RJ Davis Deserves the Jerry West Award

This week finalists for the Jerry West Award were announced. Given annually to the best shooting guard in college basketball, the players have a significant legacy to live up to in Jerry West. The man is “The Logo” after all.

And you know what? The five finalists all do that. In alphabetical order, those finalists are RJ Davis (North Carolina), Caleb Love (Arizona), Kevin McCullar Jr. (Kansas), Antonio Reeves (Kentucky), and Tyson Walker (Michigan State).

Every one of them has had a fantastic season putting them in a tough conversation for all-American honors. That said, one of them has statistically had a better season than all of them.

RJ Davis is the clear choice for the Jerry West Award, and it really is not much of a discussion.

To be clear, Davis does not dominate every single stat amongst the players. He is in the middle of the pack in rebounds, assists, and steals. And his overall shooting efficiency is a distant second to Antonio Reeves. (More on that with the third graphic.)

If you just looked at the traditional stats, you probably would say he is solidly in the conversation for the award but not dominating it, despite Davis being the leading scorer.

But traditional stats are not the end-all-be-all for a reason. The game of basketball has changed dramatically over the past few generations of players. Advanced states like PER, win shares, and box score plus minus give a fuller measure of a player’s effectiveness on the court and value to his team’s success.

In these advanced stats, RJ Davis is clearly above his competitors. Amongst the five finalists, Davis has the highest PER, offensive win shares, overall win shares, win shares per 40, offensive box score +/-, and overall box score +/-. The only stats he doesn’t dominate are that he is tied with McCullar for the most defensive win shares and second to Walker for defensive +/-.

One of the reasons Davis has been able to dominate the advanced stats (and this award discussion) is that he shoots more three pointers than any of the other four players, gets to the free throw line more, and converts at a higher percentage than everyone but Reeves. (There is a reason so many more teams play like the Golden State Warriors today instead of running Phil Jackson’s patented Triangle Offense—they know they are more likely to win if they can shoot it from deep at a high level and get to the free throw line more often.)

Opposing teams know that Davis is UNC’s top option. Because of that, his opponents have done everything they can think to run Davis off the three point line and keep him from getting to the free throw line. It just does not matter. He keeps going where he goes and doing what he does.

Davis probably will not have the best professional career of the five players, at least not at shooting guard. At 6’0” and 160 lbs, he is tied for the shortest of the five and weighs the least. That’s a tough row to hoe for a shooting guard when you regularly have to go up against players 6’6” and taller. Whether he succeeds as a point guard is another discussion, although he still will give up a lot physically to other players at that position.

But this award is about play on the court this college basketball season, and the stats just do not lie here. By any reasonable measure, RJ Davis is the best shooting guard in college basketball for the 2024 season. Nobody else is more deserving of the Jerry West Award more than him.

Whether you win the award or not, congratulations to you, RJ. You earned it.

Nicholas Galanin, “Things Are Looking Native, Native's Looking Whiter” (2012)

Self with Brenda J. Child

I have been fortunate enough the past few days to study with Brenda J. Child (Ojibwe ancestry and Northrop Professor of American Studies at University of Minnesota). Sponsored by the Gilder Lehrman Institute, our course was titled American Indian History Since 1890. Child paid especial attention to physical objects and what they can illuminate about the past. Our assignment was thus to find an object (preferably not document) and write about its history and what it can explain about the past. (We were supposed to write in the style of a museum exhibit label.)

 I chose a piece of art by Nicholas Galanin that I had used in class before, but I had never done much more than analyze it as a piece of art. I knew little about the artist or the history that he references in the art. Learning more about Galanin and his intentions was fascinating, and I am glad to share the results. Below you can find both Galanin’s piece and also my “museum writeup.” Cheers!

*** *** ***

Galanin, “Things Are Looking Native, Native's Looking Whiter” (2012)

Nicholas Galanin (b. 1979) is an artist of Tlingit and Unangax̂ ancestry whose work confronts colonial violence while exploring understandings of indigeneity, particularly autonomy and agency. For the giclee print “Things are Looking Native, Native’s Looking Whiter,” Galanin juxtaposes source material from a 1906 photograph of a Hopi-Tewa woman by Edward Curtis with a 1977 image of Carrie Fisher playing the character Princess Leia from Star Wars.

While Princess Leia is widely recognized in United States culture, Curtis is less well known. Called the “Shadow Catcher” by many Natives because of his photographs, Edward Curtis snapped more than 40,000 images during his career and recorded ethnographic information from over eighty American Indian tribal groups, photographing well-known Native figures like Geronimo and Chief Joseph. Ethnographers have found Curtis’s work to be a treasure trove of information on Native peoples essentially unduplicated anywhere else because he went to a number of remote locations and described Native life in great detail. Yet Galanin countered, "[Curtis’s] work was stereotyping and romanticizing the Indigenous people, building this idea of a culture that's vanishing, which it isn't — I'm still here and I'm still doing work. He perpetuated these false ideas of purity and mystery.”

 “Things Are Looking Native, Native's Looking Whiter” thus makes effective commentary on Native identity, femininity, and beauty. During the late 1970s and 1980s, Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia was often regarded as the height of female grace and beauty and held up as a paragon of female sexuality. The inherent comparison in Galanin’s print causes the viewer to examine their own biases and preconceptions. The two women have remarkably similar facial features and hairstyles, but whereas Fisher’s hair was intended to make her look alien and “other,” the unnamed woman’s squash blossom hairstyle is more natural and representative of her Native culture.

Galanin implicitly asks his audience to question why they accept Fisher’s Leia as an exemplar of female beauty but likely have not had the same thoughts about Native women. No matter what, the piece challenges our preconceived notions of Indigenous cultural autonomy and value, demonstrating the distinctly ethnocentric beauty standards that permeate modern society. For a similar artist, see Andy Everson (b. 1972), of K’ómoks and Kwakwa̱ka̱'wakw ancestry. Everson has taken images of Imperial figures from the Star Wars universe and adorned them with images of Native resistance.

