Make it a hybrid

I just switched one of my spring classes from a regular lecture course to a hybrid that will meet every other week in the classroom and online. Why? In the futile hopes that hybrid will attract more students, because history courses are interchangeable from a certain point of view. 

Solitude

Roles in life

complete with scripts

Be a man

Be a woman

Follow the script

Imagine understanding

Imagine connection

when the script of another

resembles one's own

The script reinforces

connections

Connections reinforce

the scripts

A few accept solitude

A few ask why

and disrupt the circle

and cause discomfort

Does the past have a hold on the present?

Plenary Session Hall (Jednací sál) in Valdštejnský palác.

    Yesterday Czechs, and many others, celebrated the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Flags appeared everywhere, sticking out of cars’ windows, stuck on the front of trams, which is reminiscent of a college football gameday in the U.S., and which, come to think of it, may in fact more accurately reflect the flags’ purpose since the World Hockey Championship is happening in Prague.

     Some buildings, normally closed to the public, were opened in honor of the holiday. One such building was Valdštejn palace, where the Senate meets and works. I wish that visiting the palace in this way could have been part of my class’s global experience, because I would have liked to hear their thoughts on what kind of impact the history of the location might have on the workings of modern politics. For example, do senators look up at the Main Hall’s ceiling mural of Valdštejn as Mars, in true seventeenth-century metaphor, and think they are countering or fulfilling that vision? Or does the fact that the Plenary Session Hall (Jednací sál) was originally a horse stable allow for more humble thoughts of their work?

Main Hall ceiling mural of Valdštejnský palác

Resistance

I am in the middle of Nechama Tec's Resistance: Jews and Christians Who Defied the Nazi Terror (Oxford, 2013), which I obtained at the 22nd Annual Conference of the WHA.

The book is eminently readable, has an at once simple and incredibly complex thesis (that those who resisted did so through cooperation with others), and presents accessible examples and explanations of those examples.  An undergraduate audience, I believe, was intended and I will add it to the list of books from which students may choose to do a book review for my History of the Holocaust course.  It seamlessly complements the structure of the course, which is divided into three main sections: one on survivors, one on perpetrators, and one on bystanders and everyone else.

From England to Bohemia

I just finished From England to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages by Michael van Dussen.

The most interesting idea, to me, permeated the book and is captured here: "communication at this time was a contingent, localized practice, mediated and conditioned by ad hoc personal contact and documentary forms that were far from stable.  In a manuscript culture, the material conditions of communication and textual dissemination afforded authorities little advantage over the propagandizing projects of competitors, particularly when it came to crossing regnal boundaries, and particularly, too, when competitors laid mutual claim to authenticating modes and forms of documentation." (p. 127)

The idea that I wished was expanded on and discussed more explicitly: "Religious controversy was indeed a practice or fluid temporal process." (p. 39)

The Rhythm of Writing

This summer I have time to work on my book manuscript.  It has to get done before fall classes start.  I've worked out a rhythm for writing (all components are necessary): 1) get up before dawn; 2) eat light breakfast and feed dogs and then take dogs to off-leash dog park for romp at sunrise; 3) come home, lift weights, and have second breakfast; 4) write till lunchtime; 5) read or translate in the afternoon; 6) avoid dogs' stares until dinnertime.  Depending on my mood, the evening consists of relaxation or more reading or translating.

I don't want to just provide links to other posts or texts on the interwebs, but this one expressed so much of how I see grading, it seemed worth sharing and I haven't been writing much here any way.  It's from 1996 evidently, so things apparently haven't changed much, but at least there are like-minded professors.  I particularly like the emphasis on the connection between action and consequence.

Link to the piece