Keele Diary #10

When I am abroad, and especially when I am living abroad, I walk a lot more than I do at home. I would suspect that the same is the case for most Americans abroad. The main reason is quite simple: At home I live in a car culture, and I have a car. I live relatively close to campus, and on rare occasions do walk to school, but rarely, at least in part because time is a finite commodity, because for much of the year weather is not exactly a friend to the light-skinned paramulator, because Odessa is not the world's most pedestrian friendly city, and because, well, I am selfish and lazy and so clearly hate the environment.

When I am abroad, I don't have a car. If I had a car, I would drive it. But also, when I am abroad, I tend to live on on near university campuses, where even if I did have a car, my parking spot at my residence would almost certainly be about as good a spot as I could locate. But also, in most places in the world, and England and Keele certainly qualify, there is simply more of a walking culture. On campus, the default mechanism is walking, and one would come up with a reason not to. At home, the default mechanism is driving, and one comes up with reasons to walk.

And I do not mind. I enjoy walking, even though I am not the biggest fan in the world of hiking (not because of the walking, but because of the pointlessness, mostly). But there have been times in my life when even hiking took on a utilitarian bent. When I lived in South Africa in 1997 hiking became another way to deeply immerse myself in the country, and I had friends who hiked, and we'd camp and have a wonderful time. I suppose I could recapture that in the United States, and in the right context and with the right people, I am certain I would. But I also think that in 1997 I simply walked everywhere. It became the norm. If I left town, I went with a good friend who had a car, and certainly did not reject rides as they came. But I also thought nothing of walking 2-3 miles to a friend's or girlfriend's house if a ride was not available, something almost unimaginable in the US.

These days my walks cover a fairly familiar path. I leave my flat, which is probably several hundred yards or so from the middle of campus. I go down to the news agent at the student union and pick up The Guardian and The Independent (yes, I still stubbornly cling to news print even though I also subscribe to numerous newspapers online and well know the direction of the newspaper industry's fortunes). From there I head somewhat back in the other direction to come to my office. In the evening I might walk home, but usually do so via the grocer's in the same general area as the news agent, and I might walk to the pub. I certainly walked more when I was at Oxford in 2005, or in Grahamstown in South Africa whenever I return there. But in both cases those were simply functions of scale -- Oxford is bigger than Keele, and the town is more integrated into the university; Rhodes University is part of Grahamstown, adjacent to the main part of town.

I'll go home for two weeks and will walk less, or when I walk it will be purely as recreational endeavor, as Mrs. dcat and I like to go for walks, oftentimes on the big loop around campus. But that will be walking to walk, as opposed to walking as a modus vivendi, as it is in so much of the rest of the world, and as it is for me here.

Keele Diary #9

Let's see, in the last 24 hours I've:

Discovered the postgrad pub here that everyone raves about. Well, not discovered, it was already there. But I found it.

Walking home (sober) I stepped off the sidewalk to let three students pass. But the sidewalk was on a slope, and the sidewalk is flanked by a thin strip of concrete that protrudes an inch or so above the surface. The ground on the slope was muddy and slippery, I wiped out, and smashed my shins directly on the concrete trim. My biggest problem at first was saving face, which became impossible when the very sweet students kept trying to help me, and I just wanted to get away. Then I discovered, once my shame faded that a contusion that size of a cricket ball (culturally assimilated!) has instantly sprung up on my leg.

They show The Wire at 11:25 on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday nights on BBC 2. They are in the midst of season two, which is probably my least favorite of the five seasons but is still among the greatest television seasons ever put on the screen. I was ready to go to bed when it was done, but I noticed that NBA basketball was coming up. I assumed it was a highlights show of some sort. Nope -- Celtics-Magic Game 5 live! I was up all night. Great win for the guys in green, coming from a double digit deficit to take a 3-2 series lead.

Still got up early to come to campus to participate in the last meeting of the Southern History seminar. I talked a bit about school integration, focusing on Ole Miss, a topic on which I am working on a project of undetermined outcome.

Had lunch with several faculty and graduate students before my research presentation, which I thought went quite well. I was happy with it anyway, and we had great conversation afterward and I have several great ideas to carry me forward.

Tonight Wigan Athletic Club is nearly the last line of defense between Manchester United and another Premier League title (ManU may still need a tie this weekend if they do win). Given that Manchester is about 40 minutes away from Keele, I expect a heavily ManU crowd to gather at the student union, so I might have to go check it out, as a live Premier League game appears not to be in the cards. Plus I have a soft spot for plucky Wigan, which was promoted to the Premier League when I was in Oxford in 2005.

Chafe on Franklin

The new Organization of American Historians newsletter has a nice "In Memorium" to John Hope Franklin, the legendary historian who passed away in March. The author is Bill Chafe, himself a fine historian and a past president of the OAH.

Keele Diary #8

Thoughts on higher education gathered while pondering the fact that England has a magazine called Carpworld, that there is apparently so much competition in the genre that Carpworld advertises itself as "The Original and Still the Best," and that the fellow standing in line ahead of me at the news agent was scooping up his copy. There is also The Racing Pigeon, a magazine that apparently is so dominant in its genre that it can advertise itself as "The Only Independent Pigeon Weekly." Who am I to doubt such a grand and self-serving claim? It ain't raging if it's true.

One major similarity between academic culture in the United States and in the UK is the enveloping sense of pessimism about academic life. The list of complaints is remarkably similar in both cultures despite the separation of the Atlantic. And the criticisms have credence. I will list just a handful: Students are apathetic/ill-prepared/worse than they once were/entitled/lazy. Administrators are daft/invasive/clueless/capricious/annoying/ignorant and insensitive to the needs of professors/departments/programs. Politicians intervene in the world of higher education without any real clue as to how things work and with ideological blinders firmly in place. We are too reliant upon time consuming assessments and metrics that do not actually tell us anything useful. Academic fads and fashions that tend to be imposed from above shift without warning. Technology leaves us in a state of flux on issues ranging from research (our own and our students -- the Wikipedia problem in the case of the latter), copyright, and library acquisitions. The effort to rigidify research outputs does not serve research or learning. The over-reliance upon student teaching evaluations re-enforces the consumer model and shackles professors and in turn hinders good teaching. The list goes on.

Read Times Higher Education, the weekly magazine for higher education, and one quickly realizes that with the exception of configuration and formatting and the vast and impenetrable gap between English and English and one could be reading the Chronicle of Higher Education in terms of many of the lamentations and concerns and debates. And yet my colleagues both here and at home should take a longer view. I am in the midst of reading three books about higher education. One is a collection of essays from academics in the humanities and social sciences calling for a radicalized and more politically engaged professoriate. Another of the books comes from a respected historian lamenting the state of the academy at least in part for the opposite reasons from his colleagues in the collected essays. And the third book wants to remind a skeptical profession of the utility of that most beleaguered and endangered species: the classroom lecture. But here is where we should perhaps take solace, step back, realize that the sky is not falling, and understand that higher education is always in crisis. The three books? The radical historian Theodore Roszak's collection The Dissenting Academy, published for the first time in 1967; historian of the Soviet Union Adam Ulam's The Fall of the American University (1972), and British education specialist Donald Bligh's What's The Use of Lectures (1971). I am not arguing that we should be sanguine about some of the very real threats we face. But I am willing to make the case that we overstate our dire sraits both here in the UK and back at home. Universities are remarkably adaptable. And one thing we should realize is that invasive administrators, clueless (and also invasive) politicians, disappointing students, and transformations in technology (inter alia) have always been with us. But so too have committed and sensitive administrators, wise and understanding politicians, and clever and dedicated students, and we have always adjusted to the new technologies. I, for one, do not lament the rise of the electronic library catalogue.

Vincent Vega had it right in this case: It's the little differences. And in academic culture there are lots of little differences between the US and the UK. But on most of the big things, including our fears and complaints, we are all part of very similar basic cultures of higher education. And thirty years from now we will probably be able to read a whole host of books from academics lamenting academic life in 2009 even as a host of such books and articles are being published at the time. Twas always thus, and always thus will be. As with most aspects of life, when we look back in the not-so-distant past and look for a golden age, there is one discovery to be made: there never was a golden age.

Keele Diary #7

Week two begins at Keele. It will be a busy week for me, but with an attainable carrot at the end of the stick. On Wednesday I will be siting in on the Southern history seminar again, this time talking about the desegregation of education. I've done some work on Brown v. Board and on the Ole Miss integration crisis, among other germane topics, so I hope I'll have something to contribute.

Then that afternoon, Weednesday May 13th, I give my research presentation, "'Digging in For a Long Fight': Bus Boycotts, White Supremacy, and Black resistance in the US and South Africa in the 1940s and 1950s." That will take place at 2:30 in the David Bruce Centre Seminar Room (CBB 1.030). If you happen to be in the general vicinity of the University of Keele, you can see me present a talk about what amounts to the first three chapters of my next book.

Thursday I am leading a seminar on the American West for the director of the Bruce Centre, who is out of town and offered me the chance to take his class for one of its sessions. I have two hours, and we'll mostly talk about regional identity and what it means. I have no particular expertise on the West, but I do feel as if I know a bit about regionalism in the United States and how regional identity can be contested.

