Anyways…I’m quite encouraged by Dr. Sacco’s discussion with us.  I’ll have to put on some thick armor for the defense, but I’ m rather confident in my ideas.  The research is a little worrisome, especially since Sacco wants us to “put our hands on paper.”  I mean, most of the papers I’ll be looking at are online (minus Tyler, whose are in a two-volume set in Special Collections), most of the newspapers will be online, and the popular magazines I’ll have access to from the nineteenth century are online.  I’m wondering what I can do with the stuff in archives close to us that will be relevant.  Perhaps the Jackson letters will be enough..I know part of my paper will be his perspective on Tyler’s presidency.

I really enjoyed digging into the Nullfication Crisis, even though I won’t be using it for my thesis.  It gives a deep perspective on Southern thought in antebellum America, especially how they defended and even ignored the impact of slavery on their lives.  In my primary document, Calhoun goes so far as to call it “peculiar labor,” which is absolutely ridiculous when part of his argument is that Northern businessmen are treating Southern plantantion owners as “serfs of the system.”  Overall, the conspiratorial tone of these documents is on par with some milder conspiracy theory stuff out there today.  Some of the Southern politicians thought that Northerners wanted to destroy their lives and make them slaves.

I am happy that the magazine articles are easy to find, especially Niles Quarterly Review.  It is one of the more valuable sources of public thought I’ll have since the newspapers of the time were almost always partisan papers. Of course, filing through 1100 magazines will be “fun” and “exciting”, but I think its much better than not having access to the information at all.  And with that, adios for the summer!

The CIA’s motives in the Guevara murder are strangely conflicting.  On one hand, Felix Rodriguez was told to do everything in his power to capture Che and keep him alive, and he acted upon these orders in Bolivia when he asked the Bolivian officers to spare Che’s life due to the orders he received from the United States government.  On the other hand, the Bolivian officers got an order to kill Che over the radio from an unidentified source, and it can be assumed that the officers would not be confused if it were a Bolivian official that they normally received orders from.  Thus, this could indicate that the CIA changed their mind and ordered the killing, or it could indicate that there were several factions within the Bolivian government that wanted to see Guevara dead notwithstanding the Americans’ opinion.

These documents show some of the problems in dealing with government sources.  Names are redacted to protect people who committed illegal activities.  Also, Felix Rodriguez’s deposition was taken during a Congressional investigation into international assassinations, so he had a motive to make his actions and those of other operatives appear in the best light possible.  Overall, it is hard to tell whether the government as a whole would have preferred to see Che alive or dead.  The State Department saw value in keeping him alive for geopolitical purposes, but this might not have overcome the desire of many to kill an ideological enemy.

I guess I need to get my Che opinion out of the way, even though it is not the most informed opinion in the world.  I am probably one of the few truly ambivalent people towards Che. On one hand, he truly believed in his political doctrine more than anyone obvious example in recent history; I cannot think of another person who fought for their beliefs against such daunting odds over and over again, from Guatemala to Cuba to Angola to Bolivia.  On the other hand, I happen to disagree with said political doctrine, even though I also disagree with the political doctrines of his enemies at the time (I would have definitely been a member of the Non-Aligned Movement during the Cold War).  So, I am interested in reading more about him, even though I look at any documents from the CIA with a very wary eye.

The second article, Rural Work, Household Subsistence, by Frank Tobias Higbie, discusses hobos in the early 20th century and how they often worked in order to keep their families alive and afford their homes.  His portrayal is in sharp contrast to many stereotypes that depict migrant workers as homeless and wandering.  Since there are few statistical studies, the subject causes Higbie to look into more qualitative sources, even though he does utilize quanitative sources like almost all economic historians.  In contrast to the Roman article, Higbie approaches his subject from an emic point of view because he is able to see many eyewitness accounts of life as a hobo from various government files and two autobiographies.  Both articles give complex explanations for their phenomena, but Rural Work does not focus on a single factor like the previous article.  Rather, it notes how previous research should be paired with data about home ownership among hobos to create a new picture of the life of a hobo.

Overall, these two articles share many characteristics with most economic histories: wide use of quantitative data, materialist outlook, and the role of social forces over single characters.  However, their different subjects create some variance in their methods and assumptions.  The article about slavery is forced to look at a single factor in great detail in order to overcome a common belief, whereas the hobo article is freer to examine all causes in greater detail.  The Roman article is etic because it relies on modern sources, whereas the hobo article is able to use more primary sources and give an emic feel to the whole article.  Finally, the Roman article focuses on consensus because the slaves worked with the masters in order to secure their freedom and post-freedom livelihood, whereas the hobo article looks at the conflict side of economic history with the connections and tricks used to gain employment in a fiercely competitve market.

This piece appears to be focused on ideationalist assumptions.  It does look at spots in the orphanges that are bought by people, but it mostly focuses on ideas and values that help children get picked.  From what I can tell, the piece assumes conflict because the geniune orphans are in conflict with other poor children for spots in the orphanages.  Finally, it uses a stochastic assumption because the same conditions do not always assure that two children are both accepted or rejected into an orphanage.