Sources

Oh the children! Think of the children!

On January 19th, AR Senator Mark Lowery (R-Maumelle) and others introduced HB1218 and HB1231 to restrict what Arkansas public school educators can teach their students, especially regarding histories of different races in the United States. 

Ostensibly these bills are aimed at protecting children from lessons and activities that are designed to ostracize individuals in various racial groups. In an interview with Roby Brock on January 27th, Lowery even went so far as to say that he intended these bills to safeguard children from abuse.

Despite his stated intentions, these bills are completely regressive, would hurt Arkansas students and educators, and are motivated by his own politics much more than a desire to protect at-risk children.

I should come clean before I go any further. I have a PhD in American History and was named the 2020 Gilder Lehrman history teacher of the year for Arkansas. If anyone has an interest in fair and accurate histories, it’s me. I’m that nerd.

Lowery’s bills would take control away from local schools and school boards and substitute his own naked partisanship for good scholarship. (I was previously under the impression that local control was a key Republican idea.) The bills also carry heavy potential penalties for violators—up to 10% of the institution’s state funding—punishing an entire school and all its children for a teacher introducing them to ideas Lowery doesn’t like.

Lowery is particularly taking aim at certain “woke” versions of U.S. history. The 1619 Project claims that the nation’s “true” founding should be considered 1619, the first year that enslaved Africans were documented in Jamestown. Lowery’s temper tantrum of a bill, HB1231, would reduce state funding for anyone who didn’t teach students that the “true” date is July 4, 1776.

The truth? Historians are less certain than the Senator on this point. Was the nation really founded on July Fourth? Or was it the day the Declaration of Independence was actually signed (August 2, 1776)? Or was it 1787 when the Constitution was written? 1788 when it was ratified? Or 1789 when it went into effect? Why couldn’t 1619 be the “spiritual” founding of the country, considering the centrality of enslaved labor to the early Republic and its pivotal role in causing our nation’s most devastating crisis, the Civil War?

Many scholars have rightly criticized the 1619 project for pushing its argument further than its evidence can fully support. But to take scholarly disagreements about its conclusions as proof that the project is fundamentally flawed misunderstands the back-and-forth nature of academic discussions. Academics rarely produce concrete “truths.”

HB 1218 comes off as an “anti-wokeness” bill to me, even going so far as to make it illegal to promote social justice for a race, gender, social class, etc. Call me old fashioned, but I think justice is a good thing, particularly since the preamble of our Constitution calls for a government to “establish justice.” 

Teaching the uncomfortable aspects of history may not be fun, but it’s nonetheless vital. I have a great deal of admiration for our Founding Fathers, but many of them were brutal slave owners. Those same men also set up and perpetuated systems of government that, according to U.N. definitions, practiced genocide against Native peoples in the Americas. 

To be blunt, women and racial and ethnic minorities are Americans too, and they deserve to have their fair and accurate pasts represented in the classroom.

The bill particularly aims to limit any teaching that might promote “division between, or resentment of” any race, gender, social class, etc. That idea is a bit ridiculous. Few-to-no public educators are looking to create resentment through our teaching. But we do want to broaden our students’ worldviews and cause them to consider how we can all work together to improve our shared world.

Telling students about hard realities is not about creating resentment or destroying their love for their country. But ignoring the parts of history that we don’t like risks turning history into a propagandistic vehicle for a government seeking to limit what its citizens are allowed to think. 

Before the American Revolution, Thomas Paine criticized the “sunshine patriot” who would stand with his country in the good times but not the hard. Paine said that those were “the times that try men’s souls,” but that we should not “shrink from the service” of our nation. I completely agree. 

History is the same way. You don’t get to avoid the nasty parts because those make you feel bad. In fact, you can’t appreciate all the good that this country has done within its borders and worldwide without acknowledging where we have fallen short of the great ideals of our founding.

Education should be left to those who actually want to educate our students. Arkansas students deserve the truth, not petty partisanship.

UPDATED 9 FEB 2021

Looks like the bills either failed in committee or have been pulled. Success!

An historian reviews Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

Southern trees bear strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root

For generations, starting with Billie Holiday, Black women have been singing Abel Meeropol’s lyrics about lynching in “Strange Fruit.” More than protesting an abominable practice, though, the song is about the anguish Black women have felt about their frequent inability to protect themselves and their loved ones from the physical and sexual violence visited upon their bodies and minds in a white supremacist southern culture.

In Legendborn, Tracy Deonn transforms that grief into a battle cry for the inherent power in Black people, especially young Black women. Deonn has written a rare combination in the literary world—an absolute page turner of a story that also forces readers to confront the historical basis of  their current realities. As Holiday sang, blood is at the root of it all.

Deonn’s debut novel has been classified as young adult fantasy, but the characters and themes will appeal to adults as well. Legendborn follows the protagonist Bree Matthews, a sixteen-year-old Black girl from rural North Carolina who has recently lost her mother to a car accident. After entering the fictitious Early College program at the University of North Carolina (which would be an analog or peer school to the North Carolina School for Science and Math or my own employer of the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts), Bree finds herself increasingly involved in a secret society of magic users who are descended from King Arthur and his famed Knights of the Round Table. Along the way, she discovers much more about herself and her family history than she ever expected. (As a side note, there is no unified Arthurian myth, so Deonn is well within her right to expand beyond Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur with which readers are probably most familiar.)

It has been more than a decade since I have gotten so wrapped up in a book that I simply had to sit down and read 300+ pages in one day, but this one did it to me folks. Deonn absolutely nails what it feels like to be a student at UNC, as she was one herself. More than that, Legendborn gets its history right, putting it in the same vein as Octavia Butler’s Kindred in its ability to force a modern reader to understand the intricacies of southern society and the blood (both genetically and from violence) at the root of our complicated relationships.

