Completely Unnecessary

My category ‘us impending doom’ will have to be changed to ‘world impending doom’ (or perhaps just ‘impending doom’ for simplicity), as the fallout from the US crisis goes global.

Despite the horror (like my savings losing about 30% of their value from just three months ago), it’s interesting to watch what is clearly a historical moment play out.

We know the narrative of The Great Depression in the US. Coolidge, Hoover. Black Thursday’s stock market crash. Breadlines. Tent cities.

What happened incrementally over a period of years gets lost to history in this narrative.

While we don’t yet know if the crisis will result in another Great Depression (the Greatest Depression?), the day-to-day workings of the crisis should give us a moment to reflect on the historical moment.

While the people of 1929 weren’t as instantaneously alerted to the movements of the markets and their currencies, some factors would have been similar. The sinking feeling as one reads the newspaper over the latest market drop. The discussions with friends - about topics you’ve never discussed before, like if you should move your money, look for a new job. The feeling of perhaps general helplessness in affecting change, whilst watching a series of individual movements create a larger, systemic change.

We didn’t go from the Crash to tent cities in one easy movement. It took day after day after day of things sometimes getting better, but more often moving towards an unknowable bottom.

Did some people save themselves with a risky, but wise transaction? Did some families plan to move their money from banks just a day too late?

Will the history books remember the day that Iceland’s economy threatened to collapse? Or could it become lost in what might be a series of national tragedies?

This all sounds rather dramatic (and, hopefully, unwarrantably pessimistic), but what I’m interested in the the opposite of that: the day to day, banal decisions that make up what becomes history.

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[Updated below.]

On the day the Wellstone Bill was finally signed into law, Minnesota’s making me nervous.

Today’s SurveyUSA poll shows McCain with a 1% lead in the Humphrey/Mondale state.

It’s only one percent, I know. Here’s why that troubles me: Al Franken has been making inroads into Norm Coleman’s lead in the Senate race, but hasn’t been able to close the gap.

The most recent polling has Coleman with a ten point lead on October 1. The race seems to be trending away from the Democrat, and McCain might be able to ride Coleman’s coattails.

Franken might not be the best candidate (he’s a comedian and has been hit or miss with the tone of his campaign), but it’s hard to argue against Minnesota being a changing state.

In 2000, Gore won handily and the state handed the Green Party a large enough percentage to get them on the ballot.

Then 2002 happened. Tim Pawlenty won the gubernatorial election after the progressive vote was split between three strong candidates: a Dem, a Green and an Independent. Wellstone died nine days before the election, and the combination of the backlash at the memorial and replacement candidate Mondale’s mild campaigning style handed Coleman the election.

Minnesota Dems have had six years to organise to win back Wellstone’s seat - and their lack of success in this department has more to do with a gradual reddening of the state than Franken alone, I’d argue.

Minnesota’s been making me nervous for awhile now, though I didn’t add it in to my maps the other day. McCain’s pulling out of Michigan is going to allow him to put more resources into Wisconsin and Minnesota.  Wisconsin polling (and its proximity to Illinois) makes it seem pretty safe, but I think it’s time to start looking at the map without Minnesota.

Luckily, it doesn’t factor so long as Obama wins VA, CO, MI and PA. That still brings in 272.

[I know that lots of other electoral math has Obama way up - well into the 300s. After 2000 and 2004, I'm just a nervous, glass-half-full kind of bunny. I'm trying to be very conservative in what I think Obama will win.]

It just shouldn’t be this close. I guess it’s more the symbolism of Minnesota - this is, after all, the only state to go Democratic in Reagan’s 1984 rout.

And it would prove the Republicans right about their ability to take the state - they had their convention there for the same reason we had ours in Denver.

Kind of makes you wonder what might have happened if McCain had chosen Pawlenty instead of Palin. Might have really changed up the map.

Update: 538 notes that a STrib poll has Franken up 9 points versus the SurveyUSA’s 10-point Coleman lead. Nate argues that both polls are untrustworthy. I’d say, it shows that MN is anybody’s guess.

Also, speaking of 538 - they’re arguing that one of Nebraska’s electoral votes might be in play. (Maine and Nebraska split their votes). That’s incredible to think about…

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In yet another act of shameless self-promotion, that Victorian suffragists piece I’ve been crapping on about for a year and a half has been published by the Public Records Office Victoria.

You can click here for the full issue of the journal or link directly to the article in html or pdf. (I recommend the pdf - they made the pictures look all fancy!)