My reward for work well done (or, for that matter, for work done) will be a trip down to Oxford where there will be a no doubt debauched reunion of the Armitage Shanks. I look forward to returning to Oxford, to seeing good friends, and to closing down all manner of pubs and bars. Until then, though, I have writing to do.

Good News Overfloweth

It was, all in all, a good night in Boston sports. The C's won their playoff game against Orlando on a buzzer-beater by Glen "Big Baby" Davis to even things up at two games apiece. The Bruins overcame three straight desultory performances to hammer Carolina 4-0. And the Red Sox beat the pesky Rays 4-3. If the Bruins manage to come all the way back against Carolina (formerly the Bruins' Adams Division foes the Hartford Whalers, by the way) and can win the Stanley Cup, won't it mean that Boston will have had the single-most successful four-sport run in American professional sports history? What other city has had each of its major teams win a title in the same decade?

Oh, and as good news goes, this is pretty exciting as well: HBO has picked up David Simon's new series, Treme. Simon is, of course, the genius behind The Wire. Treme will be set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Keele Diary #6

After working into the early evening yesterday, I decided to go to the Sneyd Arms Pub for dinner and to have some drinks. The Sneyd (pronounced "Sneed") Arms is a quintessential British village pub. I brought a couple of sections of the newspaper, positioned myself at a table not far from the television with the sports highlights, ordered an ale, and commenced to reading, watching the highlights of the games (Stoke City beat Hull 2-1 yesterday, all but assuring that the local lads will not have to fear relegation this year) and people watching. I ate a fine coronation chicken, which is basically a curry, with chips coated in cheese, and over the course of several hours several fine Abbot Ales.

The people watching was equally good. A high percentage of the patrons were clearly locals, drawn either from the surrounding village (I think it is Keele Village, but I am not certain) or else from the university community. There were slightly soused women in funny hats all dressed up and just returned from an ascot. There were men in tweed and herringbone who seemed frozen in another era, mid-century mannered Englishmen out for a pint, perhaps back from a fox hunt (the area screams fox hunting), saying things like "the man who raised me was of the traditional sort. He said what he meant and he meant what he said." (I normally hate reconstructed dialogue, but I liked that one so much I actually punched it into my Blackberry at the time.) There were young lovers and older couples and groups celebrating birthdays. There were people so pale they seemed one step removed from albinism. Men shouted at the football matches using words like "bugger" and "bloody." And while the law now allows pubs to stay open later than it once did, last call is still at 11:00 in the Sneyd Arms.

I do not want to fetishize an imagined English tradition nor to reduce the night to a set piece. The pub has its share of spiky haired young men speaking loudly to impress the young women with their very modern decollotage, the television is connected to satellite, and while the menu has abundant traditional English fare it also offers nachos and fajitas and Chinese food and burgers. But there is unquestionably a traditional, rural, local vibe to the Sneyd Arms that makes it appealing and that connects it to past generations of students and locals and the occasional visitor, tucked away in a corner, reading the books section of The Guardian and whiling away the hours with pints of bitter.

Keele Diary #5

As much as I travel, and as many times as I have had long-term commitments in faraway lands, such as the opportunity afforded me here at Keele, the reality is that all of my experience does not change the fact that sometimes travel is a lonely business. I am a pretty social person, and tend to be able to make friends wherever I travel. But it does not happen instantaneously nor does it happen automatically. As a consequence, the first weekend, which this one is for me, tends to be the most difficult, something that might come as a surprise to even my close friends.

I just put in a pretty good week of work, and while I am at the office now and have been for a few hours, I do not necessarily want to come in first thing in he morning and work all day. I brought some dvd's, including a couple of tv series, just to make sure that I could kill down time and, frankly, to allow me to stave off boredom early in the trip. Season two of Hill Street Blues has served me well the last 24 hours or so when campus quieted down (well, more on this in a moment) and left me to my own devices. And here I should be plain -- I am toying with a weekend trip to Paris while I am here, and Thunderstick spent much of Thursday encouraging me to take off this weekend. It pains me to say it, but he was probably right.

In any case, I opted for a mellow night in the flat last night after deciding not to try my social fortunes at one of the on-campus pubs, a graduate pub that apparently is run by a member of CAMRA (the Coalition for Real Ales) and is supposed to be quite good. It was too late to slip in for a quiet pint (I was in the office until about ten last night). But also outside of a very raucous student union I would estimate that a couple of hundred or more students were lined up to get inside of what promised to be a chaotic undergraduate experience. I envied them even as I acknowledged that I have always hated those jam packed nights. I decided at that point to avoid the masses and head toward home. I could have hit the quiet pub past my flat, but in the end opted for a quiet night at home. I stayed up too late, throwing my carefully cultivated sleep schedule off, which is oftentimes more of a key to staving off loneliness than you might imagine. If one is up when everyone is asleep and asleep when most people are up, it is not good for the mindset.

In any case, I promised myself to go out a bit earlier this evening, before the undergraduate maelstrom, and having gotten a reasonable amount of work done these last few hours I intend to fulfill that promise. Ideally by this time next weekend, the loneliness will have abated both through knowing more people and by having more of a comfort zone with this new place where I find myself. Of course by this time next weekend I'll be amidst the legendary Armitage Shanks in my old stomping grounds in Oxford (might the Manor Bar come into play? I suspect that it might) so I'll have somewhat alleviated my social anxieties by reverting to a familiar world.

Keele Diary #4

Well, I appear to have settled on using the shower nozzle unit to fill the tub partway and then doing a hybrid bath-shower thing. What a hassle. No wonder this country lost its empire. Hell, even in Ireland I've always been able to shower. Ireland!

So a little about the University of Keele. The university is located on its own somewhat isolated hilltop surrounded by little villages, outside of which are a number of small towns in the North Midlands. The nearest real cities are Manchester and Birmingham, each an hour or so away. Of the surrounding towns, one, Stoke-on-Trent, is large enough to support a Premiere League team, if that is any sign of anything.

The university was established after World War II when just as in the United States, there was an explosion of demand for higher education created by returning veterans, heightened post-war prosperity (which admittedly took longer to arrive in Britain than in the US), population growth, increasing globalization (admittedly not a word that would have been used in that generation) and a general transformation of the role of the university in society. No longer was higher education the domain of the elite few going to Oxbridge or settling for one of the other older universities.

And yet while Keele is new, it does not feel quite as new as its counterparts in the United States that emerged at roughly the same time. This is largely because the university is built on an old estate (I believe it was known, cleverly enough) as the Keele Estate. And so there are some aged, historic buildings, on an expansive, bucolic setting. There also is the natural beauty of the region, and the historic "Potters" that I do not know enough about yet to speak intelligently except to say that apparently the area is renowned for its pottery.

There certainly is a lot of new architecture, and much of it clearly went up in the 60s and 70s and so qualifies as what architects term "butt ugly," but in general the university has a lot of brick and stone and someone has worked hard to develop a really rather nice campus. My office is located in The Chancellor's Building, which has a few characteristics that seem to be a requirement for at least one building at every typical university: It is complex and easy to get lost in, the hallways are labyrinthine and narrow, there are lots of bizarre angles, alcoves, and hideaways, and it has a certain charm to it even if there is nothing especially spectacular or even aesthetic about the building. The academic wings also are connected by the central area which has, among other things, a cafe and a restaurant, an art gallery, and a few official offices.

The David Bruce Centre for American Studies is named after the respected former United States Ambassador to England, David K. E. Bruce. I was pleased to see that Bruce's biography was penned by Nelson Lankford of the Virginia Historical Society , where I was a fellow several years ago, and there is a copy in my office on the coffee table, which is a nice touch. The Centre is located on the floor where my office is, although really the Centre consists of the faculty, the fellow's (my) office, the seminar room and library, and a few administrative staff. At one point I guess American Studies was its own department or unit, but it now has been combined with the humanities faculty generally and thus in some ways has been reduced, largely because of what by all accounts is administrative shortsightedness. So there is another commonality between Keele and most other universities, including most in the States.

My office is a nice space. My desk faces the back wall, which consists mostly of a picture window that covers the whole length and more than half the height of the wall. I am surrounded by shelves of books that are part of the Bruce Centre library and that are in the process of being re-cataloged and re-shelved, though that project is thankfully in abeyance while I am here, so I just get to have an office that looks like a devoted Americanist's office, albeit surrounded by books that by and large could have been in the office of a mid-20th-century Americanist, which actually is not all that bad. One learns to appreciate the shoulders of those giants one stands upon when reminded of the great output of our predecessors. I have an little alcove behind me with a chair and another shelf, and on the window ledge is the requisite tea pot, while next to my desk is a chair for the visitors I am largely unlikely to have, even given that I am doing a tiny bit of teaching while I am here. The office is well lit and provides a nice place to work. My computer is new, though my monitor is old and a bit small, so that I can only see a few lines of my emails as I type them, and there are formatting issues with some of the newer, busier websites. But I have no real complaints, they are treating me very well, have equipped me well for productivity, and have done as much to integrate me into the larger community as quickly as possible as any fellowship I have ever held.