Seeing this world through Bree’s eyes, however, gives the reader a front-row view into the modern-day repercussions of the South’s past, particularly the legacy of slavery and the racial power relationships it reinforced. But Legendborn confronts such issues in such an organic way that nothing feels forced or politicized to make a specific point—the book merely holds out a magnifying glass to zoom in on everyday interactions for the reader to observe and ponder. Similarly, gay, trans and/or non-binary characters are mixed in so naturally that they exist as their authentic selves, just like such folks do in real life. No character’s identity is solely defined by one facet of their lives. 

In this way, Legendborn could easily be taken as a strong rebuke of the narrow depictions of race in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series and Rowling’s even narrower personal understandings of gender. To be clear, however, such aspects of Deonn’s book are natural and flow perfectly within the context of the story. It does not feel like Deonn wrote the book as a direct admonition to Rowling. Deonn has instead written a fantastic novel that, to her great credit, feels like she has held up a mirror to the world of bright young students who would have attended the Early College program she has created. I have no doubt that my own students will see themselves and their friends reflected in the characters in Legendborn (minus the Arthurian magic).

As a side note, one of my greatest criticisms of most young adult fiction is that there never seems to be a good reason for the protagonists to be young adults. For sure, there are plenty of reasons to criticize older generations who have seemed unable or unwilling to fix an increasingly broken world, or, worst of all, sometimes intent on fracturing that world even more for personal gain. But, most young adult fiction leaves the notion that children should be fixing the world unexamined and taken for granted. Deonn, however, has convincing reasons why the story simply must revolve around high school and college-aged young adults. (I will decline to explain why in this review so as not to spoil too much.)

In all, Tracy Deonn’s Legendborn is a tremendous read that will keep your hands gripped on the book till you finish and give you plenty to ponder afterwards. If you have any sort of interest in fantasy literature, it should be on your reading list. The only problem is that we now have to wait anxiously for Deonn to finish the remaining books in the series. 

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If you are looking to buy Legendborn, my humble suggestion would be to order it from Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, NC. It is a beloved independent book store in the community. 

Gilder Lehrman Institute Arkansas History Teacher of the Year

Look, Another Shit-Brained Article on Higher Education

Higher education, like many industries, is currently experiencing a number of traumas relating to the COVID-19 global pandemic. Not surprisingly, many “very serious” people have made a number of pronouncements about higher education, ranging from why the institution is in such a financially precarious state entering the pandemic (it’s almost certainly lack of public funding) to what the future of higher education will be.

Stephen McBride has written one of the latter articles for Forbes titled “Why College is Never Coming Back,” and, folks, it’s one of the most shit-brained screeds I’ve ever read in my life.

There are many dubious tiers to the bullshit layer cake constructed by McBride, but one brief paragraph is so asinine that parsing it is enough to demonstrate the author’s lack of credibility to write about the subject with any authority or expertise (and I’m pretty disappointed that a Forbes editor let the piece run, even if it probably is just them reposting McBride’s blog).

McBride writes: “For example, [colleges] could hire world-class professors to create online courses for, say, $200,000/year. Each professor might teach 250 students per school year, which works out to roughly $800 per student. Tack on the cost of running the online course, plus a profit for the college, and you could probably charge each student $3,000/year.”

Being my most generous, I would say that McBride is being disingenuous and sandbagging his readers on costs. But the ideas there are so blatantly insolvent that it makes me question whether he has any idea how universities (or even payrolls) actually work in the real world. Here’s four reasons why.

(1) McBride underestimates the cost to institutions

First off, that $200,000 salary, unless you’re treating these “world-class professors” as consultants, will require an additional tens of thousands of dollars in payroll taxes, health insurance, retirement benefits, etc., all benefits expected by “world-class” professionals.

Also, who will be creating and grading the assessments? As my colleague James has said (although I think he borrowed the phrase from a friend), “I teach for free. I get paid to grade.” There’s a reason why most “world-class professors” have a legion of graduate students to TA for their classes—grading is awful, and it’s extremely time consuming. Moreover, those TAs often run discussion sections and conduct most of the office hours. And even those TAs are often not responsible for grading more than 90 students a semester (often it’s more like 50-75). Just the TA portion is a 20+ hour/week job. Schools would almost certainly have to pay much more to deliver this content than McBride asserts.

(2) McBride underestimates to cost to students

Perhaps the most shit-brained part of this is that he thinks it would only cost $3,000 per student per year in tuition, a number he arrives at by adding $800 in supposed tuition costs ($200,000 divided by 250 students) to “the cost of running the online course, plus a profit for the college.”

Are you serious, Stephen?

Does he think that students only take one course per school year? Or does he think that one “world-class professor” can teach 250 students every subject they need to know?

Instead, applying reality to the situation, most students take 4-6 courses per semester, roughly 10 courses a year, which would be $30,000 in tuition costs. In many ways, McBride is proving his detractors right. College cannot be as cheap as he thinks it should be without some serious outside capital in some way (either via public funds or an endowment).

(3) McBride misunderstands what a typical “world-class professor” does

I have been fortunate enough to know and study under some truly world-class professors. I mean that not as a euphemism—some of them are well-known in the field of history on basically every continent. Has McBride spent much time around them?

Most “world-class professors” got to the positions they did by spending a significant amount of time researching, teaching no more than two classes per semester (often less), and typically teaching fewer than 100 students a school year, often with the assistance of teaching assistants. That reality fundamentally misaligns with McBride’s vision of how a “world-class professor” would operate in his model.

(4) The “world-class professor” envisioned by McBride is likely highly problematic

 McBride never comes out and says it, but I’m assuming by “world-class professor” he means a full-professor at a top university. In 2017, full professors in the U.S. were 81% white and 66% male. (Indeed, white males made up 54% of the full professors.)

