Posted by: Boviate at 12:48 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I'm taking my first grad-level class this semester. It's "HIS 545 - Britain 1642 - 1815", a seminar with five students. Three are secondary school teachers working on getting their Master's during the summer, one is a grad student, and then there's myself, who gained approval to take it for undergraduate credit.

The most interesting thing is the change of emphasis. To summarize the professor's explanation, "Undergraduates study history. Graduates study historiography." It is taken for granted that you can read some primary or secondary sources on any period and figure out some approximation of what happened; what we're looking at for this class is how that understood approximation has changed over time.

I come at it from a background with more math and science than most history majors. I have come to believe that history is a model, in the way that scientists use the word. It is necessary to construct a model because there is too much to learn directly- even the history of, say, myself, would take someone else my full lifetime to learn; one has to leave out almost everything, and keep only juicy bits to construct a narrative explaining what happened at some past time and place.

The models used change, and that is the process of historiography. For instance, before the 1980s, few bothered to look at the influence of women on the American Revolution. Before the 1940s, few bothered to look at the influence of the urban poor on that same series of events. Now, the trend is to consider that there weren't 13 British colonies in the Americas, there were more than 30. Why did the rest of them stay loyal? It's not like the people living on Bermuda had more civil liberties than the Virginians.

Looking at things historiographically rather than historically is the key switch, and it's a difficult one to make. Every week we read a book, discuss it, and write a response paper on it. My weekly papers are, right now, mashed-together Frankenstein's monsters, as I try to work out not just what the authors say happened, but why they chose to frame things in the way they did, and what they chose to exlude.

This week we're reading a very traditionally Marxist history, and it makes me grind my teeth. Marxist history focuses on the lower classes of society, which were oft neglected in past history-writing. But the authors of this book are misusing statistics in a way that annoys the hell out of me. Plus, Marxist history in general still believes in determanistic history, the whole inevitable revolution thing. Thus the entire concept is in opposition to both free will and historical contingency. (Historical contingency is the idea that things didn't end up the way they did from predestination, that different decisions could lead to changes in history.) The way I see it, if one does not believe in free will and historical contingency, then the study of history is pointless mental masturbation.

Note that there's now a schism going on; there are now marxist historians with a "small m". Historians of that school are concerned with the role of working classes, but reject the "big M" Marxist view of the inevitable path of human societal destiny. I intend to suggest in class that the "little m's" are just social historians focused on the lower classes, and I predict that the prof will chuckle and tell me that such a comment is a great way to start an argument in a faculty party.

[The course book list is in the extended entry, for those of you that feel a desire to learn irrelevant details. We're reading the fourth book right now.]

Posted by: Boviate at 02:19 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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As a student of history, one occasionally notices things. Most recently, today I noticed that Thomas Jefferson was 33 years old when he wrote the Declaration of Indendance.

I'm also 33 years old.

I wrote a paper this weekend. It's all right, I guess, but I don't think even my parents would be interested in reading it, let alone future generations.

Posted by: Boviate at 07:32 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Studying eighteenth and ninteenth century British history would be a lot easier if the Jacobians and the Jacobites didn't hold opposing ideologies.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:14 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I stayed up late last night reading Britons: Forging a Nation 1707-1837 so as to have today free. This weekend is Taste of Buffalo, with live bands all day downtown, and dozens of local restraunts set up kiosks and pavilions with demos, recipes, sample food, and coupons of course.

The camera bag is packs, I skipped breakfast to be nice and hungry, all is in readiness. Except the weather. After a week full of glorious sunshine, it's been raining all morning. The weather forecast does suggest that it'll clear up… around midnight.

Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny, though. Here's hoping!

Posted by: Boviate at 10:13 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Posted by: Boviate at 10:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I had a good Fourth of July. I brough fresh chocolate chip cookies over to my friend Iggy's place; he's got a nice turn-of-the-century house. We (and a whole gang) watched war movies while Iggy and I tried to ignore the fireworks. Neither of us is a big fan of those things. Ate some good steaks, played some games, watched some movies, went home and went to bed.

Posted by: Boviate at 11:33 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Tonight's dinner:

Put a cooling rack into a cookie pan. Place bacon slices onto the cooling rack. Turn oven to 450°F, place bacon into oven. Cook for ten minutes, then start checking every two minutes until they are done to your preference. (No need to preheat the oven, you need to keep an eye on them so often anyway.)

While bacon is cooking, mix up your favorite five-ingredient biscuit. Roll out thinly, no more than 1/2". Cut with biscuit cutter.

When the bacon is done, remove to paper towels, and take the cooling rack out of the cookie sheet. Leave all the bacon grease in situ. Place the biscuits into the bacony pan, put back into oven, bake for ten minutes.

Eat together, topping biscuits with honey if you have a sweet tooth like I do.

Then get some excercise the next day, 'cause all that bacon isn't healthy!

Posted by: Boviate at 09:45 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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SUNY Buffalo, my fair university, has two campuses. South Campus is the old one, from when this was a private school. North Campus is on a huge tract of land bought when the university accepted Governor Rockefeller's offer (that could not be refused, if you get my drift.)

South Campus is where the old buildings are. One of those buildings is Hayes Hall. It predated the University purchasing the land, which had been the Erie County Almshouse and Insane Asylum.

Hayes Hall has a clock tower, added in 1910 or so. Today I learned what is inscribed upon the clock's bell.

"All truth is one. In this light, may science and religion endeavor here for the steady evolution of mankind. From darkness to light, from narrowness to broad-mindedness, from prejudice to tolerance, it is the voice of life, which calls us to come and learn."

Posted by: Boviate at 10:39 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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So: a week or two ago I make some peanut butter cookies. I made two pans worth really big, to combine with homemade ice cream into ice cream cookie sandwiches. Vanilla ice cream tasted underwhelming, so I mixed in a bunch of cocoa powder and it was delicious.

I went to the effort for a picnic I and some friends were going to have at Shakespeare in the Park; Friday we were going to go see the Tempest. But word of the trip got out, more people became interested, and suddenly I wasn't going to have enough ice cream sandwiches to go around. Playing favorites was not going to be polite, so I whipped up a bunch of devilled eggs instead.

Then we cancelled the picnic on account of thunderstorms. So now I've got a bunch of devilled eggs and ice cream sandwiches. It's a terrible tragedy, in that I've eaten a bunch of them today, and it is terribly unhealthy. But delicious!

Posted by: Boviate at 08:29 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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