the academy should adopt direct individual responsibility—there are too many interests arrayed against it. I’m suggesting that each of us grad students can find a way out of the “Plan B” trap, by deciding what we do that benefits society (or the discipline, or the advance of useful knowledge, etc.), and then articulating it and doing it. What is our personal value-add? Regardless of whether we’re given an opportunity to do it in the institutional format we expected. After all, whose “Plan B” was it, anyway?