 Effectively, McBride’s plan would squeeze out most women and people of color from the profession.

  

In all, McBride demonstrates an amazing capacity for foolish statements and uninformed arguments in such a short space. And, for that, I applaud his efficiency. But his plans for the future of college? He needs to go back to school and figure out how the real world works.

P.S. If there were any doubt in your mind that McBride is a huckster shill, check out the last few lines of his post: “Get my report "The Great Disruptors: 3 Breakthrough Stocks Set to Double Your Money". These stocks will hand you 100% gains as they disrupt whole industries.” What a jackass.

May 29, 2020 in These United States of America

I wrote this poem a month ago today and wanted to share it.

 

May 29, 2020 in These United States of America

They burned a building
In Minneapolis last night.
Sal’s Pizzeria emerged unscathed this time.

 I saw one man kneel in a uniform,
And the nation called him a traitor.
Another man kneeled in a different uniform,
But he was just serving and protecting.

 Those things can happen when
Someone sells loosies
Or plays with toy guns
Or sits in their own apartment.
Insulting the sanctity of property rights
In this country? Clearly a Capital idea.

America was once called
The United States of Lyncherdom,
And that prophecy is fulfilled today.
Yet again. I am as embarrassed as Mark was.
But I am alive.

 I will never have The Conversation with my daughters
Because their skin is white like mine,
And their blond hair, 
One’s impossibly straight,
The other’s raucously curly,
Will grant them protection.

At least from this malevolence. 

Their bluish-gray eyes shining
Like a talisman. Yet another badge
That protects its owners from deserved harm.
Because black still only comes before blue
In alphabetical order,
No matter what Mookie showed us decades ago. 

COVID-19 Turned Me Vegan… For A Week

This is what it has come to. The current global pandemic has been a life-altering event for all of us, even people like me who are fortunate and privileged—my wife and I are still getting paychecks, my in-laws live with us so we have their companionship and help with childcare, and living in Arkansas means we have a yard and abundant other green spaces to get outside safely.

But, even with all those blessings, the constant, enervating grind is enough to jade anyone. I find it difficult to get out of my own head as I watch the case and body count tick steadily upward, which means that effectively doing my job, parenting, and helping homeschool my daughters is difficult, sometimes impossible.

Like many people, however, I have found comfort in food. I got the idea to drastically alter my diet and go vegan, even if just for a week. The idea was not necessarily to be healthier (and I do not think it was, at least not appreciably), but more to force myself to eat out of my comfort zone and experiment. I wanted something new to focus on, at least for a short time.

So, how did it go? Pretty damn well, actually. 

My three favorite meals I cooked were spiced pinto beans and rice (with fixin’s, of course), hummus wraps, and bean burgers.

When cooking with more vegetables and non-meat products, I found myself focusing more on texture and color than I normally do. And I found that I had to be more explicit about building flavor through whole ingredients and spices. Simply put, bacon is going to put a richer flavor into most dishes than will any vegetable, no matter how you prepare them. In building those flavors, too, I found myself being more conscious of the way my food looked as well, especially the colors. As the old adage goes, “we eat with our eyes first.”

IMG_2397.jpg

The best meal to me was the rice and beans. Lots of bold spices (garlic, cumin, chili powder, paprika off the top of my head) were complemented by a rice recipe we borrowed from some friends-of-friends from Mexico, two different homemade salsas (one traditional, one peach), an avocado-corn relish, and a great kale salad with a quick lemon-garlic dressing. Any meal with lots of onions, garlic, avocado, and spices is going to work out just fine.

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Side note: we have been eating a ton of excellent kale lately, purchased from local JV Farms. If you are in the Hot Springs, AR area (they’re located in nearby Bismarck, AR), definitely consider purchasing from them.

The next best meal was the hummus wrap. The hummus recipe mostly comes from my friend and mentor Akram, who was born in Lebanon. I added some smoked paprika to it at the suggestion of my friend Dan and substituted peanut butter for the tahini (we were out). I think both additions were perfect for my palette, or at least I could not tell that there was peanut butter in it (ours is very low sugar). Add greens (from JV Farms), shredded carrots, quick pickled onions, and some mini-sweet peppers, and it was the prettiest thing I ate all week. I could not resist pairing it with some southern-style green beans. You’ll have to trust me that the hummus was under all that.

Last was the humble bean burger, modified from this recipe. Was it pretty? Absolutely not. But the recipe built good flavor with just hints of sweetness, acid, and lots of umami. And I added more kale. So much kale.

IMG_2406.jpg

In all, I really do not think I was much healthier for the week as a whole. Did you know that Oreos are vegan? I ate many Oreos. French fries are vegan too, and were excellent when paired with an Impossible Whopper one day for lunch. And I got to eat plenty of peanut butter, with apples, on pb&j sandwiches, right out of the jar with a spoon…

But the experience was good for me because it gave me a quarantine goal that was beyond surviving. Yes, our situation meant that I had the privilege to add an extra goal for myself. I recognize that. 

But I also recognize that, during this crisis, we all need to take care of our spirits as much as our physical selves. Make sure you are finding something take your mind off of all of this, even if it is just for a week.

On Kobe

Kobe Bryant died yesterday in a helicopter crash. I am not sure I could tell you why, but his death has affected me deeply. The truth is, when he was alive, I really did not like the man.

It is not a controversial statement to say that Kobe Bryant was credibly accused of rape in 2003. (Nobody should be suspended for tweeting about that, by the way.)

Kobe was also a big booster of women’s sports. The U.S. Women’s National Team acknowledged as such after his death. And he was an ally to the WNBA and many women’s players. His daughter Gianna dreamed of being a WNBA player, and the love he felt for her, especially in supporting her dreams, was palpable. She, along with some of her friends and their parents, died on that helicopter too.