If only the office had a shower . . .

Big Daddy Drew's Favre Issues

Suffice it to say, Big Daddy Drew is not happy (warning: his language makes me seem like a timid church mouse) at the prospect of Brett Favre joining his beloved Minnesota Vikings. Enjoy!

Quick Hits

Because dcat readers cannot live solely on a diet of Keele Diaries, here are a few links with brief commentary:

Eugene Robinson takes on the very real and deeply disturbing possibility that The New York Times Co. might shutter The Boston Globe. He uses words such as "pimp" and "cannibalism" to describe the Times' behavior. It is hard to disagree with him.

At Salon Glenn Greenwald goes after Jeffrey Rosen of The New Republic for what Greenwald (to my mind rightfully) calls Rosen's "smear" of potential Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Rosen basically relies on little more than anonymous sources to attack Sotomayor's intellectual abilities. long-time readers know my view on journalistic use of anonymous sources, especially when those sources are used simply to grind an ax or pursue an agenda. It is one thing to protect a source who would otherwise be in legitimate danger and whose evidence is essential to the telling of a story. It is quite another to rely on anonymous sources to provide the only evidence you have to accuse someone of being dumb, sloppy, or both.

Finally, Jonathan Chait at The New Republic asks what happened to conservatives cherishing the rule of law? It was vital when it came to pursuing Bill Clinton for lying about his infidelities. Apparently it is less important when it comes to the rather more significant matter of engaging in torture. I am not sure where I stand on pursuing convictions. It seems to run the risk of guaranteeing future tit-for-tat. At the same time, should being in a presidential administration automatically grant one carte blanche for what are, not to put too fine a point on it, human rights violations?

Keele Diary #3

Men were also not meant to take "showers" using a hand-held nozzle attachment drizzling water at a trickle. Be warned: An ongoing subtext of these diary posts might well be my lamentations about the state of my bathing situation.

Yesterday marked my first real duties here at Keele. In the morning I sat in with an undergraduate seminar in Southern history. They have reached the Civil Rights Movement and so it made a certain amount of sense to have me there to toss in my random observations. The students were generally prepared, they watched the first episode of Eyes on the Prize, which clearly had a powerful effect and then had a discussion centered around some primary sources they had been assigned.

Keele operates on a bizarre schedule whereby they have a twelve week term, but after week then they broke for a month for Easter and then basically for what is Keele's "conference season," which is apparently a pretty lucrative period for them. Academic (and I assume other?) conferences in the UK are different from the majority of those in the US in that they are self-contained. So if Keele hosts a conference, it provides lodging, meals, and even pub nights in addition to hosting the actual meeting itself. So that has been going on for the last month, while the students were either preparing for exams or writing their course papers or, as you might imagine, simply enjoying a month off. Now they have returned for the last two weeks of classes, which must be very difficult for all involved. And for those classes with papers but not exams, the professors are pretty much at the whim of the students when it comes to attendance. That a good number of the students sowed up yesterday is a testament, I would say, to them, but also to the professor, Martin Crawford who embodies the respected senior British academic, and the students clearly adore him.

Then yesterday afternoon was the roundtable panel on President Obama's first hundred days. I had been working on that presentation virtually since my arrival, and had been reading and thinking about the topic for a few weeks. My fellow panelists were the respected diplomatic historian John Dumbrell, Professor at the University of Durham, and Keele political scientist and historian Jon Herbert. Our event was one of several on a vibrant Keele Wednesday afternoon, so there was competition for the audience, but we had a nice enough turnout and the panel went quite well, inspiring a lively q&a/discussion session that lasted well beyond the allotted time for the session. Obviously others will have to be the judge, but the feedback I got was that I acquitted myself well in my first real public presentation of my fellowship.

The gist of my argument was based less on Obama's performance (shorthand: Fine so far, but too early to make any real judgments) and was more of a reflection on the hundred days itself. I started off by comparing the Hundred Days to the NFL draft, which I had to explain to my British audience, inasmuch as during and after the draft th experts will et together and act outraged or otherwise absolutely certain in their convictions despite the fact that no one actually has any idea how the draft turned out. I feel a bit the same about the impassioned responses to any president's first fourtee weeks, two days in office. Here, if you'll pardon the self indulgence (on top of the self indulgence that is this whole diary conceit) is a sample from my talk, which I actually wrote out because I wanted to make a good first impression. (If you want footnotes, contact me; I basically stole the Napolean bit from Alonzo Hamby, for example.):

We draw on the first hundred days from the Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, of course. I suppose it warrants recognizing that the concept antedates FDR, extending back as far the references to the period after Napoleon's triumphal return from Elba. But that resulted, ultimately, in Waterloo. So let us for our purposes do what Americans do best, which is to say, let us pretend the rest of the world and its history does not exist. For Americans, and admit it, for the rest of the world, the First Hundred Days evokes FDR.

And with good reason. The first hundred days of what historians call the First New Deal resulted in a flurry of activity. The Emergency Banking Act and the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Alphabet soup of the CCC, PWA, and the ill-fated AAA and NRA. Some worked well, some did not. But all represent the larger driving principles of the Hundred Days; Elastic rather than static, pragmatic rather than ideological, experimental rather than dogmatic, and flexible rather than rigid, the programs of the Hundred Days, indeed the New Deal as a whole, were intended to, as any decent first-year student ought to be able to tell you, bring about the Three R’s of Relief, Reform, and Recovery. (And to my colleagues in the room teaching first-year students, keep in mind that I am speaking of the ideal, platonic form of first year students, and not, alas, of either yours or mine necessarily. Think of mine as a normative conception rather than a conception driven by normality.)

And the Hundred Days is a tremendously useful lens through which to view the FDR presidency. But it is useful not because in and of itself it has any particular utility – our obsession with base-10 tends to make us value numbers ending in five or zero more than those ending in, say, 3 or 7, even if inherently they are no more important or meaningful, and expressed another way, one hundred days is fourteen weeks and two days, hardly a logical or meaningful measure – but rather we utilize the hundred day benchmark because of the particularities of the historical context within which FDR operated. Those particularities give meaning to the concept of the hundred days; the hundred days does not give any particular meaning in and of itself. This, I believe, is why the hundred days has been so appealing but its invocation ultimately so sloppy. Devoid of a specific context, the hundred day measuring stick is arbitrary and meaningless. In fact it can warp meaning because it tries to fit ongoing processes into historical boxes for which the present may be ill-fitted indeed.

What is most perplexing about the resilience of the hundred days is that it was obsolete with FDR’s death in Warm Springs, Georgia in April 1945. How many people – indeed, how many historians – can tell you much about the first hundred days of the presidencies that followed FDR’s? And of the ones that are memorable, how many are memorable because they were part of an organized effort to marshal energies in that timetable? The reality is that the hundred days model was a one-off, a singular phenomenon that journalists, with the help of historians desperate to be talking heads (CNN: Call me!) have perpetuated long after the idea had any historical utility.

Useful invocations of history are cognizant of and respectful toward context. The problem with most invocations of history is that they tend to ignore the context in the pursuit of a usable past. Absent context, however, the usable past tends to become a misused past. And a misused past tends to be most suitable for the ideological present.

I then address the questions of whether the Hundred Days might still be effective as a framing device, and failing that, as a descriptive advice before moving on to talk generally about Obama. Professor Dumbrell followed with a wide-ranging discussion on the Obama administration's foreign policy, Dr. Herbert on domestic affairs primarily. Both, though certainly men of the left, displayed a remarkable willingnes to engage with Obama critically, throwing yet another wrench into the thesis of an academy beset with leftist ranters.

I'll admit I'm having one of those days when inertia has set in. My next responsibility is my research seminar next Wednesday, and the best way to prepare for that is to spend most of the next few days working on my current chapter. But not writing is the easiest thing in the world, so I've been spinning my wheels. Which surely is unconnected to the fact that after the roundtable a group of us went out to dinner at a nearby pub, where I then stayed to watch the Chelsea-Barcelona Champions League semifinals (Barcelona won on aggregate goals based on away goal differential in the home-and-home semis. Ahh, soccer.)

Keele Diary #2

First off, let me tell you something: Men were not meant to take baths.

I walked into my flat for the first time the other day and all looked fine with one exception -- no shower nozzle. Just a plain old bathtub. So for the last two mornings I have had two lines from Seinfeld running through my head. The first has been Kramer dismissing the idea of taking baths when he is having shower head issues as "lying in a tepid pool of his own filth." The second is when Kramer offers Jerry the chance to take a soak in the hot tob Kramer has installed in his apartment. Jerry demurs, referring to Kramer's hot tub as a "bacteria frappe." We are working on trying to rig up some sort of shower nozzle. Let's hope.

So I am settling in. I can just about make a beeline from my flat to my office in the labyrinthine Chancellor's Building several hundred meters away without any missteps. I am participating on a roundtable today on President Obama's first hundred days and so have been working on that, putting in some serious writing time yesterday and this morning. I am convinced that I will have the most productive month of my life if the pace of the first two days is indicative of anything.