Here’s the abstract:

In 1891, women’s suffrage advocates collected the signatures of some 30 000 Victorians, all supporting the vote for women. Quickly dubbed the ‘Monster Petition’, it remains one of the largest documents ever presented to Parliament. Some of the most famous names in the suffrage movement grace the ‘Monster’, but the majority of women who signed it were not well-known names. This paper explores the lives of seven women who were left out of the history books. Working-class and living in Davis Street, North Carlton, Agnes, Eliza, Helen, Ellen, Sarah, Ada and Jessie were not ‘history makers’, yet they still made history. Their stories paint a fuller, more accurate picture of women’s history and the history of the suffrage movement in Victoria. This paper argues for the significance of all historical figures, and suggests that the smallest of us can play a role in major historical events.

The other articles look really interesting. And the whole journal’s online and free to read!

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The Library of Congress has started uploading photos like the one below to their Flickr page. They have black and white sets from the 1910s and color sets from the 1930s-40s.

The Bennett sisters look formidable…

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Dith Pran died today of pancreatic cancer at the age of 65.

Dith is most famous for his partnership with NYT journalist Sydney Schanberg. The two covered Cambodia during the rise of the Khmer Rouge.

Unlike Schanberg, who had an American passport, Dith was unable to escape Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime. He lived through a time in his country’s history that remains nearly unspeakable to this day.

It seems impossible to believe that he survived so much, only to be felled by his own cells. It is tragic that his life (as well as the lives of all who died as a result of the KR regime) was cut so short.

If you haven’t read The Death and Life of Dith Pran, I highly recommend it. Dith and Schanberg were also the subjects of the Academy Award-winning film, The Killing Fields. The film is good, but I recommend the book. If you get interested in the Khmer Rouge period, I also recommend, Stay Alive, My Son.

The NYT also has a photo gallery of Dith, including some of his work with the paper after his escape.

Link:
Dith Pran, ‘Killing Fields’ Photographer, Dies at 65 [NYT]

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I’ve never really felt like a grad student. Until this morning…

I’m finishing up my work in the archives when I get a text from Sara complaining about the myriad of first years with their orientation balloons. I emerge from the basement and look around in horror as the solace of my previous empty library is shattered by the mewling and puking of new students on their library tours. I glance with scorn at the noisy groups taking the exact tour that Sara and I took just one year ago.

I walk over to the loans desk to put a hold on a book I really have no right putting a hold on. There’s a weekly loan copy available, but I mention the word ‘thesis’ and the hold is placed. Sorry, other person probably also working on a thesis. See you in three weeks when you pull the same maneuver.

I leave the library, skirting the throngs of new students and the inevitable Socialist pamphleteers that the students’ presence has engendered. (New students are like standing water, should I be willing to compare MelbUni Socialists to mosquitoes, which I am.)

I ride to John Medley, expertly avoiding people on the too narrow path. Parking my bike, I listen to an enthusiastic American uni guide cheerfully mispronounce the names of her charges. One girl looks in my direction. I’m far overdressed for the weather, wearing both a long-sleeved shirt and a scarf. ‘It’s incredibly cold in the archives,’ I hope my bored glance communicates. ‘I’m willing to suffer the slings and arrows of uni fashionistas like yourself for the importance of my incredibly important research. It’s important.’

Scarf = grad student

I realize finally how I look as I enter the bathroom on the fifth floor. That bored look is really just exhaustion from staying up last night to type notes from a book into my bibliography database.

Exhaustion + Scarf = grad student.

The person I’m looking for isn’t around, so I head back downstairs, cursing my inability to get a mobile signal in John Medley. I have to ask the girl whose name was being mispronounced to move so I can wheel my bike and its tiger-striped handlebars past her. The corking is kind of coming off; I look like I’m living on a ’student’ budget.

Poor + Exhaustion + Scarf = Grad Student

Anyway, after that I wisely head away from campus, avoiding ‘O’ week. The emails and texts I get over the next 30 minutes indicate that pretty much everyone else is doing the same.

We are so cool now that we’ve been here a year. We don’t need orientation, though there are still times when I wind up stuck inexplicably in the Engineering section and not near the ERC as I’d planned. Whatever, my scarf says it’s just because I’m overtired.

ps - Despite what my handlebar corking might imply, I actually have some money coming in with a research job. I spent yesterday and part of today looking through 1949 newspapers during a coal mining strike. I was looking for government-sponsored ads, which were amazing enough, but some of the ads and stories they were running are hilarious.

For instance, did you know that ’scalp starvation’ is the cause of 9 out of 10 cases of baldness? Silvikrin has ‘14 organic elements’ to prevent this totally crap explanation…

Watson and Crick, 1953…

I’ll post some of them when I get a chance.

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Turns out that a Google search of things like, “1890s Carlton” brings up a link to one of the Metblogs I wrote a while back. A man doing research on his family found my email address via the site and asked for some general information about what life was like in the neighborhood back then.

Dork that I am, I’m now engaged in an all-out search for his elusive relative.