And yet he was the person who once called a referee a “fucking faggot” during a game, even if he did later work hard to make amends for his homophobic ways.

None of that cancels out any of the other stuff. But I write it all down to remind us that taking the full measure of a man’s life means considering his whole life with nuance. Kobe Bryant was human and flawed, on and off the court.

But, my heavens, he gave us so much on the court (even if he almost went to dook… or was it UNC?).

He gave us 81. He gave us 62 through 3. He gave us 60 his last game (we can ignore that it took 50 shots). He got five rings and deserved at least one of his Finals MVPs. He deserved each of his four All-Star Game MVPs. In 2008, he was the unquestioned leader on the Olympic “Redeem Team.” It is impossible to list it all, but these are the on-court memories that will stay with me. Oh, and him miraculously not flinching here. Damn. 

How did he not flinch here!?!

How did he not flinch here!?!

In the end, I think the reason why Kobe Bryant’s death affected me so much is that I never really considered that he could die. He was so willful, so ornery, that I had no conception that he might let death win. Of course that is a silly notion. 

Ernest Hemingway once wrote: “When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed; not you. . . . Then when you are badly wounded the first time you lose that illusion and you know it can happen to you. After being severely wounded two weeks before my nineteenth birthday I had a bad time until I figured out that nothing could happen to me that had not happened to all men before me. Whatever I had to do men had always done. If they had done it then I could do it too and the best thing was not to worry about it."

Kobe Bryant had to do what men have always done—what we all have to do. But since he died, I have realized how much I came to expect having him around to talk about the game, inspire the next generation of players, and show us that you can become a better man than you have been.

Thanks for the memories, Kobe. Godspeed.

Mountain Valley Water and Hot Springs, AR History

For the past few years, I’ve been working, perhaps not as diligently as I should, on a project related to the history of Mountain Valley Water. It’s a local company and the nation’s first bottled water sold coast-to-coast. (You may have seen it held by a U.S. president, Elvis, or on an episode of Parks and Rec.) Anyway, in the past year I’ve had two articles come out on the subject, and I think they have some worthwhile things to say on consumerism, health, environment, and local history. They’re linked here for your perusal. Cheers!

“Advertising Indians,” Gastronomica: The Journal of Critical Food Studies, 18:2 (Summer 2018): 11-18

“Bottling Nature’s Elixir: The Mountain Valley Spring Water Company, Environment, Health, and Capitalism,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 78:1 (Spring 2019): 1-31

UPDATE (1 OCTOBER 2019): My school, ASMSA, did a brief press release on this research. You can read about it here.

Agricultural History Society's annual meeting 2019

This year’s annual meeting of the Agricultural History Society—the 100th anniversary!—is being held in Washington, D.C. (The draft program can be found here.)

Due to various constraints, there will be no presentation capabilities at the conference. But, since technology is great (as long as it’s not doing something like destabilizing U.S. journalism), I can put our conference materials here on my website for attendees to access during the session. Perhaps you’re doing that right now! See below.

Jenny Barker-Devine, “Agribusiness and the Liberal Arts”

Neil Oatsvall, “U.S. History Textbooks and Agricultural History”

Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, “A Decade of Two Crises: Farm Crisis/AIDS Crisis”

Some questions to consider:

  1. Does agricultural history get included sufficiently in dominant interpretations of history within the curriculum? 

  2. How can we convince our colleagues to spend more time talking about agriculture? 

  3. How can we get our colleagues to recognize when they already are talking about agriculture so that we can engage them in discussions about best practices for teaching the subject? 

  4. How can we demonstrate to students that agricultural history is vital to their understandings of the past? 

  5. How can we encourage both students and colleagues to include agricultural history as part of student research? 

That Time My Grandmother Threatened Strom Thurmond

“Good morning, Lucy.”

“If you come on this side of the street I’m hitting you with the newspaper, Strom.”

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My grandmother, Lucy Johnson, used to talk about Strom Thurmond from time to time. She spent most of her life in Aiken, South Carolina. He was from nearby Edgefield. 

Lucy Johnson, my grandmother

Lucy Johnson, my grandmother

Most people know Thurmond as the longtime politician who was a Democrat, Dixiecrat, and then Republican. After holding the office of South Carolina Governor from 1947-1951, Thurmond spent nearly fifty years (1954-2003) in the U.S. Senate. He even ran for president in 1948 as part of the pro-segregation Dixiecrats (he helped author the anti-Brown v. Board “Southern Manifesto”). 

My grandmother, however, knew Thurmond as a neighbor. For years I had heard stories about how the politician, after his first wife, Jean, died of a brain tumor in 1960 at age 33, remarried a much younger woman, Nancy. Thurmond was 66 at the time of their marriage, 44 years his young wife’s senior. And Nancy Thurmond, former Miss South Carolina, was a classmate of my mother’s in high school. 

After getting married the second time, Thurmond did what any man in his mid-60s with a beautiful young wife might do—he started exercising a lot to try and get into shape. My grandmother frequently told the story quoted at the outset of this blog post. 

Thurmond would be out for his morning jog, and my grandmother would often see him when she was out to get the paper. Knowing her, she might have planned her trips to get the paper when she thought he might be out. She could be, to put it kindly, a bit confrontational. After Thurmond’s salutation, she would threaten him with the paper. There was always such bitter resentment when my grandmother told this story, and I could never quite understand why.

Sure, I dislike Strom Thurmond as much as a lot of people do. He was a philandering racist. But there was clearly more to this story than I knew. Tonight my mother told me the rest of it.

Apparently my grandparents were in a square dancing class with Thurmond and his first wife, and every time Thurmond passed by my grandmother he would grab her rear end without any sort of permission. Like many women at the time probably would have (beyond the sexual politics of the time, Thurmond was an extremely powerful man), my grandmother put up with it for a few passes. But, after one time too many she cornered Jean Thurmond and told her, “If he touches my ass one more time, I’m going to deck him in the middle of the room in front of everybody.”