I was invited to attend an undergraduate seminar on Southern history this morning, which enabled me to meet some of the students and to partake in the teaching process, something that is sadly rare in these kind of fellowship environments. And yesterday evening I attended a history department colloquium on the state of history at Keele past, present and future in which many of the lamentations sounded familiar and could be echoed by professors at the bulk of institutions in the English-speaking (and I suspect beyond) world. (Think: silly administrators, uncommitted students, a sense that the public does not get or appreciate history, declining funding, an obsession with assessments, shifting goal posts of expectations, the role of technology for good but also for ill, and so forth.)

It's been rainy and damp in the North Midlands, but there are vague rumors that the sun is supposed to re-emerge. Apparently the weather was glorious until my arrival. I'll beg off drawing any major conclusions from that and will hope that the coincidence will be revealed by a few sunny days to come.

Keele Diary #1

I am settled in to my office at the David Bruce Centre at the University of Keele. The trip over was extensive: Flights from Midland to Dallas to Heathrow; Heathrow Express to Paddington Station where I caught the tube to Euston Station, train from Euston to the nearest town, Keele on Tyne, where the head of the Bruce Centre picked me up and got me settled. After some confusion regarding where the key was, they got me into my faculty flat on campus, which is more than suitable, and I was able to get settled in. Campus is largely self contained because it is somewhat isolated, being a couple of miles removed from the nearest real town. I'm sure there is a dual-edged sword to what must at times feel like a hermetically sealed environment, but for my purposes here for a month, it is great that the student union has a grocery store, news agent, post office, pub, cafe, and places to eat.

One of my main adjustments, even after all of these years of international travel, is dealing with jet lag. Largely because in many cases my way of dealing with it is not to. But because my flight arrived at mid-day yesterday, rather than at the more common 8-9in the morning, I did not have to kill a full day. By the time I got to Keele it was in the aternoon, and once I got settled in, and after a nice pub dinner with the centre director, I only had to stay up for a little while longer in order to fight off really screwing with my sleep pattern. And as a saving grace, my flat has a television! It only has the five basic channels, but it's enough to provide background noise and entertainment. I had to be up this morning for some more introductory stuff, so while I could have slept another three or four hours, at least I will make that time up tonight rather than by sleeping in late and never quite adjusting.

Anyhow, sorry for the rather pedestrian reportage. Hopefully I will have something more clever to report in the days and weeks to come. Until then -- cheers!

Off to Keele: Self Indulgence Alert

In a matter of a couple of hours I will be heading off to England (solo, alas) where I will be spending a month as a visiting fellow at the University of Keele's David Bruce Centre for American Studies. In addition to working on my next book(s) I will be giving a research seminar, will be participating in a couple of the program's graduate seminars, and am participating ina roundtable on President Obama's first one hundred days. I also will be giving talks at other universities across the country. For the next four weeks, then, you will be getting what I will sim[ply call "England Blogging," which will be the same thing but I hope somewhat more frequent (given the time to write and think) and 25% more Anglotastic!

David Barash is a Moron: Idiocy Alert

Well, folks, I have my nominee for the dumbest thing written by anyone anywhere in 2009, and if you think about today's climate of dialogue, that's quite an assertion. My selection comes from David P. Barash, a Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, whose "The Roar of the Crowd: Sports Fans' Primal Behavior" appeared in March in The Chronicle Review, a publication that most of the time I really like, as it provides an interdisciplinary lens through which to view the life of the mind.

Under ordinary circumstances I would go paragraph-by-paragraph, line-by-line to eviscerate this screed against being a sports fan. But the article does not compensate for its idiocy with brevity, so I'm only going to have to address a few of the lowlights. I will excerpt some of the passages and then will provide my responses -- if you are a sports fan, enjoy:

Marx was wrong: The opiate of the masses isn't religion, but spectator sports. What else explains the astounding fact that millions of seemingly intelligent human beings feel that the athletic exertions of total strangers are somehow consequential for themselves? The real question we should be asking during the madness surrounding this month's collegiate basketball championship season is not who will win, but why anyone cares.

Note the condescension. But also note that one could replace "spectator sports" with, say, movies (I bet you a thousand dollars Barash prefers the word "film") or theater or music or television, or even literature while making the same argument. In other words, yes, as human beings we sometimes do not make all of our own amusements. Even onanism, intellectual (a skill at which Barash seems particularly well equipped) and otherwise, cannot provide sole intellectual sustenance. Sometimes we rely on others, since we live in communities larger than ourselves, to help facilitate our various enjoyments. Or maybe Barash only watches movies in which he knows all of the participants. Plus sports have an added benefit: They are real. I love movies and tv and the other amusements, but I don't privilege them over sports largely because sports represent real drama played out in real time by real people with immense gifts and who do not have their lines or their blocking written out for them.

Now for the second paragraph:

Not that I would try to stop anyone from root, root, rooting to his or her heart's content. It's just that such things are normally done by pigs, in the mud, or by seedlings, lacking a firm grip on reality — fine for them, but I am not at all sure this is something that human beings should do. In desperation, if threatened with starvation, I suppose that I would root — for dinner. But for the home team? Never.

Ha! See what he did there? Root can have two different meanings! Sports fans can root! Pigs do something entirely different, called "rooting"! David Barash is clever. I'd also bet I can list a whole lot of really really smart sports fans who have a perfectly fine grip on reality. Why, some of them are even in academia. Are they really all akin to pigs? Still, that little "root" wordplay? Priceless!

So instead of sports, he suggests:

Is life so pale, dull, and unsatisfying that it must be experienced vicariously in order to be savored? You might try reading a book, talking with your family, going for a walk, wrestling with the dog, listening to some music, smelling a flower, making love.

Now this is so serially foolish that I really do not even know where to begin. Once again I'll point out the vicarious nature of, say, watching movies or going to the theater. But beyond that, I love his dualism -- if you spend three hours watching a ballgame, for Barash the logical conclusion is that your life is dull. It must be great to be one of David Barash's students, because it means you can get away with saying some really fucking inane, illogical things in the papers you write for him because David Barash is clearly a complete fucking moron. (Hey, he introduced the name calling.) You see, apparently no one who watches sports reads books. (Though I am going to place as an aside that I would bet you a thousand dollars that as a disciplinary imperative as a historian I've read a lot more books in 2009 than psychologist David Barash.) If you watch sports you do not talk with your family. I certainly am not going for a walk with my wife in the next half hour because I will also watch sports today. We own cats, so he's got me there. But if you watch sports and have a dog, sorry -- you have to pick one! Smelling a flower doesn't really take all that much time, but again, the logic is unassailable. And it is a proven fact -- sports fans never have sex. Which is why going to a ballgame is a bit like attending a Shaker meeting -- there are lots of old folks because of the prohibitions against sexual reproduction. If I ever quit on sports though, I am going to root the hell out of . . . (hey, another meaning for root! David Barash, watch yourself. I'm catching on fast!)

Then we get some some ham-handed differentiation between those who participate in sports -- which he sees as admirable, and thank God we jocks have his imprimatur -- and those who watch. Because they are obviously never the same people. People who love sports either only participate or watch, in David Barash's reading-prolific, wife-walking, dog-wrestling, flower-sniffing, cocksman's life. I'm not even going to waste much time pointing out with how absurd his argument is, or reminding you how those who have played the game often love the game in myriad forms. Because later on he drops this little gem:

Of course, there have been athletes who were admirable, even off the field. On balance, however, the probability is that successful athletes number among themselves more than their share of alcoholics, misogynists, sociopaths, and violence-prone dimwits and miscreants. After all, these are adults paid to play children's games, and there is simply no reason why the ability to do remarkable things with one's body — things that are generally quick and violent — should make someone worth emulating in any other way, and probably good reasons why the opposite is more likely.

Now this one absolutely infuriates me. For one thing, it's a pretty fucking brazen assertion without even a scintilla of evidence. And it is an assertion from someone who presumably does not watch enough sports to be making this sort of value judgment. There is also, Dr. Barash, no reason to assume that the ability to do, let us say "semi remarkable" things with one's mind "someone worth emulating in any other way." Therefore following your logic, I would assume that the probability is that successful psychology professors at the University of Washington number among themselves more than their share of pedophiles. The logic is exactly the same. Except that society generally does not give two shits about psychology professors, so their boy-rooting (when you play with fire, Scarecrow . . .) does not end up on Sportscenter or in the newspaper. And naturally a DWI makes news among the famous in a way that someone not getting a DWI does for reasons that ought to be apparent to anyone who understands a rudiment about how the world functions. And yet clearly based on the episodes he observes between stuffing his face in flowers, Barash is capable of drawing an evidence-free conclusion on athletes based on the public embarrassments of a tiny, tiny, minority. And if there is evidence, he doesn't cite it, which in its way is actually worse. Because I at least acknowledge that I have no evidence that Barash is a pedophile (though following much of his logic in this article, I also have no evidence that David Barash is not a pedophile. Work your algorithm magic, Google!).

