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…
Sphere: Related ContentDith 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]
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.
Sphere: Related ContentTurns 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!’
Sphere: Related ContentYou 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.
Sphere: Related ContentHoly heck. About to print this mofo out. I really ‘finished’ earlier today - five hours ago, but the prose that had to be torn out of me (along with a little bit of my will to live) took a while to clean up.
So, what did I do to celebrate this glorious achievement? I took some books back to the library and immediately checked out King Leopold’s Ghost. (It’s good, you should read it). Yes, I am the kind of person who reads history books more than once. I eyed it the other day on the ‘Recently Returned’ shelf and treated myself to checking it out today. It’s time to admit to myself and the world that I am an enormous dork who gets off on colonial history.
And now, because I can barely read words anymore, I’m off to bed. Thanks to those that kept me (largely) sane the last few days. I can easily say this has been the most frustrating process of my entire academic career. And it was on ethnography. So weird. Extra thanks to Sam and Violeta for reading that nonsense - Sam twice. And she had a slug in her sink.
Sphere: Related ContentIf 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.
Sphere: Related ContentI was nearly blown into traffic today by a gust of wind. Millions upon millions are prone to the wrong-headed belief that “the Windy City” moniker comes from Chicago’s wind, but I’m here to tell you that Melbourne has some of the most ferocious wind I’ve every experienced. At one point, I was pedaling, but the headwind was so strong I nearly tipped over from lack of momentum. Can’t wait until winter!
Onto the media stuff. For my Conflict class, we’re looking this week at the ways in which the media frame public dissent and protests. Pretty interesting stuff. A study of a British riot mentioned the famous 1968 Democratic Convention riots, so I decided to have a look at the Tribune archives (thanks library card!).
Common wisdom now relates that Daley and the police wailed upon the hapless protesters, but in 1968 the situation was pretty different. Most references I found - before the system crashed - were about the poor, fatigued police just doing their best. An editorial hilariously sums up the Tribune’s (highly conservative wisdom) after the jump…
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