As the story goes, the harassment stopped after that.

Now, I should give some expected caveats here. The above stories are family stories passed down to me either directly from my grandmother or from her via my mother. I have no way of proving their veracity, as all the involved parties are deceased. (Of course nobody could prove them false, either, I doubt.) But my grandmother believed these stories a great deal. I wanted to write this blog post to give power to a past woman’s experiences and give her a voice.

And, if the story is true, I am quite proud of my grandmother for threatening Strom Thurmond when he clearly deserved it.

John Peter Zenger and the Value of a Free Press

These days it often feels like journalists are under attack just for doing their jobs. Some people in politics have even called the press “enemies of the people,” reminiscent of Soviet accusations during the Cold War.

Unsurprisingly, governmental problems with the press are not new. Because of that, I wanted to do a quick blog post today about the trial of publisher John Peter Zenger in New York in 1735. You can read more about the trial here. (In full disclosure, my quotations come from a document reader, but I’m fairly certain they’re borrowed directly from the document I linked.)

The trial centered around a charge of libel against Zenger, and the judge claimed that Zenger had “a reputation as a printer and publisher of false news that wickedly and maliciously criticize the government of our said Lord the King.” But did he commit libel?

Modern definitions of libel center on two central ideas: (1) the printed material is false, and (2) the printed material has caused some sort of quantifiable harm to its target. Interestingly, early 18th-century law was not quite as settled, and perhaps merely criticizing an elected official could be considered libel and a punishable offense. 

Zenger quickly admitted that he had printed and published the newspaper, but said that he was worried the colony of New York’s “LIBERTIES AND PROPERTIES” were endangered with “slavery”—men had their deeds destroyed, new courts were set up without legislative consent, trials by jury were taken away, the governor had deprived men of property of their votes, etc. (or so he claimed).

The prosecution asserted this meant Zenger was clearly guilty, because “nothing is plainer, than the words in the charge are scandalous, seditious, and tend to disturb the minds of the people of the Colony.” The court case, therefore, centered around what the word “libel” truly meant. Zenger’s lawyer insisted that something had to be untrue to be libel, while the prosecution countered, “a libel is nevertheless a libel whether it is true or not.”

Zenger saw himself as having a responsibility to protecting common people from governmental officials who might abuse their power. His defense centered on the notion that “while we pay all due obedience to men in authority we ought at the same time to be upon our guard against how they use that power. Men who oppress the people under their government force them to cry out and complain and then make that very complaint the foundation for new oppressions, and prosecutions.”

The judge, however, countered, “nothing can be worse to any government than to have people attempt to create distrust and dislike of the management of it. This has always been looked upon as a crime, and no government can be safe without punishing those who attempt to create distrust or dislike of it.”

Luckily for us, the jury sided with Zenger, declaring him “not guilty” of seditious libel. The jury helped establish our modern view of libel that it indeed must involve some sort of falsehood. Because of that, we still have ideals of a free and independent press in the United States. Far from being the “enemy of the people,” our press is in fact central to the liberties that we hold dear in the United States, and essential to maintaining our democracy and holding our elected officials and business leaders accountable for their actions. 

Comparing Donald Trump to Past Presidents

George Santayana's saying that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” is total hogwash. But, I do think that studying the past can help us understand the present. (Since I am a professional historian, this should not be a surprising position.)

With this blog post, I want to very briefly point out (in chronological order) some of the worst traits of past presidencies that I believe are present in the current Trump administration. Every presidential administration in U.S. history has had problems, of course. But I am not sure we have ever seen this many problems in the same presidency (a bunch of Wikipedia and other links are included if you want to read more). 

(1) Bigotry against non-whites and cronyism from the Jackson administration

When Andrew Jackson ascended to the presidency in 1829, he was so popular that excited voters essentially threw a kegger in the White House after his inauguration. But part of Jackson’s appeal had a darker side—many voters were excited by the fact that he was outwardly racist toward non-whites, especially indigenous peoples. Indian removals happened at his behest (he even ignored Supreme Court orders to do so, saying, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"). The Trail of Tears is the best known of component of these.

Not as bad as the Indian removals (what is?), Jackson also practiced the “spoils system,” which means that he appointed friends and supporters to political posts instead of appointing deserving people on the basis of merit. This abominable practice eventually led to the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 whereby civil servants are supposed to be chosen by merit.

How is Trump like this? I have previously argued that he is a white supremacist, so that fits the first part. And Trump’s appointment of political supporters and family members to a number of top posts easily first the second. 

(2) General corruption and scandals of the Harding administration

Warren G. Harding was not a bad man, but he did have a tendency to appoint unscrupulous men to office. There were a number of scandals that occurred during his administration, but the best known is the Teapot Dome Scandal. The Secretary of Interior leased Navy oil reserves in Wyoming to private companies that essentially stole U.S. oil reserves. It was the most significant scandal in U.S. history at the time.

How is Trump like this? Take your pick. Look at all the scandals from Scott Pruitt. In general, Trump's presidency seems designed to get as much money as possible out of the deal for he and his (something previous presidents, particularly men like George Washington or Jimmy Carter, would have abhorred). The Trump International Hotel in Washington is one of the clearest cut cases where Trump is using the office to make money.

(3) Japanese internment during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations

Executive Order 9066, issued shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, did not specifically mention Japanese-Americans, but it still led to the internment of over 100,000 of them, about two-thirds of those being U.S. citizens. The order itself cited “protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and national-defense utilities.” Specifically, it allowed military officials “to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent […] from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion.” Clearly racially motivated (no German- or Italian-Americans were interned), the incident remains one of the most reprehensible moments in U.S. history.