Then there are literally hundreds of words of really lousy argumentation that are based on evolutionary psychology, including some claptrap about how we can fool the American oystercatcher by placing an enormous fake egg where her real egg is and she'll try to nurture it. And so somehow this is analogous to human sports fans for reasons that I am either too dumb or not dumb enough to divine. (Stupid American oystercatcher! Stupid sports fans -- watching a game you have come to love over the course of your life because it gives you enjoyment! What a silly fake eggsitter you've turned out to be!)

Much later, because Barash is really beginning to grate, and because you just knew it was coming:

Sometimes the rapport of identification can be harmless, not uncommonly resulting in giggles, laughter, yawning. Sometimes it is more sinister. As Koestler emphasized, the acts of greatest human violence and destructiveness have arisen not from personal aggressiveness or nastiness, but from self-transcendence in the form of seductive, mindless identification with a group. Think of Rwanda's Hutus and Tutsis, Bosnian Serbs and Muslims, Nazis and Jews, Irish Catholics and Protestants, Armenians and Azerbaijanis, Israelis and Palestinians.

Yes! Yes!! YES!!! Godwin's Law! Godwin's Fucking Law!!! "Sometimes the rapport of identification can be harmless" but sometimes -- and surely in statistically significant enough doses to make it worth addressing -- Red Sox fans actually just want to machete some motherfuckers. ("Yankee fans.") That's just how we roll. And the death camps at Invesco Field? They really are something to behold. Seriously: Is he joking with this?

And for the conclusion, which I will take on sentence by sentence:

By we, the fan means the whole deliciously desirable, immensely seductive group.

You can assume that the "we" in that sentence should probably have appeared in quotation marks and refers to the tendency of sports fans to refer to their Gestapo units, er, favorite teams, with a strong sense of identification. The shame!

He means that he is no longer just little old himself, but something larger, grander, more impressive, more important, and thus, more appealing.

Want to debate whether the gendered language is intentional? In any case -- yes, again, many of us actually realize that we are not in and of ourselves a sustainable planet. We have to look outside of ourselves. I, for example, do not have David Barash's ability to regurgitate cud from one of my four stomach units, so I sometimes look outside of "little old myself" (hello, syntax!) and go to a restaurant. You know who else liked restaurants? Idi Amin.

Sports fans, in this view, are nationalists writ small.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, the Nazi nonsense. Except that "nationalism writ small" is an almost useless concept given what "nationalism" actually means as either a word or as a historical concept. It would be like referring to "giantism writ small." Given what giantism is, or what nationalism is, the idea of either being "writ small" indicates a desire to use an ad hominem that one does not understand.

Or oystercatchers writ human, which is to say, moved by inclinations less distinct and less automatic than the rigidly stereotyped response to releasers and the obedient superresponse to supernormal releasers that are found among many animals, but inclined to some sort of response nonetheless.

No idea what this means or what the framework for the analogy is. Just asserting an analogy is insufficient. And most professors in our varying disciplines try to stomp out this sort of fatuous attempt to grasp the world through shallow analogizing. Not David Barash. He got a Chronicle Review article out of it.

There is nothing unusual about it, although even now, I must admit, the whole business perplexes me.

This is the first sane thing you've said: Being a sports fan is an enormously common phenomenon. Given that fact, perhaps it's not everyone else who is wrong. Just a little self reflection might have saved us all this headache. You do not like spectator sports. I do not like evolutionary psychology. The difference is, I would not compare evolutionary psychologists to genocidaires.

But an oystercatcher would understand perfectly.

If you have a better nominee for the most fucktarded thing written in 2009, I'd like to see it. David Barash goes into the clubhouse (sports analogy! Achtung, bitches!) with a lead I do not see him relinquishing.

South Africa's Election (Part II) -- Self Indulgence Alert

The Foreign Policy Association has published Part II of my analysis of South Africa's elections. (Go here for Part I.)

A Mother's Love

If this story from the latest Texas Monthly does not inspire a pretty strong emotional reaction, you might not have a soul. It got very dusty in hacienda dcat by the end. It tells the tale of a tragic high school football injury, remarkable human spirit, and above all a mother's deep devotion. You'll probably want to give your Mom a call after this one.

Winnie, Piglet, and the Swine Flu

Heh. Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.

The First Hundred Days

I have been thinking and reading a great deal about both the idea of a president's "first 100 days" and also about how President Obama has fared in his early tenure as president. This is in large part because I will be participating on a roundtable on Obama's First Hundred Days next week after I arrive at the University of Keele, where I will be a fellow at the David Bruce Centre for American Studies for the month of May.

Alan Brinkley has an article at The New Republic in which he argues that Obama, in this mythical timespan, "has been less frenetic than Franklin Roosevelt's, but in some ways more productive." The comparison with FDR is both obvious and inevitable because of the fact that the very concept originates with FDR and because of the circumstantial analogy between today's financial crisis and that DR confronted when he took office.

I do not want to pre-empt my own presentation from next week, but in shorthand my view is: Too early to tell; first hundred days is a journalistic rather than a historical construct when it comes to analyzing most any president but FDR; There might be better comparisons to make than with FDR.

The New and Improved Africa Blog (Self Indulgence Alert)

Please check out the new and improved Foreign Policy Association Africa Blog. There might be some tech glitches early on, but in the long run it should be bigger than better than ever, and the FPA blogs already make up the premiere network of foreign policy blogs in the world.

Idiocy Alert: The Conservative Meltdown

In today's Boston Globe Scott Lehigh gets after the completely idiotic conservative accusations of liberal fascism (Jonah Goldberg's book of the same title is probably the worst example of journalistic use of history ever, by the way) and Vermont Socialist (but really Social Democrat) Bernie Sanders similarly dismisses the conservative accusations of socialism.

Part of me is amused that contemporary conservatism has become a bastion of idiocy and shallow thought as the movement implodes into incoherent tea parties ("We are about to return to the high marginal tax rates of the first Bush administration! Batten the hatches!") and as Rush Limbaugh becomes the most prominent person within the movement (which says more than anything I could about the state of the right). But there is also a patina of danger behind this unhinged and marginalized right-wing zealotry. Idiocy fetishized as resistance breeds violence.

The South African Elections: Self Indulgence Edition

Tomorrow South Africans will go to the polls for the fourth time in the post-Apartheid era. The Foreign Policy Association has published my preview. This is the first part of a two-part feature. The second half will appear later this week when I assess the immediate aftermath of what could represent a very important thermometer for South Africa's still fledgling, but absolutely vital, democracy.

Running a Bit BAAS-ward

I spent the weekend in Nottingham, England at the British Association for American Studies' (BAAS) Annual Meeting, which has fast become one of my very favorite conferences. I was able to see some very good friends, including RoJo, who has made periodic appearances here at dcat. I'm trying to get readjusted from a whirlwind, virtually sleepless trip and get caught up on life here in the States but will blog more soon.

Bruscino Puts the "Fun" in Funston

Friend of dcat Tom Bruscino provides the introduction to (and was the motivating force behind) Bison Books' new edition of Frederick Funston's memoir Memories of Two Wars: Cuban and Philippine Experiences

Go buy a copy. And buy a copy for a friend. Congratulations, Tom.

So Much Style That It's Wastin'

How are YOU going to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Strunk & White's Elements of Style (Itself a revision of a usage book White had published in 1918)? If you are The Boston Globe's Jan Freeman, you are going to bitch about it. As for me, I find usage guides to be pretty tedious slogs (of course my usage is probably lousy) but if you are a writer, don't mess around -- go get The Chicago Manual of Style (I believe the latest is the 15th edition) and be done with it. A full run of the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary is on my wish list as well, but between cost and space, my OED fantasies will remain just that.

I Want My Book TV! (Self Indulgence Alert, Redux)

Just a reminder that you can see me on C-Span 2's Book TV tomorrow when it shows some of the highlights from the Virginia Festival of the Book, including the panel I was on featuring books about the Civil Rights Movement.

Arsenault on "The Voice of the Century"

Last week Dwight Garner of The New York Times reviewed my friend Ray Arsenault's new book, The Sound of Freedom: Marian Anderson, the Lincoln Memorial, and the Concert That Awakened America. I'm just glad Ray and I are not working on the same topic any more -- that's a competition I'm not likely to do especially well at!

Time for My Close-Up: Self Indulgence Alert

If you are hanging around this weekend wishing something for brilliant and edifying to appear on your television, your prayers have been answered! C-Span 2's Book TV this weekend will feature some of the highlights of this year's Virginia Festival of the Book panels, including the one on the Civil Rights Movement on which I participated. The programming is scheduled to begin at noon, eastern time, on both Saturday and Sunday. It will be even better if you have a copy of Freedom's Main Line in front of you! (check out the price under new/used from Amazon's partner booksellers!)

Opening Day!!!!!!!!!!

Today (or tomorrow -- see the next paragraph) should be a national holiday. And were I king of the world (someday, someday) enacting such a festive respite in honor of the start of baseball would be one of the first pronouncements I would make, alongside establishing the global fashion police (hey you, Fatty, where you think you're going in that spandex? Walk back into the house slowly and no one gets hurt . . .) and establishing a college football playoff system. And I know there was baseball played last night, a blasphemy that too would be done with the stroke of a pen in my enlightened despotism.