I thought that Thompson’s article presented a more complex and compelling thesis, but I feel that Gauderman did a better job of writing.  Thompson’s aritcle was wordy and overly complex at times and seemed to repeat points in multiple cases, whereas Gauderman did an excellent job of tying her examples together to prove her arguments.  Overall, Gauderman’s article gave me more insight into the paper I will be writing next year.  I am thinking about doing a microhistorical analysis of the effects of the failure of the nullification movement, and this article gave me a good example of how I could use the narratives of different people and tie them together to make an argument.  Also, I typically try to integrate quotations into the flow of my writing rather than relying on block quotations, and her article offered an excellent example of how to do this.

Although these two texts are microhistories, they differ in the techniques used to create that microhistory.  Reagan relies on case files from investigations into women who died from their abortion.  These are useful because they provide a deep story into how a system of friends, lovers, and sympathetic doctors allowed women to retain their reproductive rights in the face of legal and professional pressure.  These case files provide a much deeper picture than mere statistics, but they have some pitfalls as well.  Since they only focus on patients who died, they might miss a true cross-section of women who received abortions.  Perhaps women who could afford more expensive doctors had a lower death rate and thus were not well documented.  However, this appears to be a useful method for finding compelling results, especially considering the difficulty of finding documentation for the history of crimes.

In The Politics of Authenticity, Rossinow finds that using oral history provides better results.  His description of the Christian Faith-and-Life Community, which he asserts is vital in understanding the New Left movement in Austin, relies on interviews given by former members of the Community.  Rossinow succeeds in providing a balanced view of the center, quoting both avid supporters of the community and the New Left movement as well as those who were opposed to the center.  The primary pitfall of this method is that it depends on the memories of those interviewed, and these might have faded after forty to fifty years.  However, Rossinow leans on an extensive amount of outside data about the political situation in Austin and the Christian existentialist movement to prove the statements made by the Community members and provide credence to their stories.

Overall, both of these monographs give us a compelling argument on their theses.  Both were interesting, if occasionally dry, readings, and they certainly used microhistory well to give character to the larger movements described in them.  I saw how microhistory can be a useful tool, but I was reminded that outside evidence is needed to ensure that my writing is not describing an anomaly within a larger movement.

Jon Wiener titled the section profiling these authors “Targeted by the Right,” but I am unsure whether political ideology is the binding force in these cases.  While it is true that conservative groups targeted Bellesies and that two conservative historians targeted Abraham, that does not mean that the Right targeted certain left-wing historians.  For example, Mike Davis appears to have fallen victim to an attack by an angry developer who happened to be conservative.  I believe that the only case that can be attributed with certainty to politics is the Bellesies case; the Abraham case points to the problems of jealousy within the academic world and the Davis case shows that bloggers often have an inordinate amount of power.  In my opinion, money is a much more important factor, and I think that proof of this is found in the John Lott case.  Even though John Lott committed an offense that was much worse than Bellesies’s error in a book on the gun rights issue, his book was not attacked successfully; one should note that the pro-gun lobby is backed by an industry that makes millions, but the anti-gun lobby does not have any businesses or industries behind it.  No one makes money if guns are illegal.

One reason why attacking powerful and monied institutions is far more dangerous to a historian’s career than flouting ethical standards is that the ethical standards are weak and rather pathetic, a point noted in Wiener’s conclusion.  For example, Wiener states that ” [Weinstein's] offer  to consider requests does not satisfy the AHA requriements of  ‘free, open, equal, and nondiscriminatory access [to historical material],” but the word “requirement” seems strong when the statement says that “historians favor free, open, equal and nondiscriminatory access.”  Indeed, many of the sentences in the Statement contain such qualifying words as “favor” and “should,” which appears to be the American Historical Association’s favorite word.  If the writers of the statement were trying to indicate more moral authority, they could have used words like ought, must, or shall, but they chose to qualify almost all their statements  and include loopholes.  In the Weinstein case, the Statement on Standards says that the association “[recognizes] the legitimacy of restricting access to some sources for national security, proprietary, and privacy reasons,” giving several ways for a author witholding information to justify his or her refusal.  Overall, I believe that Statement on Standards gives an outline of what all historians would like other historians to do, but it appears that the American Historical Association does not have the authority to force any historian to be professionally responsible.

The part of the reading I was most confused about was his postscript about the need for “global history.”  To me, this sounds similar to the single narrative of history that was disproved around the turn of the twentieth century.  Iggers counters this by saying that we need to look for common trends in  history rather than a single narrative with a beginning and an end point, but it is more likely that historians would ignore evidence that pointed against their global narrative rather than integrating it into their theory.  I am skeptical that any single trend of history can be truly ‘universal’ and thus I feel that global history is an impossible pursuit.

Overall, I thought the Iggers book was a vital read, but I am happy that I made it through the book and managed to soak in most of the information.  Historians in Trouble was a much more entertaining and insightful read with the knowledge and viewpoint I gained from the Iggers book.