How is Trump like this? I am trying to avoid the word “baby jails” here… a recent Vanity Fair headline declared, “THE U.S. IS BUILDING JAILS FOR TODDLERS BECAUSE TRUMP ‘DOESN’T WANT TO LOOK WEAK.’” No matter how you slice it, the United States has been separating immigrant and refugee children from their parents and jailing both for indefinite lengths of time. Trump himself tweeted out that immigrants did not deserve due process because U.S. immigration policy is “laughed at all over the world.”

(4) Watergate scandal during the Nixon administration

A graduate of dook** law, Richard Nixon was not always a bad president. He signed significant environmental legislation, like creating the EPA and the Clean Air Act of 1970. He worked hard to lessen the Cold War by negotiating the SALT I treaty and normalizing relations with China. His prosecution of the Vietnam War was disgraceful, but not his entire presidency.

But Nixon did preside over the greatest political scandal in U.S. history, Watergate. The short answer is that he was so desirous of staying in power that he was willing to spy on his political rivals and steal information from them. For this, he was eventually forced out of office (with impeachment looming, Nixon resigned).

How is Trump like this? It is clear that members of the Trump administration worked with Russians in an attempt to influence the 2016 election, part of which involved stolen emails from the Democratic National Convention. The most significant aspect seems to be a 9 June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower where several members of the Trump campaign, including one of his sons, his son-in-law, and his campaign manager met with several Russian agents. Like Nixon, Trump craves political power and is willing to resort to highly questionable or illegal means to achieve it.

***                  ***                  ***

As I said at the start, the past does not repeat itself. But to ignore similarities between the current presidency and some of the darkest moments in U.S. history is unwise. If it continues on the current trajectory, the 45th president’s term will end up the most despicable, scandal-ridden presidency in U.S. history.

 

**Reminder that I went to UNC. That’s just how we spell the name of that school.

Time Travel in the Classroom: Using Science-Fiction to Combine Science and Humanities

One of the highlights of my teaching career to date has been co-teaching a course on time travel this semester. Of course it is fun to co-teach with my dear friend, Jack Waddell (I have previously advocated for collaboration in scholarship). And time travel is just an inherently fun idea. But, more than the purely “fun” parts, the course simply works, bridging the gap between science and humanities in an organic and easily digestible fashion.

First off, how does the course work?

Jack is a physicist and therefore takes care of the physics of what time might look like in a real world context. Yes, time travel is a real thing, both predictable and measurable. In 1906 Albert Einstein more-or-less invented the idea of special relativity, by which time dilation (or the slowing of time) occurs when objects approach the speed of light. But special relativity only works in contexts with no gravity. Einstein detailed his ideas of general relativity in 1915 for those situations, the general rule being more gravity means more time dilation.

Delving into these ideas means teaching the students some pretty advanced physics that they would not otherwise encounter until graduate school, most likely. The physics stretch the students (and instructors!) a great deal intellectually. But it is all quite fun, honestly. You get to see your world and universe in an entirely different way, challenging your very conceptions of how the universe functions. The ideas are not all abstract, either. For example, if gravitational time dilation were not taken into account, GPS satellites would be off by about 15 additional meters each day. Over the course of the year, those coordinates would be off by more than three miles!

The course does more than simply cover high-level physics concepts, however. It also uses science fiction to question how time travel, whether theoretical or speculative, might operate in real life. We are not the only people to do such things, of course. Kip Thorne, the physicist famous for being the science adviser to the 2014 film Interstellar, has speculated about how wormholes might work (even if he thinks they might not be theoretically possible) and how those could potentially be used to time travel. Science fiction has a great place in the classroom too.

Interestingly, fiction about time travel began long before scientists started to ponder the idea in earnest. Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” (1819)was not the first fiction to incorporate a time travel element, but it was perhaps the first very popular one. H.G Wells was the first person to use the word “time machine”in his 1895 book of the same name. (Both works are in the public domain, so read away!) This year we have also gotten into some more modern fiction, including some bona-fide sci-fi classics: Ray Bradbury’s “A Sound of Thunder” (1952), Robert Heinlein’s “‘—All You Zombies—‘” (1958), and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War (1974). 

On top of fantastic written fiction, we are also viewing a number of movies that include time travel. Some of the films, like the previously mentioned Interstellar or Primer (2004), are quite serious. Others, like Back to the Future (1985) and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989), are playful and lighthearted. But all combine questions of what might happen if science fiction became science reality.

And that is where I come into the picture. (Please do not misunderstand me that Jack is incapable of tackling such subjects—far from it—but I have to justify my existence somehow.)

At the local comic convention this past year, the 2017 Spa Con, Jack and another one of our physicist colleagues, Brian Monson, were part of a panel on teleportation. During the panel, Brian suggested that one of science fiction’s real benefits was that it allowed us to work out ethical quandaries inherent to science and technology. And he is right there.

With our time travel course, Jack and I try to get students to realize that scientists need arts training, and artists would be better off with some science training. Interdisciplinarity is not merely a trendy academic buzzword. It is a better way of organizing our thoughts and allows us to answer questions that we never would have even asked had we stayed rigidly fixed to our own disciplinary boundaries.

Who is to say that Asimov did not get it right when he devised his “Three Laws of Robotics”? Or that HBO’s new series “Westworld”cannot help us better understand the ethical conundrums associated with artificial intelligence? This is something more than the fearmongering present in most Michael Crichton works (which I adored as a child, so please do not take this critique just as bashing). Instead, if our technological development is going to continue apace with its speed over the last hundred years, how will we handle that as a society? Obviously there could have been more discussion about the morality of technology like the atomic bomb. But the recent congressional hearings into Facebook show that more benign technologies also raise a host of ethical problems with real world consequences.