The Red Sox were scheduled to be on national television today, but because of frightful April weather in Boston, the game has been postponed to tomorrow. Which brings me to the question of what the hell the Sox and Rays are doing kicking off in Boston in early April when both teams just left Florida, where the Rays play in an indoor facility. I love Fenway, I love baseball, and I love Opening Day, but Fenway in early April can be frigid, and if it is wet it can be utterly miserable. Why not play this series in St. Pete and open at Fenway in a couple of weeks? 'Twould be done in dcat's world (admit it -- you're growing warm to the idea of my benevolent dictatorship).

Here are my perfunctory predictions for the season:

American League:

AL East: (Predicted order of finish; * denotes predicted Wild Card berth) Red Sox, *Rays, Yankees, Orioles, Blue Jays (In the best division in baseball, maybe in baseball history, three teams will win 90 games and the fifth-place team will be fighting for a .500 record through September.)

AL Central: Indians, Twins, Tigers, White Sox, Royals (The Indians will rebound to win a stunningly mediocre division.)

AL West: Angels, Rangers, A's, Mariners (Also mediocre, but more competitive, one of the stories in the West will be the Rangers finally having some good young pitching to go with a team that can always hit. Still, at least for this year, the Angels will continue to be the class of the division.)

National League:

NL East: Mets, *Phillies, Braves, Marlins, Nationals (It is fun watching the Mets collapse, but they have strengthened their bullpen and should win the East, though Philadelphia is not going to give up the crown all that easily.)

NL Central: Cubs, Cardinals, Brewers, Reds, Astros, Pirates (Why in the hell does the NL Cantral have six teams while the AL West has four? This has always annoyed me. My benign autocracy will shift one of these teams to the American league -- welcome back Milwaukee!

NL West: Dodgers, Diamondbacks, Rockies, Giants, Padres (Manny really is a difference maker. This should be a good race to the end, though, and the Diamondbacks could pull it out.)

Postseason:
ALDS: Sox over Indians; Angels over Rays

NLDS: Cubs over Phillies; Mets over Dodgers

ALCS: Sox over Angels (Again.)

NLCS: Cubs over Mets (hey, one of these years this much-anticipated matchup is going to happen)

World Series: Sox over Cubs in six. (What, you thought I was going in another direction? The Sox both have my blind loyalty and a hell of a team. The pitching staff, starters to back of the pen, could be other-worldly and the lineup will have its usual stellar season. That's a nice combination.)

Play Ball!!! (Tomorrow!)

Unabashed, Naked, Shameless Self-Indulgence Alert

At Amazon right now a handful of the booksellers are in something of a pricing war, which means that you can get a copy of Freedom's Main Line for less than $19. I have no idea if or how this counts toward my sales total, but it's a pretty good bargain for the cost-conscious book buyer. Act now, as the tv ads always say, this deal won't last forever! Or maybe it will. How would I know?

At the Africa Blog

I've been busy busy busy over at the Foreign Policy Association's Africa Blog. I hope you'll go over and take a look at my commentary on African affairs ranging from Nigeria, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and across the continent, with lots and lots of South African politics as a focus. South Africa will hold elections later this month, and the country has not been in this kind of political flux since 1994. I hope you'll check in regularly, bookmark the Africa Blog, and put it on your blogroll if you blog.

Losing the Globe?

I grew up reading The Boston Globe. Or at least I grew up during my formative newspaper years -- from junior high onward, when my stepfather came into the picture and brought the paper home early every morning from his pre-work coffee run, thus broadening my horizons each morning from the tiny and provincial local newspapers that graced Newport, New Hampshire -- reading the Globe. I placed particular emphasis in those early years on the Globe sports section, which was hands down the best in the country.

So it is with fear and trepidation that I read this morning that the Globe's corporate overlord, The New York Times Company, is demanding $20 million in concessions from the myriad unions that serve in production and distribution of the Globe or else shuttering the paper is a very real possibility. Some of these concessions are surely necessary. But I cannot help but think that at least some represent an attempt to squeeze labor during difficult times knowing full well that if things do return to something resmebling prosperity, the workers will not get back what they give up.

The loss of the Globe would feel like a personal tragedy, but also would represent the most significant newspaper loss so far. Maybe the era of the newspaper, so seemingly permanent for so long, really is ending. Maybe in ten years we really will get all of our news from the internet, and that those newspapers that do survive will do so in a solely or primarily web-based form. But I hope not. The web offers many things that atraditional newspaper cannot, but so too does the paper-and-ink version offer pleasures that even the most user-friendly technology cannot replicate. I am crossing my fingers that the Globe will emerge from this current crisis.

Rugby Pics

The Boston Globe has a collection of twenty-five spectacular rugby picturesfrom the past few weeks, focusing particularly on the fans and players of last month's world rugby sevens competition in Hong Kong.

Git Yer Hot Dogs Here!

MSN has one man's opinions on the seven best hot dog places in the country. I cannot vouch for any of them, but any time we can talk about hot dogs is a good time here at dcat. Indeed, we had a great conversation on this topic when I raised a similar issue, listing some of my own favorites, at the late great Rebunk.

"B" is for "Better"

Due to economic circumstances my MA alum UNC-Charlotte (which, for branding purposes tries to go simply by "Charlotte")is scaling back its plans for its new football program. And while this will seem like rationalization, making virute of necessity, I think the new Plan B is better and saner than the original Plan A.

(Hat tip to this guy. The Yankees suck.)

The Arms Race in the East

At The Boston Globe Tony Massarotti is enthusiastic about the Red Sox pitching corps, particularly the bullpen. The American League East is going to be incredible this year, maybe the greatest division in baseball history, and so how the pitching staffs fare will go a long way in determining which teams will be playing in October and which very good team will be stuck watching. None is so blind as he who will not see, but I still think the Rays will be the odd team out, though of course I hope the Yankees can spent October counting their money while watching the Sox and Rays fight it out for the right to go to the World Series.

Opening Day Approacheth

Opening Day, which should be a National Holiday, and will be when I am benevolent dictator of the world, fast approaches. It appears that the Red Sox are pretty close to settling on their Opening Day roster, an ultimately meaningless decision that injuries and performance will make moot within weeks if not days. Nonetheless, meaningless or not, I'll freight it with meaning. There are few surprises. I'll run down the roster position-by-position as The Boston Globe's Tony Massarotti sees it shaping up:

STARTING LINEUP
(L) Jacoby Ellsbury, CF
(R) Dustin Pedroia, 2B
(L) David Ortiz, DH
(R) Kevin Youkilis, 1B
(L) J.D. Drew, RF
(R) Jason Bay, LF
(R) Mike Lowell, 3B
(S) Jed Lowrie, SS
(S) Jason Varitek, C

The biggest factors in the success or failure of this lineup will be health, which separates the Red Sox from the rest of the league in almost no meaningful way except inasmuch as the Sox had relatively more vital players suffer fairly serious injuries last year. Another issue will be whether Tek can add anything to the batting order. The Red Sox will hit, and Tek's value comes almost wholly from leadership and running the pitching staff. That said, no American league team can afford a pitcher-size void in the 9-hole in the lineup. The Red Sox will hit and they will score runs. But if they stay healthy and guys play to their best-hope projections, this is a team easily capable of leading the league in runs scored, which is not something most teams can say even if they do not lose a game to injury and everyone has a career year.

BENCH
(R) Rocco Baldelli, OF
(R) Nick Green, IF-OF
(L) George Kottaras, C
(L) Chris Carter, IF-OF

The Sox chose Carter over Jeff Bailey but Bailey is a guy management and fans foresee a great future for and so he will get time in Boston this year. Kottaras would have been a surprise in February, but once the Sox got rid of Josh Bard, Kottaras had the inside track. If he performs well as Tim Wakefield's de facto personal catcher and can even come close to hitting Big League pitching there may be less need to overpay the Rangers, say, for Jarrod Saltalamacchia or Taylor Teagarden.

STARTING ROTATION
(R) Josh Beckett
(L) Jon Lester
(R) Daisuke Matsuzaka
(R) Tim Wakefield
(R) Brad Penny

Penny is the classic case of paying short money on long odds and hoping the bet comes in. If it does, this might be the best pitching staff, one-to-five, in the Majors. Beckett needs to come back and have something of a redemption year. And until Dice-K gets through a full season and can up his innings and lower his pitch count there will be concerns. But he was lights out in the World Baseball Classic, which is both a great sign for obvious reasons, but is also worrisome because of how Matsuzaka has shown a tendency to break down at the end of a long season even without something like the WBC lengthening his year all the more. His economical start yesterday is a nice portent, I hope. In any case, bank on one thing: Clay Buchholz and Justin Masterson are almost certain to get their share of starts, and they probably will not be alone. Repeat after me: There is no such thing as too much starting pitching.

BULLPEN
(R) Jonathan Papelbon (closer)
(R) Takashi Saito
(L) Hideki Okajima
(R) Justin Masterson
(R) Manny Delcarmen
(R) Ramon Ramirez
(L) Javier Lopez

The bullpen, at least the middle-relief component of it, was problematic in 2008. On paper this looks like a solid group, and if Okajima returns to his 2007 form, there is reason to believe that the Sox will have a sick Pythagorean rating this year (which is a formula of runs scored to runs given up that is a remarkably good predictor of wins and losses). But expect volatility. The Sox have young arms that will likely not remain in Pawtucket for long, and if guys falter management will have no qualms replacing them. No one sets out, after all, to be a long reliever.