Old records are so much fun! And I get to look for his great grandfather’s will and everything. I’m so insanely flattered to be asked for help doing this. It’s as though I have a useful skill.

So now I have a project to occupy the days before leaving for Asia. Not, you know, reading about where I’m going and what I’m doing, but spending the day at the archives (and then going to see Cloverfield).

Really, it’s completely impossible for me to play it cool about stuff like this. He was like, ‘Hey, so I’m doing this research, but it’s hard because I’m 3000k away’ and I’m like, “I’m going to the archives tomorrow!’

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You know how you assign random meanings and values to things? For instance, I’m willing to pay $14 for two pints of Coopers at a bar, but balk at the same price for an entire six pack. You get certain things in your head via context, and it’s hard to ascribe new meanings.

This is about history.

I’m reading Afflicted Powers by the collective RETORT. One of their arguments, briefly, is that the US had to put on the ’shock and awe’ campaign in Iraq (and the entire war, really) as a way of reclaiming US power over the creation of spectacle, which had been lost in 9/11.

At the point I’m at now, they’re arguing that the War on Terror is really just the next in a series of wars and other military interventions that have really defined the US since 1812, the only difference being that we have now moved into a state of perpetual war.

I swear the point is coming.

In this chapter they’re doing a quick rehash of various American conflicts - such as Jackson going after Florida, the Louisiana Purchase, the Platt Amendment, stationing of troops in Nicaragua, and so on. I don’t know why I had it in my head that Monroe was before Jackson, but it seems decidedly odd in my brain that the Trail of Tears was before the Monroe Doctrine. And Woodrow Wilson seems way more of a ‘modern’ president - in my mind I don’t view him as that far away from the present - but he’s only ten years away from the Roosevelt Corollary. Teddy Roosevelt seems distinctly in the past past.

In studying history you so often learn the timeline of a certain set of events. For instance, my understanding of American intervention in Latin America - which is a lot of the chapter’s focus and a lot of what I studied in college - seems in many ways completely separate from my understanding of American involvement in WWI, the Depression, and WWII. Many of these events happened simultaneously, but it’s hard to look at everything at once. So instead my brain has kind of created a number of separate histories, usually running parallel to each other and occasionally intersecting.

I’m not sure how much sense this makes, but it just seemed so odd to me that Jackson was before Monroe. More strikingly, the birth of the Monroe Doctrine is pretty much in Jackson attacking the Spanish in Florida. Because in my head, his presidency is sort of lifted out - he was the bad guy who stole people’s land and shouldn’t, in my opinion, be on the $20 bill.

I guess that’s the narrative problem of history - you inevitably leave out so many mitigating factors, small and large. It’s tough to account for the things people do and the reasons they do them.

We’ve clearly reached the inane part of the semester again.

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You know how I’m always talking about the subtlety and sophistication of Australian advertising? Well, at least the current generation comes by it right. These are two ads from 21 January, 1908 that I just found in my research from last semester.

The first is for washing powder, the second for a fete (locally organized carnival) - they’re thumbnails, click ‘em:

Wait. How many competitors will there be? I can’t believe it doesn’t cost FIVE DOLLARS to get in.

Now, nearly every day had a blurb about someone trying to throw themselves into the Yarra (the attempted suicide rate was out of control back then, apparently). Every story is like, ‘Another young girl found in the Yarra last night.’ The Argus was similarly unimpressed with this man:

I like the end of the story before - died with his swag on his back (as every good Aussie should). Well, that and the fact that they call the other guy’s dynamited body ‘the trunk’.

Finally, the news from the Dunolly Council:

Australia’s great.

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If there was an award, I’d win it.

As anyone who’s talked to me lately knows, I’m doing research on six-odd women who signed a petition for women’s suffrage in 1891. I’ve logged more hours at the State Library and Victorian Archives than many of the employees. I’m just going to marry the Scottish guy who works there because we’ve started frenetically comparing research stories, and I just can’t imagine that anyone else would have us. It’ll be the least romantic pairing ever, but its practical utility will be reminiscent of the time period I’m studying.

Here’s the scary part: It occurred to me in class the other day that if I could find the (great-) great-grandchildren of these women they might have pictures and some deeper family history. There’s only so much drama you can get out of a marriage record in Aberdeen. So I decided to try to contact them.

This isn’t exactly as easy as it might seem. You might say, in fact, that the records are set up precisely to prevent a psycho like me from doing this. All birth records after 1920 are locked so that stalkers, both scary and incredibly lame, can’t bother the ostensibly living.

Instead of respecting this basic code of ethics (and, might I add, with the complete encouragement of my professor), I’m now searching through the records for their parents obits, wills, and probate records. “Survived by” is my new best friend.

I’m clearly sick, but it’s a harmless kind of sick. I’d like to think, however, that these skills will be applicable should I ever go off the deep end.

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