So, when we have our students learn about the physics of time travel, we want them to be able to do more than just calculate γ (gamma, or the coefficient used to determine time dilation in special relativity). And when we show them fun movies, we want them to get more than just a laugh out of it. When we have our students write their own science fiction, we want more than just to stimulate their creative processes. 

What we really want is for students to think synthetically and recognize that science, ethics, and fiction are not as separate as might get portrayed in popular culture. Creating good citizens in the future will require thinkers adept at moving between each of these modes of thinking and combining insights in ways that improve understandings in each individual discipline. 

Saying that humanities and science should be taught together is not new. The fact that we are teaching this course at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts says that. But, hopefully our course shows that science fiction can be an ideal vessel to do so. As our students have learned, time travel science and fiction are less about how our world works and more about how we should fit into it with each other.

Why Black Panther is like Godzilla

Note: This blog post contains some spoilers of both Black Panther (2018) and Godzilla (1954).

I like superheroes. And, according to IMDB’s list of the top grossing movies of all time in the United States, I’m not alone. Of the top 20, six are superhero movies (and, for good measure, so are numbers 21 and 22, so eight of the top 22).

Amazingly, Black Panther is already number 16 on that list, having grossed around $430 million dollars to date. That is remarkable, considering the film only debuted two weeks ago! At this rate, it is probably on track to be the highest grossing film of all time.

Beyond its box office success, Black Panther has drawn accolades for being so, well, black. Superheroes have tended to be overwhelmingly white and male. For example, the number of white men in superhero movies played by actors with the first name “Chris” has drawn derision and scorn. (Buzzfeed even produced “A ranking of Every White Guy named Chris Who Stars in a Superhero Movie.”) Wonder Woman, #20 on the above list of box office grossings, has received similar praise for being so unabashedly about a woman and directed by a woman, things out of line with most superhero flicks. But, Black Panther has had its racial aspects even more highly discussed and lauded

One film critic (FilmCritHulk) has even claimed, “Black Panther unspools with a complexity I have not seen talked about with regards to race since [Spike Lee’s critically-lauded] Do The Right Thing.” The Hulk (the film critic one) even said the film is “in short, a miracle.” But, to me, the appropriate comparison to Black Panther is not Do The Right Thing, but, instead, Godzilla.

Stay with me here.

In 1954, the original Godzilla (Gojira, if you will) was a cinematic marvel ahead of its time. Yes, it appears cheesy today to see a man in a foam rubber suit destroy what is clearly a model of a city. But, at the time, it was a revelation. Beyond its theatric appeal for people who liked destruction, Godzilla had a deeper meaning. Bill Tsutsui well explains in his book, Godzilla on My Mind: Fifty Years of the King of Monsters (2004).

In the original Godzilla, the big green lizard is originally awakened by U.S. nuclear testing in the Pacific Ocean. As a postwar Japan struggled to find its identity and deal with the horrors of WWII, this mechanism made sense to Japanese moviegoers; the United States was bad, and its atomic bombs caused bad things to happen. But the film placed Japanese scientists as the direct antithesis to their U.S. counterparts.

In the film, Japanese scientists have also created an ultimate weapon: the oxygen destroyer. Combatting both a love triangle and the King of Monsters, a Japanese scientist ultimately uses the oxygen destroyer to kill Godzilla and then kills himself so that the knowledge of how to make such a horrible device would never fall into the wrong hands. You see, in this story, when the Japanese created a world-altering weapon, they only used it once in defense and then realized that it was too terrible ever to be used again. The scientist who killed himself thus protected the world in two ways.

The movie implicitly makes the comparison between the ethics of U.S. actions and the ethics of hypothetical Japanese actions. This message was scrubbed out of the U.S. release almost entirely, but it resonated a great deal with Japanese people at the time.

Fast forward to Black Panther. The film postulates that the most technologically advanced nation in the world (by a longshot) is Wakanda. To the outside world, Wakanda appears to be a poor herding nation that is not worth messing with at all. It is so poor that, in the European colonial landgrab of the 14th through 20th centuries, it was left entirely alone. Because of this, Wakanda was never colonized by a foreign power.

We know, of course, that the Wakandans never would have been able to be conquered due to the fictitious metal vibranium they mine, and also the power granted by the heart-shaped herb that helps create Wakanda’s protector, the Black Panther himself. These two facts make Wakanda incredibly powerful, more so than any other nation in the world by a significant margin. It is, in this way, that the comparison to Godzilla becomes clear.

A central component of Black Panther’s plot revolves around a leadership struggle in Wakanda and the fundamental question of what Wakanda’s role in the world should be. Two diametrically opposing viewpoints emerge: one states that Wakanda should hide itself from the world and only use its technology in defense, and the other states that Wakanda should use its technology to arm people of color all over the world so that they can become colonizers and take over other nations. (In one of the post-credit scenes a compromise is effectively reached where Wakanda does not take over the world but instead decides to share its technology for the good of everyone.)

Black Panther, therefore, presents essentially the same idea as Godzilla. It posits a tremendously powerful African nation saying, “when WE had the power to do horrible things like Euro-Americans did, WE instead decided not to do so.” Just as the Japanese did not unleash the oxygen destroyer on the United States, the Wakandans did not colonize the entire planet like Euro-Americans did. Both sides COULD have done so, but had more honor, integrity, and value for human life than that.

Thus, to me, Black Panther is the modern equivalent of Godzilla, especially in the morality that it espouses. Both films are highly cognizant of history and want to show that things could be different if people made different, better choices. Non-violence in this case does not represent a weakness or incapability to commit violence, but instead demonstrates a higher level of moral fiber. As an historian, I find that message highly appealing, especially the idea that if good people make decisions they can change the world for the better, creating a safer, more harmonious world for all nations.

Because of that, I am looking forward to watching Black Panther climb the box office charts. I do not know if it will become the highest-grossing film of all time. But its message is good enough that I will be happy if it does.