DISABLED LIST
(R) Julio Lugo, SS
(R) John Smoltz, P
(L) Mark Kotsay, OF

Lugo's injuries forestalled a decision on the shortstop fight, but that may well have been Lowrie's slot to lose to begin with. Smoltz represents another gamble, but if he can return in May and is healthy, he will solidify the staff. We'll worry about where he fits in later -- there is lots of time between now and when he will return. Kotsay's return will require a roster move, but we're swapping parts at that point, and in any case, health issues usually mean that when a guy comes up there is someone to hide, and some of the bench guys have options available, so sending them to Pawtucket won't be a problem. And if the Sox have too many Major League bodies, well, that's a good problem to have.

Consider this the first solid Sox talk of the year. Do not expect it to be the last. Opening Day against the Rays in Fenway is six days away and counting.

Cricket Chirping in the US

Over the years I've really come to like cricket. I don't claim to understand the game anywhere near as well as I do, say, rugby, a game I played in South Africa and that I feel I have a pretty good grasp on both in terms of the play on the pitch and also understanding teams and the international game (especially from the the professional and international vantage point of South Africa). Cricket is extraordinarily complex, the scoring system is far from straightforward, and any game that can take five days to play (in its most traditional, purist version) inevitably has its share of nuances.

I am nonetheless skeptical of (though also pleased with) the attempts to bring the game to the United States. Ours is a country of sporting xenophobia. Americans don't understand cricket or rugby, and so tend to mock it, even though they are among the most played team sports in the world -- cricket is probably the second-most popular team sport across the globe behind soccer and rugby cannot be too far behind, though baseball and basketball also have a substantial global footprint. When these international sports -- and I include what most of the rest of the world calls football -- garners any attention on Sports Center, for example, the odds are good that the mention will be both fleeting and mocking. Cricket and rugby almost certainly will never make enormous strides in part because of this sporting xenophobia, and in part because rugby is too much like American football, cricket too akin to baseball.

Still, there are some signs that cricket may well at least enter the fringe in the United States. There is an active and growing cricket community at American colleges that hopes to grow the sport here. USA Cricket is active and is growing. Manny Ramirez even took a few swings from a bowler in an effort to promote DirecTV's new cricket coverage. And a new version of the game, 20-20, represents at least in part an effort to bring a faster-paced version of the game to American audiences (despite the unfortunate Mark Saranford connections).

I'll be happy if someday I can catch international test cricket on my cable. Cricket is a very difficult game to follow in the United States, and I'd be happier if I could just watch the occasional mach (and if I could catch rugby even more regularly).

Happy Hour Approacheth

Esquire has a list of the best bars in America, conveniently listed by state. I will give the caveat that Esquire should have provided that in its estimation all of the best bars in America are located in each state's largest cities with very few exceptions. New York, for example, has a large number of listings, not surprisingly, but apparently every great bar in New York State is located within three of the city's boroughs. Similarly, it seems that every great bar in Texas is located in Dallas or Austin, with one in San Antonio. This all seems improbable. Nonetheless, flawed though it may be, let the list be your guide and drink up! Many of you live very near some of these places -- a report would be more than welcome.

John Hope Franklin, 1915-2009, Rest in Peace

I only met John Hope Franklin twice. The first time was at the Citadel Conference on the Civil Rights Movement in 2003. He was gracious and spoke with me for a few minutes and I naturally felt blessed just to have gotten him to acknowledge me. The second time was at one of the recent meetings of the Southern Historical Association. I just wanted to say hello, mentioned the Citadel conference, and because he was that kind of man, he fibbed and said he remembered.

Because of these two brief meetings, and because of the monumental nature of his work as the practical founder of African American history, it was with more than ordinary sadness that I learned about Professor Franklin's passing on Wednesday. He was 94.

Franklin holds a remarkable place in American historical scholarship. He is not known for any particular interpretive schools or historiographical debates, largely because he practically established the school and the historiography. His most famous book, From Slavery to Freedom, is still in use after several revisions. His memoir, Mirror to America, is a model of the historian's autobiography, with the added advantage that Franklin was a historian who made history, a thing so rare that you would excuse most people for thinking it nonexistent.

Creationists Are Idiots

Sometimes the level of complete fucktardery in the state in which I now live is astounding.

Curt Schilling: Kind of a Big Deal

At The New Republic Jason Gay compares Curt Schilling to Ron Burgundy of Anchorman. My favorite line actually comes from a commenter who quotes someone else: "another webs article summed up Schilling perfectly: 'since Curt was a bit smarter than your average ballplayer, he mistakenly assumed he was smarter than the public at large . . . being the tallest jockey in the racetrack locker room doesn't make you a giant'."

I am in the camp that, his bombast aside, Schilling belongs in the Hall of Fame. Everyone will look at his win totals, which at 216 are very good but not great, but of course wins are not necessarily the greatest metric for assessing how good a pitcher is given how team dependent a statistic it is. Think of it this way: Who pitched a better game, a guy who struggles through five innings, gives up six runs, but happens to benefit froma slugfest, or the guy who goes eight, gives up one, but loses 2-1? Surely one outcome is better than the other, but strictly looking at the pitching performances, the guy who lost did a much better job than the guy who won. In nearly every other statistical measurement, Schilling is clearly Hall-worthy, with the understanding that his postseason performances put him over the top.

I Don't Care: Give Me a Steak

This tragic, sad, poignant, disturbing story may well be true. But a world of less red meat is a world where the living envy the dead. Plus, every time they find something that is yummy that kills you, someone eventually discovers that no, in fact, that consumable is actually good for you. I am ready for the inevitable egg-like comeback of red meat. Though for me, red meat never left.

Baseball Bits and Pieces

Even as the Red Sox look ahead to the upcoming season, including worrying about what effect participation in the World Baseball Classic will have on Sox players, especially Daisuke Matsuzaka, they also look to the past. Curt Schilling has announced his retirement. There are lots of aspects of Schill's personality that have grated in recent years when he either was not pitching or else was not pitching well -- he is, for example, bombastic and mouthy and has never met a microphone he does not love. But no matter what flaws Schill has shown while on the shelf, we'll always have 2004, the year when Schill was unquestionably one of the biggest difference makers on the field, in the bullpen, in the clubhouse and, yes, in front of the media.

Someone asked me to comment on the World Baseball Classic in the last couple of weeks. I love the idea of the WBC. I think it is great for the game and will help grow baseball internationally. But the problem is that it will never mean that much to American fans, not as long as teams and thus fans run the risk of losing some of their best players to injury right before a new season on Major League Baseball, which is where fan loyalties in the United States lie.

The reality is that in international sports, the national team has to inspire the loyalty above all other configurations of their teams in order for that sport to explode as a phenomenon within international competition. Thus in South Africa, the Springboks reign supreme above even Super 12 or Currie Cup competition. Even in England, people place their loyalties to England above their deep and abiding loyalties to their Premiere League teams, which usually ends up in country-wide despair. I wonder if a WBC played in November in the Caribbean or elsewhere where the weather would cooperate would not work better than one played in March. And I simply cannot abide the numerous days off during the WBC. Baseball is played daily, or near so. There is no reason for multiple days off during a torunament such as the WBC. So, I like the idea, but the execution needs some tinkering.

The Epic Road Trip

3,510 miles of driving. A nights spent somewhere in a highway hotel in east Arkansas, multiple nights each in in Asheville, Charlotte, Columbia, and Charlottesville, and a couple of hours dozing at a rest area outside of a place called Hope on a marathon drive home. Research at the University of South Carolina's South Caroliniana Library and a well-attended panel at the Virginia Festival for the Book (keep your eyes open for it on C-Span's Book-TV). A fellows reunion for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Also: a still unresolved hotel charge in Charlottesville involving a several-hundred-dollar error currently errantly going (natch) in their favor. Oh: And an absurd speeding ticket (note to Virginia's Highway Patrol: shame on you for pulling over five cars in a row in the last three miles on I-81 in Virginia, all of which had out-of-tstae license plates on a race weekend when thousands of people were descending on your highway redoubt. And fuck you, Trooper Badge #5093, you premature ejaculating lying pedophile -- the false accusations bit works both ways -- I had not even reached the speed limit and was barely even back on the Interstate after having stopped to get gas a few hundred yards before. I wasn't even going 70, never mind 79.)

Finally, home. Seeing the wife (yeay!) and eating home-cooked food. Serious unpacking. And blissful sweet sleep. Hopefully I'll be back in regular contact soon.

National Book Critics Circle Awards

The National Book Critics Circle has named its award winners for books published in 2008. I am a member of the NBCC. None of my top choices won (I am not a very influential member, clearly), though the winners are worthy.

Grammar FYI

Apparently lots of journalists are misusing the word "prepossess" and its myriad derivations. I have no idea if this matters to any of you, or to me either.

We're #1!

In honor of this year's 15th Virginia Festival for the Book, Charlottesville's alternative newsweekly The Hook is honoring its "15 picks for the 15th anniversary." Their number one pick for this year's festival?:

1. Stories from the Civil Rights Movement. The panel line-up may be heavy on the white guys, but UVA law profs Richard Bonnie and Mildred Wigfall Robinson co-edited a collection of 40 essays written by people who were in school when one of the most influential Supreme Court decisions was made. It's called Law Touched Our Hearts: A Generation Remembers Brown v. Board of Education. With Freedom's Main Line: The Journey of Reconciliation and the Freedom Rides author Derek Catsam, and Peter Wallenstein, who wrote Higher Education and the Civil Rights Movement. [An unsung Civil Rights hero, John A. Stokes, who helped lead the Farmville student strike in 1951, will be talking at another event at Walton Middle School open only to students].
Noon Thursday, March 19, at UVA Bookstore

Sure, their motivation for plugging the panel has largely to do with another book, and I basically get dismissed as just another white guy, which I probably am, but there is no such thing as bad publicity, especially at such a powerhouse event as the Virginia Festival. If you are anywhere near Charlottesville, please do attend.

The Times' Upgrade

The New York Times has replaced the goddawful William Kristol, whose tenure as a columnist was mercifully truncated a while back, with The Atlantic Monthly's Ross Douthat. This seems like a good call and is a serious upgrade in intellectual heft and ideological seriousness.

On Journalism Schools

Have you ever had the sneaking suspicion that journalism school is kind of bullshit? Michael Lewis had just such a concern in 1993 and so visited Columbia's highly regarded School of Journalism to see if his suspicions were true. The result was this classic crackback in The New Republic. And frankly stuff like this (also at Columbia) doesn't help either.

The friend I am staying with here in Asheville is like a brother to me (and he periodically checks in on this blog) and he went to Albama's graduate school in journalism to get an MA. He enjoyed it, and surely found it useful in terms of giving him something to grasp on to after an undergraduate career in which he did not intend to pursue journalism and in an aconomic climate not especially conducive to helping a new graduate transition into professional journalism in small-town New Hampshire. He worked in the field for a few years and hated more about it than he liked - all while living in poverty even with full-time writing gigs - and is now a nurse (which required two more years of schooling). My own views of journalism school were shaped at my PhD program, an admittedly small sample, where the Contemporary History Institute included members of our nationally- ranked journalism program. The bulk of my journalism colleagues (CHI is an interdisciplinary program) were so enamored by the reputation of their school and the occasional big name passing through to teach for a year or a semester that they forgot to consider whether or not one-sentence paragraphs represent an especially wise approach to writing or why knowing stuff made their colleagues in history (or occasionally poli-sci, though at Ohio the political science grad students, and more than a few of the professors, tended to be fools and lackwits) so much more prepared to engage in substance than they were.

As far as I am concerned we could close all of the business, journalism, and education schools tomorrow, (keep early childhood education, which we could team with psychology or something) and the world would be none the worse for it. If these programs were limited to graduate school we could ignore them. But they pervade undergraduate education to the point where the journalists and teachers in training do not realize that you need to be teaching or writing something of substance that you know something about. Meanwhile undergraduate business majors all think they are going to be the next Donald Trump when the reality is that they are on a fast track to a middle-management trainee program somewhere that will teach them all they actually need to know about how to run that local Walgreens. Meanwhile the elite firms in accounting, consulting, investment banking, and what have you are recruiting senior English, history, and econ majors at Williams and Dartmouth knowing that smart people can be trained to pick up rudimentary business skills but that dumb people with business degrees cannot necessarily be trained to have analytical and critical thinking skills.

Road Trippin'

I am writing from a hotel room east of Little Rock. Yesterday I started a long road trip that will take me to, among other places, Asheville, Charlotte, Columbia and the University of South Carolina, and Charlottesville, where next Thursday at noon at the UVa Bookstore you can see me participate in the Virginia Festival for the Book. I'll post as I can.

Debunking New Deal Revisionism

In the latest New Republic Jonathan Chait puts the smack down on Amity Shlaes, the current darling among the conservative let's-selectively-(and badly)-invoke-history-for-our-own-ideological-purposes set. As an added bonus, he uses a new book by the incomparable William Leuchtenburg, to help reveal Shlaes' book on the New Deal for what it is.

The Natural

The Boston Globe has a story about a 16-year old baseball player in Las Vegas who conjures up images of The Natural.

Insanity Plates

Hate vanity plates and the people who own them? So does this guy, which is why he started this blog with a friend. Enjoy.

Another SI Snafu?

In his March 9 article in Sports Illustrated, "The Wrong Man,", which is drawn from a new book on the Dodgers, Forever Blue, Michael D'Antonio makes what he and SI present as a new, provocative argument : That Walter O'Malley is not to blame for the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn. That this argument still defies conventional wisdom is a testament to the tenacity of conventional wisdom. But it is not new. Neil Sullivan, in his book The Dodgers Move West (Oxford, 1987), made a similar argument more than two decades ago. D'Antonio's article makes no mention of Sullivan's book. I hope D'Antonio's book does not make the same mistake. It is a grave ethical oversight in both journalism and academia to present an idea as original if it is not. In this case, the idea decidedly is not original and to present it as such is deeply dishonest.

Save Money, Go To College

Looking to cut costs but still want to travel? The New York Times recommends going to college. In a manner of speaking. College campuses and the towns that host them have art museums and public lectures, culture and sporting events, places to eat and drink and things to do, libraries and bookstores. I always find that one of the pleasures of research trips is getting to experience another college. Late next week I will leave for a trip that will encompass The University of South Carolina, where I am a fellow at the Institute for Southern Studies this year, and The University of Virginia, where I will be participating in the Virginia Festival for the Book and attending a reunion of fellows at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

An Odd Odd Man Out

Uh oh. Yet another memoir is having aspersions cast upon its veracity. Odd Man Out is a memoir about a season in the low minor leagues that has garnered considerable press in large part because its author, Matt McCarthy, is a graduate of Yale and is now a medical doctor. Sports Illustrated recently ran an excerpt of the book. But now The New York Times has done some snooping and something is awry.

The accusations are of two types, one damning, one (possibly) less so. McCarthy claims that he took prodigious notes in journals during the time. Yet there are clearly some factual errors, and enough of them are substantial. This is fairly damning, especially since as of now McCarthy has refused to show his journals to anyone. The issue appears to be that his journals are undated. If so, this might be sloppy, but also would explain some of the factual inconsistencies.

The second accusations come from people who insist that they never could or would have said or done certain things. In almost all cases, the things they claim not to have said or done are offensive and make them look bad. These accusations I take with a grain of salt. Anyone who has ever spent any time in a locker room or on a road trip with male athletes and coaches knows damned well the sorts of things that guys will say and do. As a general rule, athletes say piggish things all the time. None would want those words exposed necessarily, but when someone exposes them, a denial does not make them untrue. I sure as hell am glad no one had designs on writing a memoir about my high school sports teams, or even my college track team, as trust me, being at Williams does not make guys any more sensitive about bodily functions, physical abnormalities, women, or basically anyone who can be made fun of. If there is any solace it is that guys are every bit as awful to their teammates as they are in discussing outside targets of their mirth, mockery, or meanness.

Of course if someone who was never on the Williams track team were to write a memoir, would anyone be surprised? The genre is beset with difficulties to the point where maybe we need a five-year moratorium on no-names writing them.

The Cassel Trade

Color me as one of the people who was unimpressed when I first heard that the Patriots had traded both linebacker Mike Vrabel and quarterback Matt Cassel to Kansas City for a mere second-round draft pick. After the year Cassel had, and with the paucity of good starting quarterbacks in the league, I think most people assumed that the market for him would slowly heat up and that the Pats would eventually be fending off suitors. Instead the Pats got rid of cassel on the first weekend of free agency, giving an indication that they felt the market might not be what they had hoped or that they are just that confident in Tom Brady's recovery from his devastating knee injury.

Whatever the circumstances, I think that the Kraft-Belichick era has shown us one thing, which is that the coach and his support staff know what they are doing. As today's Boston Globe editorial on the trade argues:

But the intensely competitive Belichick did not attain his professional preeminence by peddling talented players at discount prices. Critics of the Cassel trade risk putting themselves in the position of a tourist who thinks he knows that a rug merchant in the Tehran bazaar has sold a couple of carpets too cheap.

That sounds about right. Cassel had a wonderful year this past season and any Patriots fan has to wish him well. But he was not going to supplant Brady this year or anytime in the future and the time to get value for him was going to be fleeting. All's fine in Foxborough.

That Giant Flushing Sound

Naturally one of the things that an opposition party does above all others is oppose. But the Republicans are fast becoming the party of Rush Limbaugh and Joe the Plumber. I'm going to bet that on balance that is not good for either the GOP or American conservatism. For a party that only serves to oppose loses its relevance rather quickly. And while I am enjoying the short-term spectacle of the right shrilly imploding it is not good for American politics for the right to become little more than a cartoon of obstructionism in action.